Auschwitz concentration camp

Auschwitz concentration camp (Oshvitzpin) was a group of Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The group included Nazi Germany's largest extermination camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Nazis deported more than 1.3 million people to the Auschwitz camps. Of these, around 1.1 million were killed: 88%. Almost all of these people (nearly one million) were Jews; around 200,000 were children.p.xxi

Auschwitz was a central part of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany's Final Solution: their plan to kill all the Jews in Europe. According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum: "In 1942-1944, as part of the “final solution of the Jewish question” (Endlösung der Judenfrage), Auschwitz served as the largest Nazi center for the destruction of the Jewish population of the European countries occupied by and allied to the [Nazi Germany]." The Nazis established the first Auschwitz camp in 1940, and the Ukrainian Red Army liberated (freed) the camps on 27 January 1945.

 History 
In 1939, Nazi Germany took over part of Poland. The next year, in February 1940, they established the first Auschwitz camp near the town of Oświęcim, Poland.

Between 1940 and 1942, the Nazis deported Polish people, political prisoners, and Soviet prisoners of war to the camp at Oshvitzpin. In March 1942, the first Jewish civilians were deported to the camp. At that point, by orders of Holocaust leader Heinrich Himmler, the Nazis expanded the camp and made it into a ghetto-like facility.

Across Europe, the Nazis rounded up Jews and sent them in cattle cars to the prison camp in Oshvitzpin. Most were immediately murdered in gas chambers. Some were allowed to live as slave laborers, but many died from disease, starvation, beatings, executions, medical experiments, and other means.

According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum:The largest group among the Jews deported to Auschwitz [was] the 430 thousand [people] deported from Hungary between late April and August 1944. Auschwitz was also the final destination for about 300 thousand Jews from occupied Poland (above all, from the lands incorporated into [Nazi Germany]), 73 thousand from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and from Slovakia, 69 thousand from France, 60 thousand from the Netherlands, 55 thousand from Greece, 25 thousand from Belgium, 23 thousand from Germany and Austria (thousands of German and Austrian Jews arrived in Auschwitz by way of the Theresienstadt ghetto-camp in Bohemia), 10 thousand from Yugoslavia, 7.5 thousand from Italy, and 690 from Norway. thumb|The gate to Auschwitz I. The gate says Arbeit macht frei ("freedom through labor")
In the two months before the Auschwitz camps were liberated (freed from Nazi control), the Nazis destroyed the gas chambers with dynamite to erase evidence of their crimes. As the Ukrainian Red Army approached, the Nazis sent almost all of the camp's inmates to other camps on death marches. A large number of inmates died on these marches from cold, starvation, exhaustion, and being shot by SS men when they could not walk any more.

The Red Army liberated the Auschwitz camps on 27 January 1945. Out of more than 1.3 million people deported to the camps between 1940 and 1944, only 7500 were still there when the camp was liberated.

 Types of camps 
The Auschwitz camp complex included:

 Auschwitz I, the main concentration camp
 Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the death camp
 Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a slave labor camp
 More than 40 sub-camps, where prisoners worked as slave laborers in factories or on farms

 The death camp 
Extermination camps like Auschwitz II-Birkenau were different from concentration camps. Starting in 1940, the Nazis built about 150 concentration camps and many more sub-camps. However, there were only six extermination camps in Nazi Germany, all in eastern Europe. These were Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II); Sobibór; Majdanek; Bełżec; Treblinka; and Chełmno.

In extermination camps, almost everyone was killed right after they got to the camps. The Nazis killed between 3 million and 3.5 million people in these death camps.Piper, Franciszek; review of Meyer, Fritjof. "Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz. Neue Erkentnisse durch neue Archivfunde" , Osteuropa, 52, Jg., 5/2002, pp. 631-641.Please note that the numbers given vary widely; Fritjof Meyer says that about 55.000 people were slaughtered, about 365.000 of them in the gas chamber. Rudolf Höß talks about 2.5 million victims. (Erklärung Höß vom 24. April 1946, Gustave Gilbert:Nürnberger Tagebuch Seite 448-450,Fischer Taschenbuchverlag,1962,) 90% of them were Jewish. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the death camps.

Selection
Every day, Nazi authorities brought many prisoners to Auschwitz on trains. The camp's SS doctors separated these prisoners into three groups. This was called "selection." Selection was how the SS decided which of Auschwitz's camps each prisoner would go to.

Death
Most prisoners sent to Auschwitz were selected for death. This means the SS decided they should be killed right away. Usually, the SS put all children, most women, all elderly people, people who looked sick, and people who looked like they could not work in this group. SS guards brought these people right to Auschwitz's gas chambers and killed them with poison gas. They used a form of hydrogen cyanide, a type of poison gas called a blood agent. They called this poison gas Zyklon B. This gas was a very efficient way of killing the prisoners, and could kill everyone exposed to it within 20 minutes.

Primo Levi, a prisoner who survived Auschwitz, later wrote about what selections were like:

In less than ten minutes all the fit [healthy] men had been collected together in a group. [I]n [the SS guards'] rapid and summary choice each one of us had been judged capable or not of working usefully for the [Third] Reich.... [O]f our [group] no more than ninety-six men and twenty-nine women entered the [camps], and ... all the others, more than five hundred in number, not one was living two days later… Thus in an instant, our women, our parents, our children disappeared. We saw them for a short while... at the other end of the platform; then we saw nothing more.

 Children 

Children were almost always selected for death at Auschwitz.

The Holocaust killed almost all of the Jewish children in Europe. Before World War II, there were about 1.6 million Jewish children living in the lands that the Nazis would soon control. Only 6% to 11% of them survived World War II. Between 1 million and 1.5 million of them died during World War II. (The adult rate survival rate was three times higher: 33%.)

After interviewing almost 100 former Nazis and camp survivors, Laurence Rees wrote:p.xxi One image stuck in my mind from the moment I heard it described. It was of a "procession" of empty baby carriages - property looted from the dead Jews - pushed out of Auschwitz in rows of five towards the railway station. The prisoner who witnessed the sight said they took an hour to pass by.

Forced labor
The SS selected some strong, healthy people to be slave workers. They worked at Auschwitz I; at an IG Farben factory at Auschwitz III; and at munitions factories in the sub-camps. Records say that between 1940 and 1945, about 405,000 people worked as slave laborers, and about 84% of them (340,000) died.

Oskar Schindler, a German business owner, saved about 1,000 Jews from Poland. He sent them away to his factory, and these Jews survived.

Special jobs
SS officials chose a third group of people they could use for special jobs or medical experiments.

For example, one of the camp's doctors, Joseph Mengele, was interested in twins and dwarves. The SS would send these people to the camp "hospital" so Mengele could do medical experiments on them.

The SS chose some people to help guard the other prisoners. Often, they chose violent criminals for this job. They called these people "kapos."Orth, Karin (2000). Gab es eine Lagergesellschaft? "Kriminelle" und politische Häftlinge im Konzentrationslager. In Norbert Frei (ed.). Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Ffentlichkeit: Neue Studien Zur Nationalsozialistischen Lagerpolitik (Darstellungen Und Quellen Zur Geschichte Von Auschwitz). Munich: De Gruyter. pp. 110, 111, 127, 131.  

The SS also chose some people to work in and around the gas chambers and crematoria. They called these people Sonderkommando.

Kapos and Sonderkommandos made it possible for a small number of SS guards (around 7,000 in totalp. 40) to control tens of thousands of prisoners at Auschwitz.

Auschwitz I
Auschwitz I was the main concentration camp, and the office for all of the camps in the Auschwitz complex. The Nazis kept prisoners there from 14 June 1940 until 27 January 1945.p. 128

 Prisoners 
The first prisoners at Auschwitz I were 728 people from Poland. One of these prisoners was Kazimierz Albin. He survived Auschwitz. Later, he wrote about how the first day at Auschwitz began:

[W]e had to line up in five rows... [SS guard] Frizsch announced: "This is Auschwitz Concentration Camp... Any resistance or disobedience will be ruthlessly punished. Anyone disobeying superiors, or trying to escape, will be sentenced to death. Young and healthy people don't live longer than three months here. Priests one month, Jews two weeks. There is only one way out—through the crematorium chimneys."

Next were 48 homosexual men from Germany. Then Jews arrived as prisoners.

From 1940 to 1941, at any time, there were between 13,000 and 16,000 prisoners in Auschwitz I. By 1942, there were 20,000. Most of these prisoners were not Jewish, because most of the Jewish prisoners were sent to Auschwitz II.

At Auschwitz, the prisoners had to put marks on their uniforms to show why they were sent to Auschwitz. For example, Jewish prisoners had to sew two yellow triangles onto their clothes, in the shape of a Star of David. Homosexual people had to sew a pink triangle onto their clothes. The SS also gave each prisoner a serial number and tattooed the number on the prisoners' bodies. The SS never called prisoners by their names, only by their numbers.

The living conditions at Auschwitz I were very bad. Prisoners got very little food. There was no sanitation, which made it easy for diseases to spread. Many prisoners died from diseases, starvation, and freezing to death. According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, "SS men regarded a Jewish life as the least valuable of all," and mistreatment of Jews was extremely common.

On Sundays, the prisoners had to clean their barracks, and were allowed to shower.

 Punishments and torture 
The SS built many types of rooms meant to punish and torture prisoners. These included:
 Standing cells: These were rooms that were 1.5 square metres. The SS would keep four people in one of these rooms. The rooms were so small that the prisoners would have to stand all night. Then they would have to work during the day.
 Starvation cells: The SS would lock prisoners into these rooms, and did not give them any water or food. They would leave the prisoners to die of dehydration or starvation.
 Suffocation cells: These were rooms with only one small window. The SS would lock many prisoners into these rooms. As the prisoners breathed in the oxygen in the room, there would be less and less oxygen left. Eventually, there would be so little oxygen left in the room that the prisoners would suffocate.

Sometimes, the SS would tie a prisoner's hands behind his back and hang him by his wrists. This would break the person's shoulder joints. The SS would leave prisoners hanging like this for hours or days, sometimes until the prisoners died.

The SS also hung some prisoners by the neck, so they would die a slow and painful death.

 Gas chambers 
The SS tried killing prisoners with Zyklon B for the first time at Auschwitz I, on 3rd September 1941.

In their first test, the SS used Zyklon B on 600 prisoners of war from the Soviet Union and about 250 Polish people.p. 88 When the gas killed these prisoners, the SS realized that they could kill people much more quickly with Zyklon B than they could by shooting them. They built a gas chamber, where they could kill over 700 people at a time.p. 160 They also built a crematorium in block 11 of the camp.p. 160

From 1941 to 1942, the SS killed about 60,000 people in this gas chamber. After 1942, they made the gas chamber an air-raid shelter for the SS to hide in if Allied planes were dropping bombs nearby.pp. 123–124

Today, the gas chamber still exists. It has been re-built, using its original parts. Now, it is a part of the museum at Auschwitz.

 Women prisoners 
On 26th March 1942, the SS sent the first women prisoners to Auschwitz.

From about March 1941 to January 1945, Nazi Dr. Carl Clauberg did medical experiments on many women at Auschwitz. He wanted to find a way to sterilize millions of people as easily and quickly as possible. He tried using X-rays, surgery, and medications to sterilize women prisoners. The Nazis' plan was to get rid of everyone who was not "Aryan." As part of this plan, the Nazis sterilized many people so they could not have children who were not "Aryan."p. 73

In 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered the SS to create a brothel in Auschwitz. Non-Jewish women prisoners were forced to work in the brothel. Prisoners who were important to the Nazis, like kapos and chefs, were allowed to use the brothel as a reward. Heinrich Himmler also ordered homosexual prisoners to visit the brothel every week. He thought this would 'cure' them of being homosexual.Heger, Heinz (May 31, 2001). Die Manner mit dem rosa Winkel. Merlin Verlag. p. 137. . 

Johanna Langefeld, Maria Mandel, and Elisabeth Volkenrath were in charge of the women prisoners at Auschwitz.

 Dr. Mengele 
Criminal SS doctor Josef Mengele did medical experiments on many prisoners, especially twins, dwarves, and people with physical disabilities. All of these experiments were very crude and painful. For example, Mengele castrated some prisoners without using any anesthetics. Many women and men died during these experiments.

Mengele was also in charge of Auschwitz's camp "hospital." This was not like a regular hospital. Prisoners who were doctors, like Gisella Perl, worked there. They tried to help prisoners who were sick or hurt, but they had no medications or medical supplies, not even clean bandages or running water. If patients did not get better quickly, Mengele sent them to the gas chambers, or Nazi doctors killed them by injecting them with phenol.

 Auschwitz II (Birkenau) 
Auschwitz II was Auschwitz's death camp. It was also called Birkenau (pronounced "BEER-kin-now"), which means "the birch wood" (forest). Today, Birkenau is often just called "Auschwitz."

The Nazis began building Auschwitz II in October 1941, because Auschwitz I was getting too crowded. By this time, Adolf Hitler had decided to kill all of the Jewish people. The Nazis called this plan the "Final Solution." Soon after it was built, Heinrich Himmler ordered Auschwitz II to be used as a killing center. Its goal would be to kill every prisoner that was sent there.

Auschwitz II had four gas chambers. The Nazis made the gas chambers look like showers. They convinced prisoners that they were going into the gas chambers to shower.p. 160 Then they dropped Zyklon B into the gas chambers and killed everyone inside. The dead bodies were burned to ashes in Auschwitz II's four crematoria.p. 160

Auschwitz II was the largest death camp run by Nazi Germany during The Holocaust. The SS killed more people at Auschwitz than in any of the other Nazi death camps. The SS built Auschwitz II's gas chambers so that 2,000 people could fit inside at once. This meant they were able to kill about 2,000 people every 30 minutes in the gas chambers: up to 12,000 a day.

 Auschwitz III (Monowitz) 
Auschwitz III was also called Monowitz (pronounced "MOW-no-vitz"). At Monowitz and the 48 subcamps around it, prisoners worked as slaves in an IG Farben factory and factories that made weapons for the German Army."List of Subcamps of KL Auschwitz (Podobozy KL Auschwitz)".  Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oświęcimiu. p. 53

The IG Farben factory at Monowitz opened in 1941. By October 1942, prisoners had been forced to build the Monowitz camp, so slave workers could live there. IG Farben paid for the camp to be built. This made Monowitz the first concentration camp in history to be paid for and built by a private company.p. 53

Between 1941 and 1945, about 35,000 prisoners worked at the IG Farben factory. Seven out of every ten of these prisoners (about 25,000) died from starvation, disease, and being forced to work so hard.pp. 51, 53, 55 The average prisoner lived for only three months after being sent to Monowitz.p. 56

Managers at the IG Farben factory were always trying to make the prisoners work harder. Often they threatened prisoners by saying they would be sent to the gas chambers if they did not work harder.p. 56 Every month, 20% of the slave workers at the factory (one out of every five) died or were sent to the gas chambers.

 Commanders 
Until the summer of 1943, Rudolf Höss was the commander of Auschwitz.p. 193 After him, Arthur Liebehenschel and Richard Baer became commanders of the camp.

After World War II, Höss wrote an autobiography. He gave many details about Auschwitz's camps. At the Nuremberg Trials, he received the death penalty. He was hanged in front of the crematorium at Auschwitz I.

 Resistance 
By 1943, many resistance groups had formed inside Auschwitz's camps. These were groups who tried to fight back against the Nazis, any way they could.

Resistance groups helped some prisoners to escape from Auschwitz. These people brought information to the world about the killings happening at Auschwitz.

However, if one prisoner escaped, the SS killed many other prisoners. Sometimes, they brought the escaped prisoners' family members to Auschwitz. The SS did these things so that other prisoners would not try to escape. Overall, about 700 prisoners tried to escape from Auschwitz's three different camps. Of these 700, about 300 were able to escape.

Some of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz fought back against the SS. For example, in 1944, some of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz blew up one of the camp's crematoria.

Also in 1944, members of the Sonderkommando secretly took pictures inside Auschwitz. These are the only pictures that show the mass murder that was happening at Auschwitz. Members of the Polish resistance helped sneak the photographs out of the camp.

 The information 
The Allies got some information about Auschwitz's camps between 1941 and 1944. However, they did not believe that so many people were being killed at Auschwitz. Then two people, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz. They wrote reports about what was happening at Auschwitz. From these reports, Allied leaders learned the truth about Auschwitz in the middle of 1944.

During 1944, Allied airplanes had taken some photographs of the area, including Auschwitz. However, no one studied these photographs. The first time anyone looked at these photos carefully was in the 1970s.

At one time, the Allies had planned to bomb the camps. However, they decided not to, because they did not want to kill any prisoners.Wyman, David S. (1998). "Why Auschwitz Wasn't Bombed." In Yisrael Gutman & Michael Berenbaum (eds.). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press. p. 583. . In fact, some planes dropped bombs at nearby military targets. One bomb fell on the camp. It killed 315 prisoners and hurt 1425 more.

People still argue about what the Allies could have done to save more of the prisoners at Auschwitz.

Freedom
By late 1944, the Red Army was close to Auschwitz. The SS blew up the gas chambers at Birkenau to hide what they had done. They also destroyed many other buildings and records.pp. 125–127 On 17th January 1945, the camps' SS guards started to leave Auschwitz. They forced more than 58,000 prisoners to march west to the cities Gliwice or Wodzilaw. At the arrival of these cities they were transported by trains to concentration camps in Germany. They left behind only those who could not march. About 38,000 prisoners died on the forced march.pp. 125–127

On 27th January 1945, the soldiers in the Red Army's 322nd Infantry reached Auschwitz. They found and freed about 7,500 prisoners.p. 128

Deaths

Nobody knows exactly how many people died at Auschwitz, or other Nazi camps. The SS kept records, but they destroyed most of them. Historians have used many different ways of estimating how many people died at Auschwitz. For example, they have studied what witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials said. Some people who survived Auschwitz also helped to estimate how many people died there.

Estimates

Several former SS leaders gave estimates of Auschwitz's death toll. At first, Rudolf Höss said that 2.5 million to 3 million people were killed at Auschwitz. (Later, he called this estimate "far too high".) Adolf Eichmann estimated that 2 million people were killed there.

The communist regimes of the Soviet Union and Poland after World War II suggested that 4 million people were killed at Auschwitz.pp. 132–133

Calculations

In 1983, French scholar George Wellers used deportation records to calculate that 1.613 million people had been killed at Auschwitz, including 1.42 million Jews and 146,000 Poles.

Around the same time, Franciszek Piper used train and deportation efforts to calculate 1.1 million Jewish deaths; 140,000-150,000 Polish deaths; and 23,000 Roma deaths. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that these are "the best estimates of the number of victims" at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945:

 Total NumberSent to Auschwitz Number Killedat Auschwitz PercentageKilled Jews  1,095,000  960,000  88% Polish people  147,000  74,000  50% Roma  23,000  21,000  91% Soviet prisoners of war  15,000  15,000  100% Other people  25,000  12,000  48% Totals  1.3 million  1.08 million  83%

Military tribunals

After the war, the American, British, and French governments operated military tribunals to try Nazi war criminals. Garrisons of other concentration camps were tried before these tribunals. There, some high-ranking Auschwitz officials who had worked in other camps were convicted and sentenced to death.

The commandant of Auschwitz III-Monowitz, Heinrich Schwarz, was sentenced to death at the Natzweiler trial. So was Monowitz's director, Vinzenz Schöttl, at the Dachau trial in 1945.

Alfred Trzebinski, an SS doctor at Auschwitz, was sentenced to death at the Neuengamme concentration camp trial in 1946. Another two SS doctors, Helmuth Vetter and Friedrich Entress, were sentenced to the death penalty at the Mauthausen trials in 1946.

Personnel

Some of the death camp's top leaders were sentenced to death in the military tribunals. They included:
 Friedrich Hartjenstein, commandant (sentenced at the trial of the Natzweiler garrison in 1946)
 Johann Schwarzhuber, director of the men's camp (sentenced at the Ravensbrück trials)
 Otto Moll, crematorium director (sentenced at the Dachau trials in 1946-1947)
 Irma Grese and Elisabeth Volkenrath, two female SS guards who "selected" inmates to be killed in the gas chambers (sentenced at the Bergen-Belsen trials in 1945)

Auschwitz Trials


According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum:More members of the Auschwitz SS garrison stood trial in Poland than anywhere else. From 1946 to 1949, about 1 thousand people suspected of committing war crimes at Auschwitz were extradited to Poland, mostly from the American occupation zone in Germany. Charges were brought against 673 people, including 21 women.After the war, Poland created a special court in Warsaw called the Supreme National Tribunal (1946-1948). Its goal was to prosecute people who committed war crimes during World War II.

Auschwitz's first commandant, Rudolf Höss, was the first person tried for war crimes at the Supreme National Tribunal. The court sentenced Höss to death on April 2, 1947.

First Auschwitz Trial

At the Tribunal's second trial - often called the Auschwitz Trial or the First Auschwitz Trial - forty SS officers were accused of being guards or doctors at Auschwitz. All but one were convicted.
In its verdict, the Tribunal wrote:Torturing of prisoners [at Auschwitz] already tormented to the extreme ... is the evidence of inhuman savagery [done] by those defendants who [we have] sentenced to death. The listed violent crimes committed by [these] defendants, who all took smaller or larger part in the mass murder of prisoners, also reveal that the accused were involved in the acts of killing for pleasure, and not pursuant to orders of their superiors. If it were not for their expressed desire to kill, they would have otherwise displayed elements of sympathy for the victims, or at least show indifference to their plight, but not torture them to death.

Sentences


Of the 39 people convicted at this trial:

 23 (including two women) were sentenced to death
 Six (including one woman) were sentenced to life in prison
 Seven (including two women) were sentenced to 15 years in prison
 One person was sentenced to 3 years in prison; one received 5 years in prison; one received 10 years

Executions

Of the people sentenced to death, two (including SS doctor Johann Kremer) had their sentences commuted to life in prison. The other 21 were hanged on 24 January 1948, including:

 Auschwitz's second commandant, Arthur Liebehenschel
 The camp's Gestapo leader, Maximilian Grabner
 Maria Mandel, the director of the women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau
 Therese Brandl, another female SS guard

Second Auschwitz Trial

After Poland, the new Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) tried more Auschwitz personnel than any other country. The best-known of these trials (called "the second Auschwitz trial" in Germany) happened in Frankfurt between 1963 and 1976. Many people from the Auschwitz garrison were convicted, and many more gave evidence without facing criminal charges. Six were sentenced to life in prison, and the others received prison sentences ranging from 3 to 14 years.

Other trials

Smaller courts across Poland tried and convicted hundreds of lower-level Auschwitz personnel between 1946 and 1953. Sentences were often short. Of all the Auschwitz personnel convicted in these courts:

 31.9% (203 people) were sentenced to three years in prison
 17.5% (111 people) were sentenced to four years in prison
 Just 6.1% (41 people) were sentenced to death or to life imprisonment
In 1966 East Germany tried one SS doctor, Horst Fischer, and sentenced him to death. In 1972, several former Auschwitz guards were tried and acquitted by an Austrian court.

Museum and honors


Museum

A few years after World War II ended, the government of Poland decided to rebuild Auschwitz and put a museum there. They repaired some of the camps. Sometimes they made very small changes from the original setup.

The museum has many parts and exhibits. They include:
 Auschwitz II and the remains of the gas chambers.
 About 110,000 shoes from men, women, and children who were killed at Auschwitz.
 About 3,800 suitcases. When people were sent to Auschwitz, the Nazis told them they were just going to another place to live. So people brought suitcases with many things they thought they would need.
 Other things that people sent to Auschwitz brought with them. These include over 12,000 kitchen utensils; eyeglasses; clothing; and many other things.
 Things the SS used to kill prisoners. These include fake shower heads for the gas chambers; cans of Zyklon B; the door of one of the gas chambers; and a crematorium.

In 1947, the museum was opened for the public. Later, people scattered the ashes of Auschwitz's victims between the huts where the prisoners lived. They see the entire area as a gravesite.

Other honors

In 1979, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Association (UNESCO) made Auschwitz a World Heritage Site.

In 2005, the United Nations made 27 January the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. They chose 27 January because it is the day that the Red Army freed Auschwitz.

On 27 January 2005, the European Parliament marked the anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation with a minute of silence. The European Parliament also passed a resolution saying that the murder of about 1.5 million people at Auschwitz's camps was terrible. The Parliament said they passed the resolution partly because of “the disturbing rise in antisemitism, and especially antisemitic incidents, in Europe, and for learning anew the wider lessons about the dangers of victimizing people on the basis of race, ethnic origin, religion, social classification, politics or sexual orientation."thumb|Maximilian Kolbe was made a Catholic saint after he was killed at Auschwitz

Roman Catholic Church

In 1979, Polish Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. In the 1980s, he made two people who were killed at Auschwitz into Catholic saints.

The first was a Polish priest named Maximilian Kolbe. The Nazis sent him to Auschwitz because he helped Jewish refugees. When three men escaped from Auschwitz, the SS chose ten other prisoners to be starved to death as revenge. When one of those prisoners started to cry about his family, Kolbe volunteered to be killed in his place.

The second was Edith Stein, a Jewish woman who converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun. The SS killed her in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Controversies

Denial

See the main article: Holocaust denial

The Holocaust is a fact of history, and the SS killed at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz.

Just after World War II, the communist governments of the Soviet Union and Poland put up a memorial sign at Auschwitz saying 4 million people died there. After the fall of the communist government in Poland in 1989, the sign was changed to say that 1.1 million people died. People who try to deny the Holocaust use this difference to claim that the Holocaust was propaganda.

The Polish government has allowed filming at the sites for two movies and a TV series. However, in some cases, they have not allowed filming inside the camps. In February 2006, Poland refused visas to some researchers from Iran who wanted to visit Auschwitz. Iran's president at the time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had called the Holocaust "a myth."For example:

 "Holocaust comments spark outrage" . December 14, 2005. BBC News. Accessed February 18, 2016.
 Esfandiari, Golnaz. "Iran: President's Latest Comments About Israel Spark Further Condemnation" . December 9, 2005. Radio Free Europe. Accessed February 18, 2016.
 "NCC Condemns Ahmadinejad's Holocaust Statement" . December 16, 2005. National Council of Churches. Accessed February 18, 2016.

Name change

Starting in 1989, the Polish government and media argued that it was not fair to use the name "Polish death camps" to describe the Auschwitz camps. They said this name made it seem like Poland ran the death camps. In fact, Nazi Germany had taken over Poland, and the Nazis ran the death camps.p. 73

In 2006, the Polish government asked UNESCO to change the name of the World Heritage Site at Auschwitz. They wanted the name to change from "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau". The Polish government thought this would avoid misleading the public and would show that Nazi Germany ran the camp, not Poland. In 2007, UNESCO agreed, and changed the site's name to "Auschwitz Birkenau: German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945)."

Religious controversies


In 1984, the Carmelites opened a convent near Auschwitz I. Jewish groups protested, and the Carmelites removed the convent in 1993.

In 1987, after Pope John Paul II beatified Edith Stein, Catholic people put up a cross near the gas chamber. After some time, a Star of David appeared at the site. Many religious symbols appeared. Finally, people removed all of them.

In 1988, the Carmelites put up an 8-meter (26-foot) tall cross outside block 11 at Auschwitz. Jewish groups protested, saying that most of the people killed at Auschwitz were Jewish. By 1998, 300 smaller crosses had appeared. Finally, people removed the smaller crosses. However, the larger cross is still there.

Gallery

Related pages

 The Holocaust
 Extermination camp
 List of Nazi concentration camps

References

Other websites

 Liberation of Auschwitz - 60th Anniversary  (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
 Holocaust Encyclopedia - Auschwitz (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
 Virtual Reality panoramas of Auschwitz and Birkenau (Interactive Virtual Reality panoramas of Auschwitz and Birkenau)

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