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%.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.

## 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.

In extermination camps, almost everyone was killed right after they got to the camps. 90% of them were Jewish. 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 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']  and  choice each one of us had been judged  or not of working usefully for the [[Third Reich|[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.''

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.

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 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 total 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  or  will be ruthlessly punished. Anyone disobeying , 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. 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.

### Punishments and torture 
 prisoners]]
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.

In their first test, the SS used Zyklon B on 600 prisoners of war from the Soviet Union and about 250 Polish people.p.&nbsp;160 They also built a crematorium in block 11 of the camp. After 1942, they made the gas chamber an air-raid shelter for the SS to hide in if Allied planes were dropping bombs nearby.

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.&nbsp;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.

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. If patients did not get better quickly, Mengele sent them to the gas chambers, or Nazi doctors killed them by injecting them with phenol.), which means "the  wood" (forest). The SS built Auschwitz II's gas chambers so that 2,000 people could fit inside at once.

## Commanders 
Until the summer of 1943, Rudolf Höss was the commander of Auschwitz.

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 
 (cropped), showing victims from the gas chamber being burned]]
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.

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. 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.

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. 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. They left behind only those who could not march. About 38,000 prisoners died on the forced march. (Later, he called this estimate "far too high".

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:

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. (sentenced at the Bergen-Belsen trials in 1945)

## Auschwitz Trials
According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum:*More members of the Auschwitz SS  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.
In its verdict, the Tribunal wrote:*Torturing of prisoners [at Auschwitz] already tormented to the extreme ... is the evidence of inhuman  [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  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  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:

### 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: 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." 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.

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."

### 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. 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

File:Map of Auschwitz and environs, 1944.jpg|Map of the three main Auschwitz camps
File:Birkenau25August1944.jpg|Example of a photo taken by an Allied plane that was never studied
File:Auschwitz Resistance 282 cropped.JPG|One of the *Sonderkommando* photos, showing naked women being sent to the gas chamber
File:Czeslawakwoka.jpg|Nazi photos of Polish prisoner Czesława Kwoka in 1942 or 1943
File:Crematorium at Auschwitz I 2012.jpg|The inside of Auschwitz I's crematorium today
File:Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia in Auschwitz.jpg|Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia in Auschwitz
File:Richard Baer, Josef Mengele, Rudolf Hoess, Auschwitz. Album Höcker.jpg|Richard Baer, Josef Mengele, and Rudolf Hoss in Auschwitz
File:KL Auschwitz I Crematorium I gaschamber.jpg|Crematorium I at Auschwitz I today
File:Women in the barracks of Auschwitz.jpg|Women in Auschwitz barracks
File:Auschwitz - Zyklon B (10901222613).jpg|Canisters of Zyklon B used to gas prisoners

## 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)