Auschwitz-Birkenau: History of the Largest Nazi Death Camp

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the concentration and extermination camps built by Nazi Germany, located near the town of Oświęcim in German-occupied Poland. Between 1940 and January 1945 about 1.1 million people were murdered there, around 1 million of them Jews deported from across Europe. Its name has become the most widely recognised symbol of the Holocaust.

Origins of the camp

After the invasion of Poland in 1939, the area around Oświęcim was annexed to the German Reich. In spring 1940 the SS chose former Polish army barracks there as the site for a new concentration camp, mainly to hold Polish political prisoners, because the region’s prisons were overcrowded.

On 27 April 1940 Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, ordered the camp to be set up, and Rudolf Höss was appointed commandant. The first large transport, 728 Polish men from the prison in Tarnów, arrived on 14 June 1940. Over the gate of this main camp, later known as Auschwitz I, the SS placed the slogan “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work sets you free”).

In its first period Auschwitz was a brutal concentration camp for Poles, many of them members of the resistance, the intelligentsia or the clergy. Prisoners died from starvation, forced labour, beatings, disease and executions at the “Death Wall” beside Block 11.

Expansion: Birkenau and Monowitz

In 1941 the camp grew rapidly. In October 1941 construction began on a vast new camp at the village of Brzezinka, about 3 km from the main camp, known as Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It was first intended for Soviet prisoners of war, thousands of whom died during its construction.

The chemical company IG Farben built a synthetic rubber and fuel plant nearby, and in 1942 the SS opened a labour camp for it at Monowitz, later called Auschwitz III. Over time about 40 subcamps were added, supplying forced labour to mines, factories and farms. The whole complex covered some 40 square kilometres, from which the local population had been expelled.

The gas chambers

In September 1941 the SS first used Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide, to murder people in the basement of Block 11 in Auschwitz I. The victims were several hundred Soviet prisoners of war and sick prisoners. Gassings then continued in a converted mortuary at the main camp.

From 1942 Auschwitz became central to the Nazi plan to murder all of Europe’s Jews, coordinated by officials such as those at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Two converted farmhouses near Birkenau, known as Bunker 1 and Bunker 2, were used as gas chambers. Between March and June 1943 four large buildings combining gas chambers and crematoria, known as Crematoria II to V, were completed at Birkenau.

Trains brought Jews from Poland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Germany, Austria, Norway and other countries. On arrival SS doctors carried out “selections”. Most people, including nearly all children, the elderly and mothers with young children, were sent directly to the gas chambers, often within hours. Those judged fit for work were registered, tattooed with numbers and put to forced labour, where many died within months.

The belongings of the deportees were sorted in warehouses that prisoners nicknamed “Kanada”, a land of imagined plenty. Clothing, shoes, spectacles, suitcases and valuables were shipped to Germany, and gold teeth were removed from the bodies of the dead. The SS sought to make the killing a hidden, industrial process, telling victims they were going to showers.

The murder of Hungarian Jews

The largest single deportation came after Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944. Between mid-May and early July 1944 around 424,000–437,000 Jews from Hungary were deported, almost all of them to Auschwitz. To handle the transports, the railway line was extended into Birkenau, ending at a new unloading platform close to the gas chambers, the platform seen in many photographs today.

The great majority of the Hungarian deportees were murdered on arrival. In the same year the Roma family camp at Birkenau was liquidated on the night of 2–3 August 1944, when about 4,200–4,300 Roma men, women and children were killed. Jews from the Łódź ghetto, the last large ghetto in Poland, arrived in August 1944.

Life and resistance in the camp

Registered prisoners lived in overcrowded wooden and brick barracks with little food, poor sanitation and rampant disease. The SS doctor Josef Mengele, among others, carried out cruel medical experiments, particularly on twins and people with disabilities. Prisoners known as the Sonderkommando were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria.

Resistance took many forms, from smuggling food and medicine to collecting evidence. The Polish officer Witold Pilecki let himself be arrested in 1940 so that he could organise a resistance network inside, and escaped in April 1943. In April 1944 two Slovak Jewish prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, escaped and wrote a detailed report on the killings that reached the Allies and neutral governments.

On 7 October 1944 members of the Sonderkommando rose up, setting fire to Crematorium IV. Almost all of the rebels were killed. Four young Jewish women who had smuggled explosives from a factory to the rebels were later hanged in January 1945.

Evacuation and liberation

From late 1944, as the Soviet front approached, the SS stopped the gassings, demolished the gas chambers and crematoria and destroyed records. On 17–18 January 1945 about 56,000–58,000 prisoners were forced out on death marches westwards, many of them on foot in freezing weather. Thousands died or were shot on the way to camps in Germany such as Bergen-Belsen.

On 27 January 1945 soldiers of the Soviet 60th Army reached Auschwitz. They found around 7,000 prisoners still alive, most of them gravely ill, along with hundreds of bodies and storerooms holding hundreds of thousands of items of clothing and several tonnes of human hair. Western Allied forces later witnessed similar scenes at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

After the war

Of the roughly 7,000 to 8,000 SS men and women who served at Auschwitz, only a small fraction were ever brought to trial. Poland tried Höss in 1947 and about 40 other camp staff in Kraków later that year. In West Germany the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963–1965 brought 22 defendants to court and did much to educate a new generation of Germans about the camp.

In July 1947 the Polish parliament created the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the site of the two main camps. Survivors, including the Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi and the Romanian-born author Elie Wiesel, later wrote some of the most influential testimonies of the Holocaust.

Key people

• Heinrich Himmler: Reichsführer-SS, who ordered the camp’s creation and its expansion.
• Rudolf Höss: commandant from 1940 to 1943, who returned in 1944. He was tried by Poland’s Supreme National Tribunal and hanged at Auschwitz I on 16 April 1947.
• Josef Mengele: SS doctor notorious for selections and experiments; he escaped to South America and died in Brazil in 1979.
• Witold Pilecki: Polish resistance officer who volunteered to enter the camp; he was executed by Poland’s communist authorities in 1948.
• Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler: escapees whose report helped expose the camp to the outside world.

By the numbers

These figures are based on the research of the historian Franciszek Piper and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Myths and facts

• Myth: 4 million people died at Auschwitz. This figure, used by Soviet and communist Polish authorities after the war, was found to be unfounded. Detailed research on deportation records led to the accepted estimate of about 1.1 million, and the memorial plaques at Birkenau were changed in the 1990s. The revision does not alter the overall estimate of about six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
• Myth: Auschwitz was only a death camp. It was a combined concentration camp, forced-labour complex and extermination centre.
• Fact: Allied bombers came close. The Allies bombed the Monowitz industrial area in 1944, but did not bomb the gas chambers or railway lines, a decision still debated by historians.

Timeline

• 1940, 27 April: Himmler orders a camp to be set up at Oświęcim.
• 1940, 14 June: the first transport of 728 Polish prisoners arrives.
• 1941, September: the first experimental gassing with Zyklon B in Block 11.
• 1941, October: construction of Birkenau begins.
• 1943, March–June: four large gas chamber and crematorium complexes open at Birkenau.
• 1944, May–July: mass deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews.
• 1944, 7 October: the Sonderkommando revolt.
• 1945, 17–18 January: the death marches begin.
• 1945, 27 January: the Red Army liberates Auschwitz.
• 1947, 2 July: the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is established.

Why it matters

Auschwitz was one of the largest sites of mass murder in history, and it stands at the centre of Holocaust memory. Since 2005 the anniversary of its liberation, 27 January, has been International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the preserved site, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979, serves as a memorial and a warning.