When was auschwitz founded

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 , a German physician who began working at Auschwitz in 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. As 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.

Before the end of the month, in what came to be known as the Auschwitz death marches, an estimated 60, 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, sick or emaciated detainees who had been left behind barbed wire.

It included three main camps, all of which deployed incarcerated prisoners at forced labor. One of them also functioned for an extended period as a killing center. The camps were located approximately 37 miles west of Krakow, near the prewar German-Polish border in Upper Silesia, an area that Nazi Germany annexed in after invading and conquering Poland.

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. 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.

These people were not entered in the camp records; that is, they received no serial numbers and were not registered, and therefore it is possible only to estimate the total number of victims. Of approximately 2. In Autumn , the camp administration was reorganized following a corruption scandal. By the end of , the prisoner population of Auschwitz main camp, Birkenau, Monowitz and other subcamps was over 80, 18, in the main camp, 49, in Birkenau, and 13, at Monowitz where I G Farben had its synthetic rubber plant.

Up to 50, 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. Barracks at Auschwitz designed for prisoners held 1, The situation in the subcamps was often even worse than in the main camps. In mid, Auschwitz was designated a SS-run security area of over 40 square miles. By August , the camp population reached , The last roll-call on January 18th, , showed 64, inmates.

During its history, the prison population of Auschwitz changed composition significantly. At first, its inmates were almost entirely Polish. From April to March , on about 27, inmates, 30 percent were Poles and 57 percent were Jews.

From March to March of , inmates, 60 percent were Jews. From May 15 to July 9, , , Hungarian Jews, the most deported from any country, were sent to Auschwitz. 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 The second measured about 1. Their bodies were taken out of the gas chambers and pushed to pits where they were burned in the open.

Between January and March , , Jews were gassed to death here, of whom , were killed from January to March 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 , and subject to a horrifying death rate.

But from the autumn of , it seems clear that the SS planners and civilian contractors were intending to build a mass-murder plant. Main Gate at Birkenau circa The first opened on March 31, , the last on April 4, The total area of the gas chambers was 2, square meters; the capacity of these crematoria was 4, people. Those selected to die were undressed in the undressing room and then pushed into the gas chambers. 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 Jewish Sonderkommandos worked the crematoria under SS supervision.

But, in May , 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 From then to November , 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 , Jews. On the 7th of October , there was an uprising by the Sonderkommando working in the gas chambers.

The prisoners managed to destroy one of the gas chambers, and thus to hinder the extermination process. All the rebels died.

A group of young female prisoners was also executed for having smuggled gunpowder to the rebels from the factory in Monowitz. Soon afterwards, the gas chambers and crematoria were destroyed on Himmler's orders, since the regime wanted to hide the traces of its murdering machine ahead of the advancing Red Army.

As Soviet troops came near to the camp in January , it was hurriedly evacuated and 58 prisoners were driven out on a death march, during which most were killed. On the 27th of January , the Red Army entered the camp link in Czech. They found 7 exhausted and starving prisoners and a number of pieces of evidence of crimes that the Nazis had not had time to destroy. In the camp stores they found almost eight tonnes of human hair and over a million men's suits and women's dresses. Photograph of child prisoners after the liberation of Auschwitz.

According to various estimates, between 1. Auschwitz became the symbol of the Nazis' final solution to the Jewish question , a symbol of Nazi inhumanity and genocide. After the war, many of those who had committed crimes at Auschwitz were put on trial in Poland and West Germany.

A further 22 Germans were sentenced in Frankfurt between and for crimes committed in Auschwitz. See also: The gypsy camp at Auschwitz. The exhibition of the Czech Republic at Auschwitz in Czech. Testimony of Mr. Toman Brod, born Testimony of Mrs. Vilma A. Links: Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum.