Auschwitz

Auschwitz was a complex of more than 40 concentration and extermination camps run by Nazi Germany in and around the Polish town of Oświęcim, about 50 kilometres south-west of Kraków, between 1940 and 1945. At least 1.1 million of the roughly 1.3 million people sent there were murdered, about 960,000 of them Jews. No other single place in history saw so many people murdered, and the camp has become the principal symbol of the Holocaust.

The site of the main camp had served as a camp for migrant workers during the First World War and then as a Polish army barracks. The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 began the Second World War, and the district was then annexed directly to the German Reich. On the recommendation of Rudolf Höss, who became its first commandant, Heinrich Himmler approved the barracks in April 1940 as a camp for Polish political prisoners. The first large transport, of 728 Polish men, arrived from Tarnów on 14 June 1940, and for its first two years most inmates were Poles. German criminals brought in as prisoner functionaries set a pattern of beatings, torture and arbitrary execution.

Auschwitz I, the main camp, held the administration, the punishment block and the first gas chamber. Around August 1941 the SS carried out its first experimental killing with Zyklon B, murdering Soviet prisoners of war in the cellar of block 11. In October 1941 work began on a far larger camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, about three kilometres away near the village of Brzezinka, where prisoners were forced to build the barracks they lived in and many died within weeks. A third camp, Auschwitz III-Monowitz, was built by the chemical company IG Farben to supply forced labour for a synthetic rubber plant; it was the first concentration camp financed and built by private industry. Dozens of subcamps served mines, factories and farms.

After the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 set out the so-called Final Solution, trains carried Jews to the camp from every corner of occupied Europe. The first gas chamber at Birkenau, a converted farmhouse, was in use by March 1942, and by June 1943 four large crematoria with gas chambers were operating. On arrival SS doctors made a "selection": those judged unfit for work were sent directly to the gas chambers without being registered, while others were chosen for forced labour, where many died of starvation, disease, exhaustion, execution or medical experiments. The largest group of Jewish victims, about 430,000, came from Hungary, followed by those from Poland, France, the Netherlands and Greece. Among the dead were also around 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war.

Inmates resisted where they could. At least 802 tried to escape and 144 succeeded; reports carried out by escapees, above all Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler in April 1944, documented the gas chambers and helped halt the deportations from Hungary. On 7 October 1944 Jewish prisoners of the Sonderkommando, forced to work in the crematoria, rose up and burned crematorium IV; most were killed. Whether the Allies could or should have bombed the camp or its railways remains debated by historians.

In November 1944 Himmler ordered the gassing to stop and the crematoria destroyed. From 17 January 1945 some 58,000 prisoners were driven west on death marches, during which the SS killed those who fell behind; about a quarter of them may have died. Soviet troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front reached the camps on 27 January 1945, finding about 7,000 survivors in the three main camps along with vast quantities of clothing, shoes and some 7,000 kilograms of human hair. The earliest Soviet estimate of four million dead, and Höss's own claims, were later replaced by historian Franciszek Piper's calculation of about 1.1 million, now widely accepted.

Only 789 members of the camp staff, perhaps 15 per cent, were ever tried. Höss was hanged at Auschwitz I in April 1947 after trial in Warsaw, and later trials were held in Kraków, Frankfurt and elsewhere. In 1947 Poland created the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum at the first two camps, and UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1979. The anniversary of the liberation, 27 January, has been International Holocaust Remembrance Day since 2005. By 2016 the memorial received some two million visitors a year. The site lies in present-day Poland.