Introduction
From Oscwiecim to Aushwitz
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp, and became known as one of the most brutal. It was a sinister camp where slave labor was exploited, medical experiments were conducted, and theft of possessions was perpetrated on a grand scale.
The town of Oscwiecim sits very close to the pre-World War I border between Galicia, the southernmost part of Austro-Hungary, and Prussia.
On the eve of World War II about 12,000 people lived there; the majority was Jewish. Because of its strategic location near the Austrian and German borders, waves of emigrants and itinerant workers passed through Oswiecim on their way to find seasonal work. An emigration camp, known as the Sachsengänger camp, was built for them consisting of twenty-two brick houses and ninety wooden barracks. In addition, as a border town, Oswiecim served as a base and military headquarters for the Austrian army during World War I. World War II reached Oswiecim very early; by September 4, 1939 the Germans had conquered the town.
Oswiecim was in the area that had been annexed to the Third Reich under the provisions of the Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact signed between Germany and Russia just a week before the war started. As such, it was on German soil. The logical consequence was that the town was slotted to be Germanized. By September 11, 1939 the name of the town had been changed to "Auschwitz". Hitler was planning a massive influx of populations into this area according to his racial ideology: Germans, the master race, were to be given Lebensraum (living space) and moved into the Germanized region. Hitler's plan was for the Germans to forge a racially pure volk in the east.
The problem this created for the Nazis, of course, was what to do with the people who then populated the area, the Poles.
The Poles were viewed as treacherous, dangerous enemies of the Reich. They were to be dealt with brutally. As such, immediately upon their invasion of Poland, the Germans embarked upon a strategy of destroying the Polish elite, that segment of the population that could oppose and perhaps revolt against the conquerors. In so-called "pacification actions", tens of thousands of Poles were killed. SS Chief Reinhard Heydrich issued instructions as early as September 7, 1939, just shy of a week after the war began, that "the leading strata of the population should be rendered harmless.”
On-the-spot executions were common practice. In addition, there were widespread arrests of priests and the clergy, activists, teachers, community leaders, and members of resistance organizations. Poles were detained at random on the streets for trivial infractions or for no reason at all. Tens of thousands of people were arrested, detained and imprisoned. The mass arrests meant that local prisons were soon full to capacity and overflowing. A new place of detention was needed.
The town of Auschwitz was the top choice of Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS. It was located on a railway junction and so had excellent transportation connections. It was easily isolated and camouflaged from the outside world, surrounded as it was by two rivers, the Soła and the Wisła. The choice of Auschwitz was all the more convenient because buildings and barracks already existed there, despite the fact that they were dilapidated and needed of a great deal of work to make them usable. The decision was reached in April, 1940 to build a concentration camp at Auschwitz, and building commenced.
Auschwitz as Part of the Universe of National Socialist Camps
Auschwitz was the Nazis' seventh concentration camp. It was the first camp established in the area of occupied Poland.
The Nazis initially used the camps they created for political persecution and suppression of their opponents. They were established in order to deter potential political opponents and to terrorize them.
The policy was that imprisonment would change the inmates' political opinions through harsh treatment while removing them from society. This theory applied, of course, only if targeted people were deemed capable of "re-education”. Those defined as "incorrigible” could expect savage and cruel torture. All civil rights were revoked. Prisoners were not told the duration of the incarceration; this was a factor that weakened their morale and left them more vulnerable to the reeducation process. The camps were run by the SS and had a far harsher regime and routine than "normal” prisons. The aim was to break the inmates' spirits, and to destroy the inmates' minds and bodies. This was done through terror; the SS were the prisoners' absolute masters and the prisoners had to comply with their commands. It was impossible to complain about unfair treatment; a prisoner who did so was killed.
From 1936 and into the war years, the camp system evolved, growing and performing more and more functions and tasks.
People began to be arrested and incarcerated though they were not political opponents. These were, for instance, "criminal elements” or "asocial elements” such as itinerants, the chronically unemployed, beggars, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, and convicted prostitutes. The incarceration of people for nonpolitical offences was motivated by ideology as well as by economic demands: the "Four-Year Plan” initiated in 1936 was aimed at preparing Germany for eventual war and for rapid industrialization. This plan required the recruitment of a work force, and from this time forward, concentration camp inmates served as laborers in the service of the Third Reich. The camps became a powerful tool for the SS, and a constant and ever-growing source of forced and available workers.
Auschwitz was originally built to be one more concentration camp of the type that the Nazis had been setting up since the early 1930s to isolate and discipline political opponents. It functioned in this role throughout its existence, and from this standpoint it was not exceptional at all. The only unusual thing about Auschwitz was its size. Auschwitz had the capacity to accommodate up to 10,000 prisoners, which was a huge number considering that in all of the camps that existed at the beginning of the war, combined, there were about 25,000 prisoners. Auschwitz quickly became an important source of forced labor. Later it would also become the largest of the death camps, but this was an unanticipated development that came only second to its original role.
Evolution of the Camp
The Buna-Monowitz Camp
The first major change came in 1941, when Otto Ambrose, a member of the Board of Directors of IG Farben (Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG), a German chemical industry conglomerate, had the idea of building a factory 7 kilometers from Auschwitz. The factory was to produce "Buna", a kind of rubber synthetically manufactured from coal, in order to support the war effort. The company selected Auschwitz because the area was rich in natural resources. Coal, lime and water were needed for the production of Buna. There was a developed railroad transport system in the area, which was crucial. In addition, the company stood to gain economically from the tax exemptions offered by the Nazi government for developing the area.
Cooperation with IG Farben, then the largest private company in the German Reich, gave Heinrich Himmler a chance to realize his dream of using prisoner labor to build up industry from which the SS could profit, especially in the munitions and armaments industries. Himmler traveled to Auschwitz on March 1, 1941 to smooth the way for IG Farben. The visit led to innovations at the camp, including the assignment of 10,000 prisoners to IG Farben, which thus became the first private company to receive an army of prisoners as forced laborers. The cooperation between the SS and IG Farben was beneficial for both parties.
At first the slave laborers had to walk the 7 kilometers each morning to the building site, meaning that their workdays began at 3:00 AM and ended much later than the workdays of all the other Auschwitz prisoners. Many prisoners arrived already exhausted. This led to a decision to build a labor camp closer to the factory in the town of Monowice, renamed Monowitz by the Germans. A typhus epidemic slowed the work down and the first prisoners of the new camp arrived only at the end of October, 1942. The camp ultimately built was commonly referred to as Buna-Monowitz. It became the first concentration camp started and financed by a private company. With the building of the Buna camp, IG Farben also began to take an active role in the policy of the "Final Solution", making selections among the predominantly Jewish slave laborers and threatening them constantly that if their work was not up to par, they would be sent to Birkenau to be killed.
Many other firms followed IG Farben's example and settled near Auschwitz in order to exploit the cheap workforce there. They included mining companies, consumer goods companies, companies in the chemical and metal industries and other companies including Friedrich Krupp AG and Siemens-Schukert. The SS charged 4 Reichsmarks for an unskilled laborer and 6 Reichsmarks for a qualified worker, but state industries got better deals and were charged even less. Barracks were built on or near the grounds of these private companies. Ultimately a network of more than 30 subcamps came into being - the last actually built in December, 1944.
This network of camps, the largest of which was Buna-Monowitz, was considered one camp within the Auschwitz complex for administrative purposes, and came to be known as "Auschwitz III." In November, 1944 Auschwitz III actually became an autonomous concentration camp.
Birkenau
Perhaps the most important development in the history of Auschwitz, that which turned it into the deadly complex that it became, also occurred in 1941 with the start of Operation Barbarossa. The Germans decided to establish a vast prisoner-of-war camp in Upper Silesia for the tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers they expected to take captive in order to use them for forced labor. The order for construction of such a camp was given on September 26, 1941. Construction began in the Polish town of Brzezinka, adjacent to Auschwitz, which was renamed "Birkenau" by the Germans.
As can be seen in the blueprints for the construction work, the camp was to be a prisoner of war camp, a Kriegsgefangenenlager. It was built in stages, but the goal was ultimately to accommodate 200,000 prisoners. Work was very difficult, as the camp was built in a swampy area which impeded progress. Thousands of Soviet prisoners of war worked on preparing the site for construction, under German supervision, beginning in October, 1941. However, due to the appalling labor conditions fewer than half the Soviet POWs were still alive after one month; after six months only 186 of the original 10,000 remained. Polish and Jewish prisoners joined the Soviet POWs in building the camp. Polish prisoner Alfred Czeslaw Przybylski recalls:
"In the course of digging and building the foundations, the prisoners worked in the fall, in winter and frost, standing waist-deep in water. Female prisoners at the women's prison in Birkenau worked under the same conditions. I firmly believe that the choice of building site - on wet ground, even though they could have built on ground that was dry and more suitable for construction - a choice made by professionals...was designed to exterminate the prisoners who worked on the construction and those who inhabited the buildings."
Though initially brick buildings were built, like those in the main camp, the planners quickly switched to prefabricated, windowless huts made of thin wooden boards. These were actually wooden stables intended for 52 horses. They were unfit for human habitation. They did not have an efficient drainage system, or insulation against the bitter cold. They also did not have sanitary arrangements. Latrines and washing barracks were only added in 1943, after spotted fever and typhus epidemics that sent the death rate skyrocketing and threatened to affect the SS as well. Each stable was originally intended to house some 550 prisoners, but with one stroke of the pen, the number on the blueprints was changed to 744. In practice, many more prisoners were crammed inside. The severe overcrowding in the huts caused unspeakable sanitary conditions, and led to a high death rate among the prisoners living in them.
Despite the plans, the camp at Birkenau never served its intended purpose as a POW camp. Though 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war were taken by the Germans, hundreds of thousands were abandoned to starvation for economic reasons, and never reached the camps where they were to be forced laborers. When it became clear that massive numbers of Soviet POWs would not be arriving at Auschwitz, Birkenau was retooled. The horse stables would house tens of thousands of other prisoners as a work force for German projects; Himmler announced in January, 1942 that 150,000 Jews would be arriving (though this plan was not completely realized).
In addition, Birkenau was turned into a center for mass murder as the "Final Solution" evolved. The first experiments with gas were carried out in the main camp in the fall of 1941. In the light of their success, the SS decided to build four permanent installations in Birkenau, for the specific purpose of gassing people to death. As a stopgap measure until the installations were completed, the Germans converted existing local farmhouse buildings to erect two makeshift gas chambers next to the camp. The permanent installations, which began to operate in 1943, brought Birkenau to the pinnacle of industrial efficiency.
The Final Solution
Historians conclude that the turning point in the Nazis' plan to "solve the Jewish problem” began with Operation Barbarossa, the massive military invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Hitler considered the invasion of the USSR as part of his plan to provide the German nation with "living space” (Lebensraum) and an opportunity to destroy Communism, which he loathed.
The Decision to Expand the "Final Solution"
Though they murdered over 1.5 million Jews by shooting them into pits, the Germans assessed that this method of killing was problematic for a number of reasons: ammunition was expensive and could not be "wasted" on Jews; too many people were involved and secrecy of the operation was jeopardized; members of the firing squads that took part in the mass shooting suffered from stress and had difficulty performing their task; and shooting Jews one by one was inefficient. The Germans looked for other methods.
The Germans therefore returned to a method they had previously tried in the "Euthanasia" program: extermination by gas. They set up extermination camps for this purpose, the first of which, Chelmno, began to operate on December 8, 1941. Other extermination camps followed: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka began to operate in an operation known as "Operation Reinhard". They began to operate in the spring and summer of 1942 and combined, murdered over 1.6 million Jews. At this point, Himmler turned to Höss, as Höss recalled, and told him:
"The existing extermination centers in the East are not in a position to carry out the large Aktionen that are anticipated. I have therefore earmarked Auschwitz for this purpose, both because of its good position as regards communications and because the area can easily be isolated and camouflaged...."
The first gassings of Jews at Auschwitz began in early 1942 and they were done on a small scale - only later would it become a monstrous operation.
The Wannsee Conference
On January 20, 1942, a conference was held in a suburb of Berlin, Wannsee, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office at the SS, with the participation of 15 officials and representatives of the Reich authorities. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss coordination between government offices regarding the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. The Reich Security Main Office coordinated the extermination plans vis-à-vis the relevant ministries and authorities. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference record that:
"Due to the war, the emigration plan has been replaced with deportation of the Jews to the east, in accordance with the Führer's will.”
The main purpose of the meeting was to coordinate among the different offices in order to solve the complex organizational problems involved in the execution of an operation of this vast magnitude, and to secure everyone's active involvement.
The participants of the conference estimated the deportation and murder of 11 million Jews, not only from countries that had already been occupied, but also from countries that were outside German control. Countries such as Albania were included even though the Jewish population there was tiny (according to the protocol of the Wannsee Conference the Jewish population numbered 200 people). This is indicative of the totality of the "Final Solution" and the Nazis' goal to deport every single Jew in Europe.
Beginning in the spring of 1942, the Germans began deporting thousands of Jews every single day from all occupied countries to camps and killing sites in Poland.
The Deportations and Their Historical Significance
A key element in implementing the "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” was the deportation of millions of Jews by the Nazis from various locations throughout Europe and the Mediterranean into ghettos, camps and murder sites in Eastern Europe. The process of annihilating European Jewry in extermination camps began with their deportation on freight trains in late 1941.
The Jews, including old people and young children, were transported by various forms of transport such as trains, trucks, buses and ships and, sometimes, even on foot. The train journey sometimes lasted several days under harsh conditions without water, food, or sanitary facilities and many Jews perished during the course of the journey.
Dimensions of the Deportations
Between 1942 and 1944, the Nazis perfected their methods for the systematic transfer of Europe's Jews to the extermination camps.
In 1943 and 1944, Auschwitz played a significant role in the German plan to kill the European Jews. Beginning in late winter 1943, trains arrived at Auschwitz on a regular basis carrying Jews from virtually every German-occupied country of Europe - from as far north as Norway to the Greek island of Rhodes off the coast of Turkey in the south, from France in the west to German-occupied Poland and the Baltic states. The number of mass deportations of Jews from Europe rose month by month. The Jews in the arriving transports stopped being registered and numbered, but were murdered right away.
Apparatus behind the Deportations
The deportation operation, which required broad organizational deployment and comprehensive planning, was led by the Department of Jewish Affairs of the SS (Abteilung für jüdische Angelegenheiten der SS) under the command of Adolf Eichmann. Members of the department advised the authorities in the conquered and satellite countries, organized, planned and worked out the exact number of Jews that were supposed to be deported from the different countries. They also had to coordinate the extermination camps with the German rail authorities according to the intake capacity at each camp. It was a systemized operation that often ended within a few days with the murder of Jewish deportees.
"[W]hen a train arrived at Auschwitz it had first to be shunted into a siding. The locomotives were swapped over, and the railway staff took over the carriages. They saw the selection process, watched the prisoner units unloading the luggage and the columns going to the crematoria. They brought the empty carriages back to the station, where the duty foreman of the goods dispatch office was already waiting for them."
Apart from the SS leadership, the people who were aware of the details of mass extermination were above all the employees of the Reichsbahn, the German Reich Railway. They were the ones directing the trains carrying Jews from the whole of Europe to Auschwitz. The Reichsbahn listed the transports as special passenger trains, but sent them out as goods trains. The price of the journey was set according to the rate of a traditional freight transport. The client was the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (the Reich Main Security Office), but the process was overseen by the Reich Transport Ministry. The deportees had to pay for their deportation to a death camp themselves, whether directly (by actually purchasing tickets) or indirectly (by having community property used to pay for the group). Adults paid 4 pfennigs per person for every kilometer of track, children under the age of ten traveled at a reduced rate of 2 pfennigs.
"The Reichsbahn granted the SS a group rebate - half price for transports of 1,000 people or more - and the empty train journeys on the way back were free..."
Deception
Deportations throughout Europe were usually conducted using mass deception of the victims. The Germans attempted to disguise their intentions by portraying the deportations as a "resettlement" of the Jewish population in labor camps in the "East." In reality, the "resettlement" in the "East" became a euphemism for transport to the killing centers and mass murder. The Germans would begin the deportations with the poor or refugees, while the ones being spared held on to the illusion that they would be left alone. After the initial deportation the ensuing stages would follow - until the murder was complete.
One example of the deception is a sign that was clipped to the train car that carried Jews from the Westerbork transit camp in Holland to Auschwitz. In order to deceive the deportees, the sign read: "Westerbork- Auschwitz, Auschwitz- Westerbork", implying that there was a possibility to return.
Another method of deception that was employed in Western European countries was to force the deportees to buy their own train tickets in order to finance their journey - the journey that would take them to their deaths. Even though this was done to cover the costs of such a huge project, it also convinced many victims that they would survive.
Arrival at Auschwitz
For the Jews, however, the moment of arrival was crucial. It was the moment when their fates, unknowingly, were sealed. It was the moment that their family units, which may have still been intact until then, were broken apart. It was the moment, amid the confusion and chaos on the train platform, that husbands were separated from wives, parents from children, brothers from sisters. It was the moment that the newly-arrived Jews left the world they had known, where they could hope to influence outcomes and change their fates, and entered a world in which their fate was decided by others and they were stripped of all control over their lives. Yet none of this was known to any of them.
Once Auschwitz had become an extermination camp, in the spring of 1942, the vast majority of the Jews who arrived there, sometimes as much as 80-90%, was exterminated on arrival. As such, most of the people who arrived never really entered the camp, but just crossed through it on the way to the gas chambers. The Germans determined who was to be exterminated immediately through a process that we call selection.
Selection
Witness testimony describes the new arrivals being hit and being forced to run, while Germans were shouting, dogs were barking, children were screaming for their parents who had gotten lost in the crowd. Meanwhile, amid this confusion, veteran prisoners received the victims and gathered their belongings together, under the orders of the Germans. The belongings would later be taken to an area known as "Canada”. The arrivals were then lined up in two columns - men and boys in one, and women, girls, small children and babies in the other. SS physicians then performed what was known as selection. Lines of men and lines of women and children passed before these SS doctors. The doctors decided, with a flick of the hand, who among the stunned people filing before them would be sent to immediate extermination in the gas chambers and who might still be able to benefit the Nazi war machine as workers and therefore be allowed to remain temporarily alive as inmates of the camp.
Many women arrived with their babies and young children. These women were sentenced to death since, under the logic of the camp, even young, healthy women who could work were to be sent to the gas together with their children.
On average, as many as 80-90% of those who arrived at the camp after selections began to take place regularly were sent directly to their deaths. There were transports in which this number was even higher. The overwhelming majority of Jews who arrived at Auschwitz were murdered immediately. They were gassed under the guise of a harmless shower, their bodies were burned and their ashes were strewn in the nearby rivers or swamps. As many as 1.1-1.3 million Jews arrived at Auschwitz and were murdered immediately. Although transport lists exist, no record of their names was kept at the camp; no camp documents mark their arrival at Auschwitz or their subsequent murder.
A very small minority of arrivals, ranging from a few individuals to up to 20% of a given transport, was selected to enter the camp and remain alive - at least temporarily. They were to be used as slave labor by the Germans, and some of them as Guinea pigs in experiments.
By the spring of 1944 Auschwitz had already become a monstrous extermination camp, but it was the transports from Hungary that turned it into the death camp with the greatest amount of victims. Hungary was the very last country invaded by the German army, which occupied the country on March 19, 1944. Over 424,000 Jews of Hungary were transported to Auschwitz over a 56-day period in the spring and summer of 1944, close to 90% of them were murdered on arrival.
Between January 17 and 21, 1945, in the face of the advancing Soviet army, the Germans evacuated over 56,000 of the camp's prisoners in the last "Death March." When the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 soldiers found just 7,650 barely-living prisoners in the entire camp complex.
Conclusion
Auschwitz ultimately became a vast complex, the largest of the German concentration camps and the extermination camp that outstripped all others in its deadly mission to destroy as many of the Jews of Europe as possible.
In creating the monstrosity that became Auschwitz, the Germans destroyed seven Polish villages, exiled thousands of Poles from their homes, and deported and ghettoized thousands of Jews. The complex grew to a zone of interest that encompassed 40 square kilometers (15.44 square miles). It included chemical, munitions, cement and other factories, fisheries and poultry breeding plants, agricultural enterprises, coal mines and other areas of interest, as well as four huge installations of murder. Auschwitz also served as the center for collection and distribution of forced laborers to all areas of German industry.
With the passage of time, Auschwitz-Birkenau has become one of the starkest symbols of the Holocaust, of the terror of the Nazi regime and of genocide. In this camp, which was the largest of the Nazi extermination camps and also contained a complex of concentration and labor camps, between 1,100,000 and 1,200,000 Jews were murdered. More than 70,000 Poles died or were killed here as well, as were about 20,000 Sinti and Roma, 15,000 Soviet POWs, and prisoners of different nationalities.
