Auschwitz - World War II - HISTORY.com Google Auschwitz: Genesis of Death Camps After the start of World War II , Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, implemented a policy that came to be known as the “Final Solution.” Hitler was determined not just to isolate Jews in Germany and countries annexed by the Nazis, subjecting them to dehumanizing regulations and random acts of violence. Instead, he became convinced that his “Jewish problem” would be solved only with the elimination of every Jew in his domain, along with artists, educators, Gypsies, communists, homosexuals, the mentally and physically handicapped and others deemed unfit for survival in Nazi Germany. Did You Know? In October 1944, a group of Auschwitz "Sonderkommando," young Jewish males responsible for removing corpses from crematoriums and gas chambers, staged a revolt. They assaulted their guards, using tools and makeshift explosives, and demolished a crematorium. All were apprehended and killed. To complete this mission, Hitler ordered the construction of death camps.

Unlike concentration camps, which had existed in Germany since 1933 and were detention centers for Jews, political prisoners and other perceived enemies of the Nazi state, death camps existed for the sole purpose of killing Jews and other “undesirables,” in what became known as the Holocaust. Auschwitz: The Largest of the Death Camps Auschwitz, the largest and arguably the most notorious of all the Nazi death camps, opened in the spring of 1940. Its first commandant was Rudolf Höss (1900-47), who previously had helped run the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany. Auschwitz was located on a former military base outside OÅ›wiÄ™cim, a town in southern Poland situated near Krakow, one of the country’s largest cities. During the camp’s construction, nearby factories were appropriated and all those living in the area were forcibly ejected from their homes, which were bulldozed by the Nazis. Auschwitz originally was conceived as a concentration camp, to be used as a detention center for the many Polish citizens arrested after Germany annexed the country in 1939.

These detainees included anti-Nazi activists, politicians, resistance members and luminaries from the cultural and scientific communities. Once Hitler’s Final Solution became official Nazi policy, however, Auschwitz was deemed an ideal death camp locale. For one thing, it was situated near the center of all German-occupied countries on the European continent. For another, it was in close proximity to the string of rail lines used to transport detainees to the network of Nazi camps. However, not all those arriving at Auschwitz were immediately exterminated. Those deemed fit to work were employed as slave labor in the production of munitions, synthetic rubber and other products considered essential to Germany’s efforts in World War II. Auschwitz and Its Subdivisions At its peak of operation, Auschwitz consisted of several divisions. The original camp, known as Auschwitz I, housed between 15,000 and 20,000 political prisoners.

Those entering its main gate were greeted with an infamous and ironic inscription: “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “Work Makes You Free.” Auschwitz II, located in the village of Birkenau, or Brzezinka, just outside OÅ›wiÄ™cim, was constructed in 1941 on the order of Heinrich Himmler (1900-45), commander of the “Schutzstaffel” (or Select Guard/Protection Squad, more commonly known as the SS), which operated all Nazi concentration camps and death camps. Birkenau, the biggest of the Auschwitz facilities, could hold some 90,000 prisoners. It also housed a group of bathhouses where countless people were gassed to death, and crematory ovens where bodies were burned. The majority of Auschwitz victims died at Birkenau.More than 40 smaller facilities, called subcamps, dotted the landscape and served as slave-labor camps. The largest of these subcamps, Monowitz, also known as Auschwitz III, began operating in 1942 and housed some 10,000 prisoners.

Life and Death in Auschwitz By mid-1942, the majority of those being sent by the Nazis to Auschwitz were Jews. Upon arriving at the camp, detainees were examined by Nazi doctors. Those detainees considered unfit for work, including young children, the elderly, pregnant women and the infirm, were immediately ordered to take showers. However, the bathhouses to which they marched were disguised gas chambers. Once inside, the prisoners were exposed to Zyklon-B poison gas. Individuals marked as unfit for work were never officially registered as Auschwitz inmates. For this reason, it is impossible to calculate the number of lives lost in the camp. For those prisoners who initially escaped the gas chambers, an undetermined number died from overwork, disease, insufficient nutrition or the daily struggle for survival in brutal living conditions. Arbitrary executions, torture and retribution happened daily, in front of the other prisoners. Some Auschwitz prisoners were subjected to inhumane medical experimentation. The chief perpetrator of this barbaric research was Josef Mengele (1911-79), a German physician who began working at Auschwitz in 1943. Mengele, who came to be known as the “Angel of Death,” performed a range of experiments on detainees.

For example, in an effort to study eye color, he injected serum into the eyeballs of dozens of children, causing them excruciating pain. He also injected chloroform into the hearts of twins, to determine if both siblings would die at the same time and in the same manner. Liberation of Auschwitz: 1945 As 1944 came to a close and the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allied forces seemed certain, the Auschwitz commandants began destroying evidence of the horror that had taken place there. Buildings were torn down, blown up or set on fire, and records were destroyed. In January 1945, as the Soviet army entered Krakow, the Germans ordered that Auschwitz be abandoned. Before the end of the month, in what came to be known as the Auschwitz death marches, an estimated 60,000 detainees, accompanied by Nazi guards, departed the camp and were forced to march to the Polish towns of Gliwice or Wodzislaw, some 30 miles away. Countless prisoners died during this process; those who made it to the sites were sent on trains to concentration camps in Germany.

When the Soviet army entered Auschwitz on January 27, they found approximately 7,600 sick or emaciated detainees who had been left behind. The liberators also discovered mounds of corpses, hundreds of thousands of pieces of clothing and pairs of shoes and seven tons of human hair that had been shaved from detainees before their liquidation. According to some estimates, between 1.1 million to 1.5 million people, the vast majority of them Jews, died at Auschwitz during its years of operation. An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 Poles perished at the camp, along with 19,000 to 20,000 Gypsies and smaller numbers of Soviet prisoners of war and other individuals. Tags Arbeit Macht Frei: The notorious Nazi sign thieves stole from a concentration camp - The Washington Post Arbeit Macht Frei: The notorious Nazi sign thieves stole from a concentration camp The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published. You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published.

You’re all set! By Ishaan Tharoor By Ishaan Tharoor November 3, 2014 Follow @ishaantharoor A man walks through the gate, part of which, bearing the Nazi slogan "Arbeit macht frei" (literally "Work sets you free") was stolen from the former concentration camp in Dachau, Germany, on Nov. 3. (Andreas Gebert/EPA) Over the weekend, thieves stole part of the entrance to Germany's infamous Dachau concentration camp — an iron gate wrought with the slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei," or "work sets you free." Officials believe the unknown culprits made off with the gate after midnight Saturday. "It is the central symbol of the prisoners' suffering at Dachau concentration camp and therefore has hit the memorial at its heart," Gabriele Hammermann, director of the memorial at Dachau, told the AFP. This is not the first time one of these notorious signs has been lifted from a concentration camp site. In 2009, the Arbeit Macht Frei sign at the Auschwitz camp in Poland was cut out and whisked away by thieves.

It triggered an international diplomatic incident and a massive hunt by Polish police. The sign was found three days later in the country's north, and authorities arrested a Swedish neo-fascist who, with a few accomplices, had attempted to pilfer this piece of Nazi history and had broken it into various parts to transport it. "This is an attack on the remembrance of the Holocaust," said the president of Israel's Yad Vashem, the country's official Holocaust memorial site, at the time. Dachau was one of the first concentration camps opened by the Nazi regime, established in this town northwest of Munich just five weeks after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. The site served as a model for future camps and a training center for Hitler's SS. Its first prisoners were communists, Social Democrats and other political opponents. Later, Dachau's population swelled to include a whole range of supposed undesirables, from Jehovah's Witnesses to homosexuals to gypsies and Jews. Nazi scientists experimented on inmates in Dachau, injecting some with drugs, infecting others with diseases, testing humans' ability to ingest seawater.

Inmates were put to forced labor — the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign itself was welded by imprisoned Jewish metal workers. And, of course, tens of thousands were slaughtered. The main gate of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz I, in Poland, with its Arbeit Macht Frei sign. The camp was liberated by the Russians in January 1945. (AP) Between the camp's opening and its liberation by Allied forces in 1945, Dachau housed nearly 200,000 detainees . The number of those killed is unknown, but estimated to be around 50,000. A U.S. general described the scene as American forces approached the camp: The scene near the entrance to the confinement area numbed my senses. Dante's Inferno seemed pale compared to the real hell of Dachau. A row of small cement structures near the prison entrance contained a coal-fired crematorium, a gas chamber, and rooms piled high with naked and emaciated human corpses. As I turned to look over the prison yard with unbelieving eyes, I saw a large number of dead inmates lying where they had fallen in the last few hours or days before our arrival.

Since all the many bodies were in various stages of decomposition, the stench of death was overpowering. Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish intellectual who survived a year in Auschwitz, puzzled over the chilling phrase inscribed on the gates of this living hell. He figured its "meaning is ironic, springing from the heavy, arrogant, funereal wit to which only Germans are privy." Levi went on: The camps were ... an anticipation of the future assigned to Europe in Nazi planning. In the light of these considerations, phrases such as the one at Auschwitz, "Work makes free," or the one at Buchenwald, "To each his own," take on a precise and sinister meaning. They are, in their turn, an anticipation of the new tablets of the Law, dictated by master to slave, and valid only for the slave. If Fascism had prevailed, the whole of Europe would have been transformed into a complex system of forced labour and extermination camps, and those cynically edifying words would have been read on the entrance to every workshop and every worksite.

world With fewer voices, Auschwitz survivors speak | The Washington Post With fewer voices, Auschwitz survivors speak Email The voices of Auschwitz The 70th anniversary of the liberation of the notorious Nazi concentration camp could mark the last major commemoration for many Holocaust survivors Published on January 23, 2015 There are fewer and fewer of those who still remember. The Soviet army entered Auschwitz — the network of extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland — on Jan. 27, 1945, liberating the most notorious site of the Holocaust. In the decades since, groups of survivors have gathered to honor that day — including an annual remembrance at Auschwitz itself. This year, they mark the 70th anniversary of liberation on Tuesday — a day that, for a significant portion of remaining survivors, may be the last major remembrance of their lifetimes. The numbers themselves tell the story. Video: The Holocaust's last voices Play Video Henry Greenbaum and Martin Weiss are part of the fading generation of survivors. As the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz approaches, they show PostTV how they are helping to shape the future by sharing their past.

(Gabe Silverman/The Washington Post) A decade ago, 1,500 survivors traveled to Auschwitz in southern Poland to mark the 60th anniversary. This year, organizers are expecting 300 or so. “This is the last big one for many of the survivors,” said Ronald Lauder, billionaire philanthropist and president of the World Jewish Congress, which is financing the travel expenses for more than 100 survivors. “By the time we reach the 75th anniversary, there may be almost no survivors left. But they are coming now, because they want to bear witness, to stand there and say, “we outlasted Hitler. We made it.’” The survivors partly carry a legacy of horror, memories of the brutality of a labor prison that, by September of 1941, became an assembly line of death where more than 1 million would perish at the hands of the Third Reich. The vast majority of the victims were the Jews of Europe, subjected to Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But others also deemed outside the racial and ideological lines of the Nazis also died. Ethnic Roma. Gays. Jehovah’s Witnesses. Polish prisoners of war.

Click to read each story Raphael Esrail, France The survivors carry another legacy as well, one even more relevant: The power of human will to persevere. What follows are the tales of four survivors of Auschwitz, since resettled in the United States, Israel, France and southern Germany. Their recollections come amid what for some is a new period of uncertainty. In France — home of 89-year-old survivor Raphael Esrail — the anniversary comes less than three weeks after a terrorist assault on a kosher grocery store in Paris in which four people lost their lives. In Israel, Marta Wise, an 80-year-old survivor, sees little cause for optimism in her adopted home or elsewhere. And in the United States, survivor Anna Ornstein, an 87-year-old psychoanalyst who has spent a lifetime treating children in trauma, says humanity has not learned from the Holocaust, as genocide has continued in many parts of the world. For Hermann Höllenreiner — an 81-year-old Roma survivor who now lives outside of Munich — the anniversary comes as concern is growing about the modern treatment of Roma people across Europe. “I would like to think that things have changed 70 years later,” Höllenreiner said.

“But there is still discrimination.” ‘The world has not changed at all’ Marta Wise, 80 Marta Wise, who now resides in Israel, recalls her intimate experiences with Nazi doctor Josef Mengele while in Auschwitz. In the photo of the camp at the top of this page, Wise is seventh from the left. (David Vaaknin for The Washington Post) JERUSALEM — There are few people alive today who can recall the ominous grin of the notorious “Angel of Death,” Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Marta Wise is one of them. “When he smiled you knew it meant danger, because when he was smiling, that was when he was at his most sadistic,” said Wise (nee Weiss), an 80-year-old from pre-war Czechoslovakia who lived for two months in Mengele’s experimental barracks in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Mengele, a German officer and physician, was known for conducting cruel, unscientific experiments on inmates, especially Jewish and Gypsy children. He was obsessed with twins and dwarfs.

His “research” included attempts to turn dark eyes blue and studies into how twins were conceived, likely with the aim of boosting the fecundity of the Aryan “master race.” Most of those who came under his care did not survive. “We lived with a family of Hungarian dwarfs with nine children,” said Wise, recalling how Mengele bounced a 2-year-old boy on his knee and cooed, “Call me Uncle Mengele.” Then he injected the toddler with something that made his skin turn blue, Wise said. Wise recalled her experiences in an interview earlier this month at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, museum and research center in Jerusalem. She spent her final weeks at the camp in Mengele’s barracks with her older sister, Eva. She and her sister, she said, were also injected with a substance, although they never discovered what. Just before the camp’s liberation, Wise had one of her most intimate moments with the Nazi doctor. After her sister became sick and was placed in the camp hospital, Mengele allowed Wise to visit her.

Graphic: The survivors Of the number of Jews who were in camps and ghettos, or hiding under Nazi occupation, an estimated 100,555 are still alive. Click to see the full graphic. (Gene Thorp/The Washington Post) “It must have tickled this monster to see this half-dead child come to help her sick, half-dead sister every day,” said Wise, describing how she met Mengele walking to the clinic one day. A few days later, Russian soldiers arrived and freed the survivors. “They did not have much but they gave us what they had,” she said, remembering how one soldier handed her a bottle of vodka. Although Wise was only 10 years old, the war and living in hiding before her capture had taught her that commodities could buy life. After they were freed, the sisters gave the vodka to a truck driver who helped them return home to their parents in Bratislava, today the capital of Slovakia. Before the war, Wise and her sister lived with their parents and eight siblings in a luxurious house in a prestigious neighborhood of Bratislava.

Their father, Eugen Weiss, was a self-made textile merchant who was initially considered an “essential Jew” by the Nazis for his business prowess. It was his mix of business smarts and deep pessimism that helped him save himself, his wife and all but one of his children during the war. In the early years, Wise and her siblings were shipped to relatives in Hungary. Later, Wise and Eva posed as orphaned Aryan girls. “We went to school every day and to church on Sundays,” Wise said. It was the perfect cover for the blond, green-eyed girls until neighbors grew suspicious. They were finally arrested on Oct. 8, 1944 — Wise’s 10th birthday — and less than a month later they arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. “Some survivors say no one helped them, but we had a different experience,” Wise said. “People always tried to help us, and we tried to help people wherever we could.” But survival, she learned, “is really just pure luck.” Wise, who moved with her family to Australia in 1948, said her parents never spoke of the war.

“Eva and I did not mention one word about Auschwitz until 1995,” she said, when Eva, who still lives in Australia, spoke at a commemoration event. Mengele fled Germany and lived in exile in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil until he died in 1979. Wise, a mother of three, grandmother of 14 and great-grandmother of five, immigrated to Israel with her husband in 1998. She is warm and friendly, but what she has to say is not soothing. “I used to be an optimist until a few years ago, but the situation in the Middle East has changed and the world does not notice anything,” she said, speaking days after the terror attacks in Paris. “Reading the newspaper in the past few days is just like reading the newspaper in the 1930s.” “The world has not changed at all,” Wise said.

“The bottom line is it can happen again and it is happening again in many places, not necessarily to the Jews, but to anyone.” ‘I only know we did not learn from the Holocaust that we should stop killing, because we did not’ Anna Ornstein, 87 Anna Ornstein, now living outside Boston, lost her father and grandmother to the gas chambers. (Damian Strohmeyer for The Washington Post) NEW YORK — On a freezing January day, Anna Ornstein was one of a few visitors on the memorial plaza at Ground Zero as she ran her hands along the massive bronze tablets into which thousands of names of the dead are carved. The tiny grandmother swaddled in black down has an eye trained for horror. “We have what I call a ‘memorial space,’ when we touch something or hear something from our trauma,” said Ornstein, 87, in her Hungarian accent. As a psychoanalyst renowned for her work on the self, she is considered an expert on how humans make meaning. As a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, she knows when there is none to be found.

And this day, nearly 70 years after then-18-year-old Anna Brunn and her mother were freed after losing her father and grandmother to the gas chambers, Ornstein wasn’t yet sold on memorials. They seem, she said, to imply punctuation, the end of something, as though everything possible has been learned. “We like to think: ‘This is it! Now we’ll know better,’ ” she said as she came out of the cold and descended into the subterranean National September 11 Memorial Museum. But despite being what she calls “the most researched horror story in the world,” the Holocaust “was just the beginning of the century of genocide,” Ornstein said. “Armenians, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda. . . . Now some Muslims say, ‘Give me respect and maybe I’ll stop killing you.’ I only know we did not learn from the Holocaust that we should stop killing, because we did not.” Ornstein, who lives outside Boston, had taken a taxi with a friend on a frigid morning to Ground Zero for the first time, to learn more about how a modern-day horror is memorialized.

When World War II ended, thousands of victims of the Nazis emigrated to the United States, a country historians say was largely uninterested in hearing their stories — like the time Ornstein watched the diseased body of her young friend expire, as a family of mice waited patiently nearby to partake. Or when she risked being shot by a camp guard for darting away momentarily from a forced line-up to touch her parched tongue to a puddle of filthy water on the ground. It’s common to hear of Holocaust survivors who emigrated and almost never spoke of their experiences again. Ornstein and her husband, Paul, who survived a forced labor battalion, became prominent psychoanalysts and raised three children, all now psychiatrists. In a field that had been heavily focused on the power of the subconscious, the Ornsteins became stars for arguing that people’s actual experiences — not only their unseen, buried conflicts — are essential in order to understand them. Anna specialized in children, and spent her life focused on the importance of the self, of empathy, of the ways relationships you have when you’re young can hurt or can cure you.

A day earlier, 90 analysts had packed into a tiny room at the William Alanson White Institute on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to hear her deliver a paper about “the importance of the empathic listening perspective, the need to be attentive,” and about trauma — one of her specialties. She wears elegant black suits, pearls and a tiny pin that says “zachor,” the Hebrew word for “remember.” That Ornstein is a survivor is well-known. She speaks to groups around the world, and published a book of essays a decade ago called “My Mother’s Eyes.” She believes having her mother and childhood friends in the camp with her saved her sense of self, her ability to not disappear into the number tattooed on her arm. Not that this analyst always freely analyzed. The analyst she saw while she was in training, she said, wasn’t equipped to deal with her experiences in Auschwitz, and she decided not to speak with him about them. While she studied and saw patients who survived many kinds of trauma — from poverty and hunger to physical pain — she chose not to see Holocaust survivors, fearing she’d confuse her experience with theirs.

Indeed, her kind voice takes on a slight edge when she’s asked about “survivors.” “That’s almost like another crime,” she said of generalizations. “We were reduced to a race. . . . This is my name, I had parents who raised me a certain way, and that was not washed away.” Her own field, she said, was among the worst for this crime of wiping away the self. Analysts had theories, including one that said survivors were empty shells. Look at us, she has been saying for decades. How is it that so many of us thrived? Holding tight to her friend’s arm, Ornstein wove down the ramps, deeper into the museum. She paused for a question. Is she, as a Holocaust survivor, an esteemed analyst, more equipped to understand the meaning of the Sept. 11 attacks? “Meaning?” she says in a confused voice.

“What meaning?” ‘I saw so much, remember too much of it’ Raphael Esrail, 89 Raphael Esrail, now located in Paris, recalls the Death March: “I could only think of my mother, think that I would never see her again, that I would die before reaching the age of 20.” (Andrew Testa/Panos for The Washington Post) PARIS — On the subzero night of Jan. 18, 1945, the Soviet army was fast approaching the gates of Auschwitz. A few minutes after 11 p.m., Raphael Esrail, then 19, was forced into line with thousands of Jewish prisoners under the light of a full moon. The bright night brought an unearthly clarity to a moment of dread. Shouting Nazis separated emaciated prisoners, some barely able to move, into smaller groups of 500. For a fleeting moment, he thought, they might all be killed right there. A French Jew hauled to the camp in a cattle car after his arrest in Lyon 11 months earlier, Esrail had made a solemn pact with himself to survive the ordeal. The things he’d seen up until that point had already tested his will to live.

But what came next, he recently recalled in a lengthy interview, was a different kind of horror. The Death March. Evacuating the camps in the days before liberation, the Nazis pushed tens of thousands of weakened prisoners into long treks toward distant trains bound for other facilities farther west. On hard ice, the prisoners marched, many of them in shoes made of wood and cloth that quickly fell apart. The worst off were barefoot within a few hours, their feet swollen, their bloodied soles sticking to the ice with each step. “Their feet would freeze, and they would fall to their knees,” said Esrail, now 89, rubbing his closed eyes as he spoke in the Paris offices of the French Auschwitz survivors group he heads. “When they fell, a Nazi soldier would stick a gun to their heads and pull the trigger. I could only think of my mother, think that I would never see her again, that I would die before reaching the age of 20.” He paused, composing himself, then continued: “I saw so much, remember too much of it.

The three days of the Death March were the worst.” In the many decades since, this time of year has always been the hardest — the days around the anniversary of liberation that still bring back the worst of the memories. The 70th anniversary has suddenly become particularly symbolic for French survivors. It comes amid worries of rising anti-Semitism in France, fears punctuated by the Jan. 9 attack at a kosher market in Paris by an Islamist extremist who killed four hostages before being killed by police. Esrail, who since the mid-1980s has sought to spread the story of the Holocaust at French schools and conferences, said he began to sense a shift in the winds some four or five years ago. Other survivors would come back from speeches at schools with stories of youngsters rudely standing up and challenging them. “A kid would say, ‘I don’t want to hear about the Holocaust anymore, I’ve heard enough,’ ” he said. “It makes you feel terrible.” In fact, it makes him feel like he felt on Jan. 9, after hearing about the attack on the kosher market. It came as a rising tide of French Jews are opting to emigrate to Israel. “How are people able to do this to others?

I asked the question 70 years ago; I ask myself the same question now.” Born in Turkey in 1925 to a French Jewish mother and a Sephardic Jewish father, Esrail had come to France when he was 9 months old. In the late 1930s and in early 1940, ripples of fear had spread through his Jewish community in Lyon. “People would come from farther east and talk about what the Nazis were doing,” he said. After the war came to France, a sense of shock overtook the community. “How, how, we wondered, could the French army, the greatest in the world, be defeated in 40 days? It all felt unreal. France was crying.” The first anti-Semitic laws came into effect, he said, in October 1940. It spurred him to join the Resistance, the underground network of fighters against the Nazis. He was tasked with making forged work permits and travel documents for Jews. And he did just that, until being discovered and arrested by the Vichy French authorities on Jan. 8, 1944.

That night, and for several days to come, he said, he was routinely tortured before being placed on the dank train car that would haul him to Auschwitz. Although he has been back more than a dozen times since the war’s end, he has opted to sit out the 70th anniversary. “I am old. I am sick,” he said. “And I do not want to die in Auschwitz.” —Anthony Faiola. Virgile Demoustier contributed to this report. Back to top. ‘That’s when I knew we were dealing with animals’ Hermann Höllenreiner, 81 Hermann Höellenreiner of Germany often speaks to students about his experiences in the concentration camps. (Mario Wezel for The Washington Post) METTENHEIM, Germany — Of the many horrors of Auschwitz, Hermann Höllenreiner’s most vivid memory of Nazi cruelty came in the first hours after arriving there. A small dog had somehow been separated from a prisoner who had managed to smuggle it onto the train. “The guard just pointed his pistol at this small, innocent little dog and killed it,” Höllenreiner said, growing emotional as he recalled the scene.

“That’s when I knew we were dealing with animals.” Along with tens of thousands of other ethnic Roma from across Nazi-occupied Europe, Höllenreiner and his family had been arrested and deported from their home near Munich. They arrived at the camp on a frosty March morning in 1943. A few months later, weakened from lack of food and shell-shocked from the unfettered cruelty around him, he was picked to help out in the lab of Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor whose medical experiments brought an extra dose of terror to Auschwitz. Rumors of the doctor’s experiments, Höllenreiner recalled, ran wild in the camp. Those experiments would later involve both Höllenreiner and his incarcerated family. But on that one particularly frightening morning, Höllenreiner, who was 11 at the time, reported for duty and was greeted by a beaming Mengele, who asked him to transport a collection of jars. “I did not want to look, but I did,” Höllenreiner, now 81, said at his home 47 miles east of Munich. “Inside the jars were what looked like human organs, preserved in some kind of liquid. There were lungs.

Hearts. It made me sick.” Later, he and his family would themselves be used in another experiment. They were, he said, purposely infected with typhoid before being injected with what appeared to be an untried new treatment. Still, it could have been worse. A relative became a subject for study on Mengele’s operating table. “He survived, but was never the same,” Höllenreiner said. Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Höllenreiner is still tormented by his incarceration. But what also pains him, he said, are the unlearned lessons of what he calls the “forgotten genocide” — the systematic liquidation of Europe’s Roma. An ancient people researchers believe originally came from India more than a millennium ago, the Roma of Europe were targets of discrimination well before the rise of the Nazis. In the Weimar Republic, German-born Roma — known locally as Sinti — were forced to register with authorities, and were banned from public pools and certain recreation areas. During World War II, the Nazis exterminated hundreds of thousands of Roma. Yet their mass murder was not officially recognized as a genocide by then-West Germany until 1982.

In 2011, Poland — where many Roma died along with Jews and gays — officially recognized the Roma genocide, designating Aug. 2 as a national day of remembrance. The delays, advocates say, correspond to lingering discrimination against Roma in Europe that in recent years has grown progressively worse. In Hungary, four men were found guilty in 2013 of a series of racially motivated killings of Roma in 2008 and 2009 that left six dead, including a 5-year-old. In 2010, France launched a systematic expulsion of Roma, deporting hundreds. Last year, Germany passed a measure that made it more difficult for immigrants from Serbia, Macedonia and Bosnia to seek political asylum, a move widely seen as seeking to stem the flow of Roma migrants from those countries. Höllenreiner is also highly critical of Europe’s Roma communities. In the decades since the war’s end, community leaders have not done enough, he said, to stress education and assimilation, leaving many young Roma stuck in cycles of poverty and living in insular and precarious encampments.

Gallery: The remnants of Auschwitz’s dark history From original blueprints to a rare photo album, artifacts from the infamous concentration camps in Poland are still surfacing. He has sought to tell his own story in German schools, sharing the extraordinary tale of how the Gestapo arrived at his family’s door one day in March 1943. They were all forced to a police station for processing before being loaded onto fetid cattle cars to Auschwitz. During the final days of Nazi Germany, and after his transfer to a concentration camp further east in August 1944, he was separated from his family in the chaos of the death marches. As Nazi Germany was collapsing, freed French prisoners of war picked him up by the side of the road and brought him to France, where several foster families cared for him until December 1946. That’s when he finally learned that his parents and sister had survived the war, and were waiting for him in Munich. His grandmother died in the gas chambers, along with more than a dozen members of his extended family. —Anthony Faiola. Stephanie Kirchner contributed to this report. Back to top.

A Holocaust Survivor, Spared From Gas Chamber By Twist Of Fate : Parallels : NPR A Holocaust Survivor, Spared From Gas Chamber By Twist Of Fate Embed Embed A Holocaust Survivor, Spared From Gas Chamber By Twist Of Fate A Holocaust Survivor, Spared From Gas Chamber By Twist Of Fate Embed Embed Jack Mandelbaum, a Holocaust survivor from the Polish city of Gdynia, poses in front of a photograph showing him as a youth. Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images Jack Mandelbaum, a Holocaust survivor from the Polish city of Gdynia, poses in front of a photograph showing him as a youth. Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images Seventy years ago, Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz, the most notorious of Nazi concentration camps. Some 300 Holocaust survivors were at Auschwitz on Tuesday, along with several European presidents and other government officials, to honor at least 1.1 million people who were murdered, 1 million of whom were Jewish. Among those killed there were Jack Mandelbaum's mother and brother.

The Polish-born Mandelbaum survived, spared at the last minute by an officer of the dreaded SS who yanked the teen away from his family and sent him instead to a forced labor camp. Last week, Mandelbaum flew from his Naples, Fla., home to Berlin, to help open an exhibit on the children of Auschwitz, and to tell his story. "I'm a person of action," he says. "Anger doesn't get you anyplace. Hate doesn't get you anyplace." In August 1939, as the Nazis were about to invade Poland, Mandelbaum was 13 and living in the Polish port city of Gdynia. Mandelbaum says his father worried that the port would be attacked, so he sent his wife and three children to stay with relatives in the countryside. He promised to join them six weeks later, but he never arrived. About a year later, he sent them a postcard from the Stutthof concentration camp. "I guess he didn't want us to worry about him, so he said he was OK," Mandelbaum says. He never saw his father again. His sister later died on a forced march to another concentration camp.

Prisoner 16013 Then, before dawn on June 14, 1942, the SS came for what was left of the family. Article continues after sponsorship "They banged on the door and everyone had to come out in five minutes, and there was a lot of shooting and crying, and people didn't know what was happening because they had to rush out," Mandelbaum recalls. "Many people were even in their bed clothes. And we were lined up in the market square, and then we were marched to a local brewery." An SS officer there began separating people to the left and to the right. Mandelbaum says he clung to his mother and brother, who were sent to the left. But the SS officer saw in his documents that Mandelbaum had worked as an electrician's helper. Oldest Auschwitz Survivor, A Teacher Who Defied Nazis, Dies At 108 "He grabbed me and pushed me to the other side," Mandelbaum says. As for his family, he says, "The people who were to the left were sent to Auschwitz to be gassed.

I never saw them again." To the Nazis, he became prisoner 16013 and spent the next three years at seven concentration camps. The first was Gross-Rosen, where prisoners worked in a granite quarry. "There were so many prisoners," he says. "We were in a big barrack, it had a concrete floor, it had no beds. And we were lined up like herring on the floor, so when one person turned, everybody else had to turn, it was so tight." Food was scarce, and the daily meal amounted to a single piece of bread and what Mandelbaum describes as soup made out of grass. He recalls emaciated prisoners stuffing paper into their mouths to fatten their cheeks so they'd look healthier to the guards assigned to remove the weak for extermination. His own weight eventually dropped to 80 pounds. But Mandelbaum says he refused to give up hope. He poured what little energy he had into work, hoping it would eventually lead to his release. Suddenly, Freedom "We had a good life before the war. I went to a public school, I had good clothes and good food and a nice apartment," he says.

"My dream was to go back to this life and be reunited with my family and my sister and my brother, and that sustained me." It also helped that he didn't know the Nazis were trying to slaughter all Jews, something he says he and other prisoners learned only after liberation. Their sudden freedom, too, was a complete shock, Mandelbaum says. "We didn't know anything, only on the morning when we woke up and the Nazi flag wasn't flying and the guards weren't there." Unlike at Auschwitz, Allied soldiers did not free them, as his camp was in a no man's land between the fleeing Nazis and advancing Russians. He and a friend from the camp grabbed an abandoned horse-drawn wagon and left as quickly as they could. "We came across a women's concentration camp and they were still locked up, so we actually became the 'liberators' of the camp," he says, with a laugh. Mandelbaum was 17 when the Holocaust ended. He says he returned to Poland several times to see if he could find his family but failed. He did find an uncle living in a hamlet near Munich.

The following year, he immigrated to the United States and settled in Kansas City, Mo., where he married, had four children and became a successful importer of ladies' handbags. It would be 16 years before he began speaking publicly about the Holocaust, something he says he decided to do after talking to one of his neighbors. "He asked me what kind of sports did I play in the concentration camp, so all of the sudden it just opened everything up, how little people knew what was going on, and this was when I started to speak in different venues about my experiences," he says. That desire to educate people brought Mandelbaum, 87, to Berlin last week. He says it's sad to see anti-Semitism on the rise in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, but he hopes he and other Holocaust survivors can make a difference. "You know, when we were in the camps, we would always ask, 'How can the world stand by and let this happen?' " he says.

"So it's a matter of being vigilant, a matter of trying to do as much as you can in order to enlighten people [about] how dangerous it is when you become a bystander." History & Overview of Auschwitz-Birkenau | Jewish Virtual Library Tweet Auschwitz-Birkenau is the general term for the network of Nazi concentration and labor camps , established near the Polish city of Oswiecim. Together this complex was the largest of all the Nazi death camps across Europe and could hold upwards of 150,000 inmates at any given time. The complex, which divided into three main areas, was established by the Nazi's in 1940 and was in use until its Allied liberation in 1945. Historians and analysts estimate the number of people murdered at Auschwitz somewhere between 2.1 million to 4 million, of whom the vast majority were Jews. The majority of prisoners held at Auschwitz were killed in the various gas chambers though many died from starvation, forced labor, disease, shooting squads, and heinous medical experiments. Today, the word Auschwitz has become synonymous with terror, genocide, and The Holocaust .

The site, though partially destroyed by the retreating Nazi's in 1945, has been established as a museum to help future generations understand the atrocities committed within its fences. By 2011, more than 30 million people had visited the camp, and during 2014 a record number of 1.5 million people visitied the Auschwitz complex and museum. Spokespeople for the museum said that from January to April 2015, over 250,000 people visited Auschwitz, marking a 40% increase over the already large numbers from the previous year. Authorities in charge of the site began to urge people to book their visit to Auschwitz online ahead of time to prevent them from having to turn people away. In June 2016, the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in the Polish town of Oswiecim re-discovered over 16,000 personal items belonging to victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau that had been lost in 1968.

The items were originally discovered in 1967 by archaeologists excavating the concentration camp site, and were placed in 48 cardboard boxes in the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw before being lost due to an anti-Semitic communist regime coming to power in 1968. - 'Death March' & Allied Liberation Establishing the Camp In April 1940, Rudolph Höss , who become the first commandant of Auschwitz , identified the Silesian town of Oswiecim in Poland as a possible site for a concentration camp. The function of the camp initially was planned as an intimidation to Poles to prevent resistance their to German rule and serve as a prison for those who did resist. It was also perceived as a cornerstone of the policy to re-colonize Upper Silesia, which had once been a German region, with "pure Aryans." When the plans for the camp were approved, the Nazi's changed the name of the area to Auschwitz. On April 27th, 1940, Heinrich Himmler ordered construction of the camp.

In May 1940, Poles were evicted from the vicinity of the barracks (most of them were executed), and a work crew comprising concentration camp prisoners was sent from Sachsenhausen . 300 Jews from the large Jewish community of Oswiecim were also pressed into service. Corpses in a block of Auschwitz The first transport of prisoners, almost all Polish civilians, arrived in June 1940 and the SS administration and staff was established. On March 1th, 1941, the camp population was 10,900. Quite quickly, the camp developed a reputation for torture and mass shootings. Expansion of Auschwitz In March 1941, Himmler visited Auschwitz and commanded its enlargement to hold 30,000 prisoners. The location of the camp, practically in the center of German-occupied Europe, and its convenient transportation connections and proximity to raillines was the main thinking behind the Nazi plan to enlarge Auschwitz and begin deporting people here from all over Europe. At this time only the main camp, later known as Auschwitz I, had been established.

Himmler ordered the construction of a second camp for 100,000 inmates on the site of the village of Brzezinka, roughly two miles from the main camp. This second camp, now known as Birkenau or Auschwitz II, was initially intended to be filled with captured Russian POWs who would provide the slave labor to build the SS "utopia" in Upper Silesia. Chemical giant I G Farben expressed an interest in utilizing this labor force, and extensive construction work began in October 1941 under terrible conditions and with massive loss of life. About 10,000 Russian POWs died in this process. The greater part of the apparatus of mass extermination was eventually built in the Birkenau camp and the majority of the victims were murdered here. More than 40 sub-camps, exploiting the prisoners as slave laborers, were also founded, mainly as various sorts of German industrial plants and farms, between 1942 and 1944.

The largest of them was called Buna (Monowitz, with ten thousand prisoners) and was opened by the camp administration in 1942 on the grounds of the Buna-Werke synthetic rubber and fuel plant, six kilometers from the Auschwitz camp. The factory was built during the war by the German IG Farbenindustrie cartel, and the SS supplied prisoner labor. On November 1943, the Buna sub-camp became the seat of the commandant of the third part of the camp, Auschwitz III, to which some other Auschwitz sub-camps were subordinated. The Germans isolated all the camps and sub-camps from the outside world and surrounded them with barbed wire fencing. All contact with the outside world was forbidden. However, the area administered by the commandant and patrolled by the SS camp garrison went beyond the grounds enclosed by barbed wire. It included an additional area of approximately 40 square kilometers (the so-called "Interessengebiet" - the interest zone), which lay around the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau camps.

With the additions, the main camp population grew from 18,000 in December 1942 to more than 30,000 in March 1943. In March 1942, a women's camp was established at Auschwitz with 6,000 inmates and in August it was moved to Birkenau. By January 1944, 27,000 women were living in Birkenau, in section B1a, in separated quarters. In February 1943, a section for Gypsies was also established at Birkenau, called camp BIIe, and in September 1943 an area was set aside for Czech Jews deported from Theresienstadt , and was so-called the "Family Camp," or BIIb. The gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau were opened in March 1943. Begining Stages of the 'Final Solution' Beginning in 1942, Auschwitz began to function in a way different than its original intent.

By late 1941, Himmler had briefed Commandant Höss about the " Final Solution " and by the following year Auschwitz-Birkenau became the center of the mass destruction of the European Jews. Before begining Jewish exterminations, though, the Nazi's used the Soviet POWs at the Auschwitz camp in trials of the poison gas Zyklon-B , produced by the German company "Degesch" (Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Schädlingsbekämpfung), which was marked as the best way to kill many people at once. The POWs were gassed in underground cells in Block 11 , the so called "Death Block," and following these trials, one gas chamber was setup just outside the main camp and two temporary gas chambers were opened at Birkenau. The Nazis marked all the Jews living in Europe for total extermination, regardless of their age, sex, occupation, citizenship, or political views. They were killed for one reason, and one reason alone - because they were Jews.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the 'Final Solution' was put to the ground in Nazi-like efficiency: Arbeit Macht Frei  Labor make you free When a train carrying Jewish prisoners arrived "selections" would be conducted on the railroad platform, or ramp. Newly arrived persons classified by the SS physicians as unfit for labor were sent to the gas chambers : these included the ill, the elderly, pregnant women and children. In most cases, 70-75% of each transport was sent to immediate death. These people were not entered in the camp records; that is, they received no serial numbers and were not registered, and this is why it is possible only to estimate the total number of victims. Those deemed fit enough for slave labor were then immediately registered, tattooed with a serial number, undressed, deloused, had their body hair shaven off, showered while their clothes were disinfected with Zyklon-B gas, and entered the camp under the infamous gateway inscribed 'Arbeit Macht Frei' ("Labor will set you free").

Of approximately 2.5 million people who were deported to Auschwitz, 405,000 were given prisoner status and serial numbers. Of these, approximately 50% were Jews and 50% were Poles and other nationalities. Camp Reorganization & Worsening Conditions In Autumn 1943, the camp administration was reorganized following a corruption scandal. By the end of 1943, the prisoner population of Auschwitz main camp, Birkenau, Monowitz and other subcamps was over 80,000: 18,437 in the main camp, 49,114 in Birkenau, and 13,288 at Monowitz where I G Farben had its synthetic rubber plant. Up to 50,000 prisoners were scattered around 51 subcamps such as Rajsko, an experimental agricultural station, and Gleiwitz, a coal mine (see The List of the Camps for a complete list of those subcamps). The situation in the subcamps was often even worse than in the main camps.

In mid-1944, Auschwitz was designated a SS-run security area of over 40 square miles. By August 1944, the camp population reached 105,168. The last roll-call on January 18th, 1945, showed 64,000 inmates. During its history, the prison population of Auschwitz changed composition significantly. At first, its inmates were almost entirely Polish. From April 1940 to March 1942, on about 27,000 inmates, 30 percent were Poles and 57 percent were Jews. From March 1942 to March 1943 of 162,000 inmates, 60 percent were Jews. Birkenau Becomes Center of Jewish Extermination Gas Chamber door at Birkenau - "Lebensgefhar" (danger of death) A parallel system to the main camp in Auschwitz began to operate at the Birkenau camp by 1942. The exception, though, was that the majority of "showers" used to delouse the incoming prisoners proved to be gas chambers.

At Birkenau, only about 10 percent of Jewish transports were registered, disinfected, shaven and showered in the "central sauna" before being assigned barracks as opposed to being sent directly to the death chambers. In the spring of 1942, two provisional gas chambers at Birkenau were constructed out of peasant huts, known as the "bunkers." The first "bunker", with two sealed rooms, operated from January 1942 to the end of that year. The second, with four air tight rooms, became redundant in the spring of 1943, but remained standing and was used again in the autumn of 1944 when extra "capacity" was needed for the murder of Hungarian Jews and the liquidation of the ghettos. The second measured about 1.134 square feet. The victims murdered in the "bunkers" were first obliged to undress in temporary wooden barracks erected nearby. Their bodies were taken out of the gas chambers and pushed to pits where they were burned in the open.

Between January 1942 and March 1943, 175,000 Jews were gassed to death here, of whom 105,000 were killed from January to March 1943. Up to this point, though, Auschwitz-Birkenau accounted for "only" 11 percent of the victims of the ' Final Solution .' In August 1942, however, construction began on four large-scale gassing facilities. It appears from the plans that the first two gas chambers were adapted from mortuaries which, with the huge crematoria attached to them, were initially intended to cope with mortalities amongst the slave labor force in the camp, now approaching 100,000 and subject to a horrifying death rate. But from the autumn of 1942, it seems clear that the SS planners and civilian contractors were intending to build a mass-murder plant. Main Gate at Birkenau (circa 1945) The twin pairs of gas chambers were numbered II and III, and IV and V.

The first opened on March 31, 1943, the last on April 4, 1943. The total area of the gas chambers was 2,255 square meters; the capacity of these crematoria was 4,420 people. Those selected to die were undressed in the undressing room and then pushed into the gas chambers. It only took about 20 minutes for all the people inside to die. In chambers II and III, the killings took place in underground rooms, and the corpses were carried to the five ovens by an electrically operated lift. Before cremation gold teeth and any other valuables, such as rings, were removed from the corpses. In IV and V the gas chambers and ovens were on the same level, but the ovens were so poorly built and the usage was so great that they repeatedly malfunctioned and had to be abandoned. The corpses were finally burned outside, in the open, as in 1943. Jewish sonderkommandos worked the crematoria under SS supervision.

Initially the new facilities were "underutilized." From April 1943 to March 1944, "only" 160,000 Jews were killed at Birkenau. But, in May 1944, a railroad spur line was built right into the camp to accelerate and simplify the handling of the tens of thousands of Hungarian and other Jews deported in the spring and summer of 1944. From then to November 1944, when all the other death camps had been abandoned, Birkenau surpassed all previous records for mass killing. The Hungarian deportations and the liquidation of the remaining Polish ghettos, such as Lodz , resulted in the gassing of 585,000 Jews. This period made Auschwitz-Birkenau into the most notorious killing site of all time. Liberation of Auschwitz: a hangar containing hundreds of shoes and clothes Resistance Remarkably, there were instances of individual resistance and collective efforts at fighting back inside Auschwitz. Poles, Communists and other national groups established networks in the main camp. A few Jews escaped from Birkenau, and there were recorded assaults on Nazi guards even at the entrance to the gas chambers.

The "Sonderkommando" revolt in October 1944 was the extraordinary example of physical resistance. In October 1944, the " Sonderkommando " crew at crematoria IV revolted and destroyed the crematoria . It was never used again. Death March & Allied Liberation In November of 1944, in the face of the approaching allied Red Army, Himmler ordered gassings to stop and for a "clean-up" operation to be put in place in order to conceal traces of the mass murder and other crimes that they had committed. The Nazi's destroyed documents and dismantled, burned down or blew up the vast majority of buildings. The orders for the final evacuation and liquidation of the camp were issued in mid-January 1945. The Germans left behind in the main Auschwitz camp, Birkenau and in Monowitz about 7,000 sick or incapacitated who they did not expect would live for long; the rest, approximately 58,000 people, were evacuated by foot into the depths of the Third Reich. Those prisoners capable, began forcibly marching at the moment when Soviet soldiers were liberating Cracow , some 60 kilometers from the camp.

In marching columns escorted by heavily armed SS guards, these 58,000 men and women prisoners were led out of Auschwitz from January 17-21. Many prisoners lost their lives during this tragic evacuation, known as the " Death March ." When Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they found only the few thousand pitiful survivors who had been left behind as well as 836,525 items of women clothing, 348,820 items of men clothing, 43,525 pairs of shoes and vast numbers of toothbrushes, glasses and other personal effects. They found also 460 artificial limbs and seven tons of human hair shaved from Jews before they were murdered. The human hairs were used by the company "Alex Zink" (located in Bavaria) for confection of cloth. This company was paying the Nazi's 50 pfennig per kilo of human hair. Of those who received numbers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, only 65,000 survived. It is estimated that only about 200,000 people who passed through the Auschwitz camps survived.

Historians and analysts estimate the number of people murdered at Auschwitz somewhere between 2.1 million to 4 million, of whom the vast majority were Jews. Holocaust | Deportations Deportations The Wannsee Conference Deportations One of the most notorious aspects of the Holocaust is the Deportations not only took place from German-occupied countries, as for instance the Netherlands, but also from states allied with Germany. From 1942 up until the very end of World War II, trains rolled through Europe towards the extermination camps in Poland or to overcrowded concentration camps in Germany itself. The Netherlands: At the beginning of World War II around 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands. The German occupation power quickly began sending Jews to concentration camps as retaliation for Dutch acts of resistance. In the course of the war the Nazis succeeded in deporting approximately 107,000 Dutch Jews. In general, the Dutch Jews were sent to Auschwitz, but also to Sobibor, and, later, to Bergen-Belsen. Around 102,000 of them perished.

Belgium: At the time of the German invasion of Belgium, in the early summer of 1940, around 66,000 Jews lived in the country, but hardly any of them were Belgian citizens. They were mainly immigrants or refugees from Eastern Europe or Germany. Starting in 1941, the Nazis began segregating the Jews: they were listed, registered, marked, and their property was confiscated. A total of 28,500 Jews were deported from Belgium during the war. France: After Germany’s victory over France in the summer of 1940 the country was divided: the Germans occupied the northern part of the country and the entire French Atlantic coastline, while the remaining parts of the country became the so-called ‘Vichy State’. The Nazis began deporting the French Jews in the summer of 1942. In June-July approximately 5,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz. The Reich Security Main Office had a set goal: to deport 125,000 Jews in 1942. Because of transportation problems, a “mere” 42,000 were actually deported.

On 11 November 1942 the Germans and their Italian allies began occupying the remaining parts of France. This meant a new situation for those Jews that had lived in relative safety in the Vichy State. Beginning in February of 1943 the Nazis hoped to resume the deportations, but the were met with great political resistance from the French. Even the Italians did not support the German efforts. In the autumn of 1942 the Germans themselves began deporting Jews from France, but without the cooperation of the French authorities such a venture was nearly impossible. From April through August 1944 around 6,000 French Jews were deported. A total number of approximately 73,000 Jews were sent to the east from France in the course of the war. Around 24,000 of them were French citizens. Denmark: The Nazis did not succeed in deporting the Danish Jews to extermination camps. In October 1943 the large majority of the Danish Jews succeeded in escaping to neutral Sweden. Norway: Norway had a small Jewish population of around 2,000 at the beginning of World War II.

In the autumn of 1942 the Nazi occupation power carried out the deportation of around half of them, 770 Jews in total. The rest of the Norwegian Jews succeeded in escaping, mainly to Sweden. The German Reich: The first wave of deportations from the German Reich was carried out from mid-October 1941. In the course of just less than three weeks 25,000 German Jews were deported to the ghetto of Lodz in Poland. Soon afterwards, more than 33,000 Jews were deported from Germany eastwards, to Riga, Kaunas and Minsk. Most of them were placed in the local ghettos, but 6,000 were shot immediately upon arrival. From March through June 1942 a total of 55,000 German Jews were sent to the east. Starting in May 1942 German Jews were also sent to Minsk in Byelorussia, where they were either shot or gassed on the spot. The last phase of the deportation of the German Jews was initiated in December 1942. All remaining Jews, including valuable workers, were to disappear.

By mid-1942 this phase was largely completed. Romania: Romania was one of the Third Reich’s most important allies during World War II, where they contributed troops for the attack on the Soviet Union. Romania had a large Jewish population of around 320,000, and anti-Semitic sentiments were widespread. The Romanians murdered thousands of Soviet Jews, as part of the attack on the Soviet Union, but deportations of their own Jewish population was not seriously contemplated until the summer of 1942. Then it happened on German initiative. However, the Romanian government remained very hesitant, and the deportation plans were postponed until 1943. The plans were dropped after orders from Heinrich Himmler in January 1943, because of the resistance of the Romanian government. Bulgaria: Bulgaria had a Jewish minority of about 50,000 people at the beginning of World War II. Bulgaria was not particularly anti-Semitic, and the Jewish population was highly assimilated. From March 1943 onwards around 11,000 Greek and Macedonian Jews were deported from the Bulgarian-occupied parts of Greece.

All of them were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp. The opposition to the deportations was so outspoken in Bulgaria itself that further deportation plans had to be dropped. Slovakia: Slovakia was proclaimed an independent state in 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Slovakia had a Jewish population of around 90,000. In the beginning of 1942 the German foreign ministry requested that the Slovakian Jews come under their control. The Slovakian government was favourably disposed to the proposal, and on 25 March 1942 the transport of Jews left Slovakia for Auschwitz. In the course of 1942 around 50,000 Slovakian Jews were deported to the extermination camps at Auschwitz, Majdanek and Sobibor. In August 1944 Germany decided to occupy Slovakia for strategic reasons, which led to a witch-hunt for the Jews. More than 12,000 were rounded up and deported. Hungary: Hungary had a very large Jewish population of around 725,000 at the beginning of World War II.

The country was characterised by widespread anti-Semitism, but in spite of this there was a strong reluctance to deport the Hungarian Jews. Non-Hungarian Jews, on the other hand, were merely viewed as a burden. In 1943 the Germans renewed their pressure to have the Hungarian Jews deported, but the Hungarian government kept delaying the decision. In March 1944, German troops invaded Hungary, and the SS were put in charge of the occupation. The deportation of the Hungarian Jews received the highest priority and was carried out with terrible efficiency. In the course of seven weeks, beginning in May of 1944, more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz. Croatia: Croatia had a Jewish population of around 30,000. As early as 1941 the totalitarian regime in Croatia introduced anti-Jewish measures, following Germany’s example. 15,000 Jews were gathered in concentration camps, where they lived under terrible conditions. In the summer of 1942 around 5,000 Croatian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Italy: Italy was Germany’s most important ally during World War II.

This meant that the Germans remained very restrained in their policies towards the Italians. Around 57,000 Jews lived in Italy, of which approximately 47,000 were Italian citizens. The country was not characterised by any widespread anti-Semitism, although Mussolini from the 1930’s onwards introduced a large number of anti-Jewish measures. In September 1943 the Italians withdrew from the war, but the Germans responded by occupying the country. As a consequence, the Nazi occupation power tried to carry out the deportation of the Italian Jews, but with no great success. At the end of 1944, 5,000 Jews had been deported to Auschwitz. Around 80% of the Italian Jews survived the war. Greece: Greece was divided into two occupation zones during World War II: one German, the other Italian. Around 55,000 Jews lived in the German zone, 13,000 in the Italian zone. The deportation of Greek Jews began in March 1943: around 45,000 were sent to Auschwitz. The Jews in the Italian occupation zone were gathered in concentration camps, but not deported.

In September 1943 Germany occupied the Italian-controlled parts of Greece, following Italy’s withdrawal from the war. As a result, the Nazis resumed the deportations to Auschwitz, this time including the Jews in the former Italian zone. Serbia: At the beginning of the war around 80,000 Jews lived in Serbia. On 4 October 1941 the commander of the German forces in Serbia issued a proclamation establishing a 100:1 ratio of retaliation for partisan attacks. As a result, 2,000 Jews (and 200 gypsies) were murdered. By the end of October 1941 the German army had shot the majority of Jewish men in Serbia. Approximately 20,000 women, children and elderly were gathered in a ghetto. Starting in early 1942, the 7,500 surviving Jews were gassed to death upon orders from the Security Police. In May of 1942 Serbia was declared “free of Jews”. A total of only 20,000 Serbian Jews, from a pre-war population of 80,000, survived the war.

Auschwitz Survivor Gena Turgel Walked Out of Gas Chamber Alive - NBC News Jan 26 2015, 7:26 am ET Auschwitz Survivor Gena Turgel Walked Out of Gas Chamber Alive by Bill Neely Holocaust Survivor Gena Turgel Recounts Horror of Auschwitz 1:06 autoplay autoplay Copy this code to your website or blog <iframe src="" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> LONDON — Of all the stories of survival from the Auschwitz concentration camp, Gena Turgel's is one of the most astonishing. "When I think back, I have to pinch myself sometimes to see if I'm really alive," the 90-year-old told NBC News. Turgel, an elegant woman with more than a hint of mischief in her blue eyes, survived not one or two, but three Nazi concentration camps. In the most notorious of all, Auschwitz-Birkeanau, she was herded naked into a gas chamber with hundreds of others. Yet Turgel, who was 21 at the time, walked out alive.

She had no idea the Nazis had tried to kill her until a woman she knew said, "Don't you know what has just happened to you? You were in the gas chamber!" Turgel still looks amazed to have cheated death. "I completely lost my voice," she said. "I just never realized I was in the gas chamber ... it must not have worked." “I wear a lot of perfume. The stench of the camps will always stay with me and I try to block it out” Turgel's life sounds like a history of the war. She was 16 when her hometown of Krakow, Poland, was bombed by the Nazi Luftwaffe on Sept. 1, 1939, the first day of the war. She had relatives in Chicago but the family was too late in acting on their plan to move there, and Poland was swiftly sealed by the Germans. In Krakow's Jewish ghetto, she lost two brothers fighting the Nazis. She then was sent to Plaszow concentration camp where she survived for two-and-a-half years until she was marched to Auschwitz. She survived testing by the infamous Nazi Doctor Josef Mengele.

After two months, as the Red Army advanced towards Auschwitz, she was sent on a "death march," first to Buchenwald concentration camp and then to Belsen, where she shared a barracks with the dying Dutch teenager Anne Frank. When Belsen was liberated by the British, she showed a handsome young army officer, Norman Turgel, around the makeshift hospital where she worked. Within six months they were married. Play Copy this code to your website or blog <iframe src="" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Every story of survival at Auschwitz is extraordinary but hers is perhaps unique. "I wear a lot of perfume," she whispers. "The stench of the camps will always stay with me and I try to block it out." It's not the only physical reaction she has to her ordeal. Her 17-year-old sister Miriam used to sleep with her, on her left side. Miriam was shot by the Germans for smuggling food into Plaszov. She says she still feels a constant chill along her left arm. The ghosts of the camp and her family — she lost seven siblings and her father — still haunt her.

As we talk, tears come to her eyes, but she doesn't let them fall. "To cry in Auschwitz could have you shot," she said. "We had to be strong, to block out everything." The killing of four Jews in Paris by Islamist radicals earlier this month sent a shiver through Turgel. It reinforced the message she has tried to teach in the schools she visits regularly, that the hatred of Jews is not consigned to history and is instead kept alive and must be fought against. She has been back to Auschwitz twice with her grandsons, passing on her memories to new generations and on Tuesday, at home in London, she will be watching the ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the camp's liberation. Turgel is determined to speak today, to try to ensure that Jews never again face the same threats. Play

Question: In which country was the notorious concentration camp Auschwitz
Answer: Poland