The majority of these subcamps were located in the region around Auschwitz. It is estimated that the SS and police deported at least 1. Of these deportees, approximately 1. The best estimates of the number of victims at the Auschwitz camp complex, including the killing center at Auschwitz-Birkenau, between and are:.
During the Holocaust , concentration camp prisoners received tattoos only at one location, Auschwitz. Incoming prisoners were assigned a camp serial number which was sewn to their prison uniforms. Only those prisoners selected for work were issued serial numbers; those prisoners sent directly to the gas chambers were not registered and received no tattoos.
Auschwitz I, the main camp, was the first camp established near Oswiecim. Construction began in April in an abandoned Polish army barracks in a suburb of the city. SS authorities continuously used prisoners for forced labor to expand the camp. On May 20, , the first prisoners arrived at Auschwitz. The transport consisted of some 30 German inmates, categorized as "professional criminals.
Less than a month later, on June 14, German authorities in occupied Poland deported Polish prisoners from a prison in Tarnow to Auschwitz. This was the first of many transports of Poles to the Auschwitz camp. Like most German concentration camps, Auschwitz I was constructed for three purposes:. Like some concentration camps, Auschwitz I had a gas chamber and crematorium.
Initially, SS engineers constructed an improvised gas chamber in the basement of the prison block, Block Later a larger, permanent gas chamber was constructed as part of the original crematorium in a separate building outside the prisoner compound. They conducted pseudoscientific research on infants, twins, and dwarfs, and performed forced sterilizations and castrations of adults. The best-known of these physicians was SS Captain Dr. Josef Mengele. Rather, it was his participation in the killing process—indeed his supervision of Auschwitz mass murder from beginning to end.
Between the medical-experiments barrack and the prison block Block 11 stood the "Black Wall," where SS guards executed thousands of prisoners.
Of the three camps established near Oswiecim, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp had the largest total prisoner population. It was divided into ten sections separated by electrified barbed-wire fences. The camp included sections for women; men; a family camp for Roma Gypsies deported from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; and a family camp for Jewish families deported from the Theresienstadt ghetto.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was also a killing center and played a central role in the German effort to kill the Jews of Europe. Bunker I began operating in spring , the larger Bunker II in mid-summer These gassing facilities soon proved inadequate for the task of murdering the large numbers of Jewish deportees being sent to Auschwitz. Between March and June , four large crematoria were built within Auschwitz-Birkenau, each with a gas chamber, a disrobing area, and crematory ovens.
Gassing of newly arrived transports ceased at Auschwitz by early November Jewish deportees arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau immediately underwent selection. The SS staff chose some of the able-bodied for forced labor and sent the rest directly to the gas chambers, which were disguised as shower installations to mislead the victims. The belongings of all deportees were confiscated and sorted in the "Kanada" Canada warehouse for shipment back to Germany.
Canada symbolized wealth to the prisoners. Trains arrived at Auschwitz frequently with transports of Jews from virtually every country in Europe occupied by or allied to Germany. Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Poland in September , and by May turned the site into a jail for political prisoners.
This area - with the infamous lie Arbeit Macht Frei written above the entrance in German - meaning work sets you free - became known as Auschwitz I. But as the war and the Holocaust progressed, the Nazi regime greatly developed the site. The first people to be gassed were a group of Polish and Soviet prisoners in September Work began on a new camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the following month.
This became the site of the huge gas chambers where hundreds of thousands were murdered prior to November , and the crematoria where their bodies were burned.
Other private companies like Krupp and Siemens-Schuckert also ran factories nearby, to use the prisoners as slave labour. When Auschwitz was eventually liberated, it had more than 40 camps and subcamps. How Auschwitz became centre of Nazi Holocaust. People from all over Europe were crammed into cattle wagons without windows, toilets, seats or food, and transported to Auschwitz. There they were sorted into those who could work and those who were to be immediately killed.
The latter group were ordered to strip naked and sent to the showers for "delousing" - a euphemism used for the gas chambers. Guards from the so-called "Hygienic Institute" would then drop powerful Zyklon-B gas pellets into the sealed chambers, and wait for people to die. It took about 20 minutes. The thick walls could not hide the screams of those suffocating inside. Then Sonderkommandos - other prisoners, usually Jews forced to work for the guards or be killed - would remove artificial limbs, glasses, hair and teeth before dragging the corpses to the incinerators.
Ashes of the bodies were buried or used as fertiliser. Imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camps was usually indefinite, and whilst initially some people were released in just a few days, most endured weeks, months or years of detention. Sanitation and facilities were extremely poor across all camps.
Brutal treatment, torture and humiliation was commonplace. Inmates in concentration camps were also usually subject to forced labour. Typically, this was long hours of hard physical labour, though this varied across different camps.
Many camps worked their prisoners to death. Approximately one million people died in concentration camps over the course of the Holocaust. This figure does not include those killed at extermination camps. The crematorium at Majdanek Extermination Camp. Between its establishment in and its liberation in , over 78, people were murdered at Majdanek.
Extermination camps were used by the Nazis from to to murder Jews and, on a smaller scale, Roma. These were:. The facility contained three gas vans in which victims were murdered by carbon monoxide poisoning. Once dead, the vans were driven to a nearby forest and the victims were buried in mass graves.
These camps were specifically built near railway lines to make transportation easier. Instead of vans, stationary gas chambers, labelled as showers, were built to murder people with carbon monoxide poisoning created using diesel engines.
A concentration camp had been established at Majdanek in In the spring of , following the Wannsee Conference, the camp was adapted to become an extermination camp by the addition of gas chambers and crematoria. Auschwitz-Birkenau was a complex, consisting of a concentration camp, a forced labour camp and an extermination camp. Eventually it had a network of more than 40 satellite camps. Following tests in September , the lethal gas Zyklon B was selected as the method of murder.
Auschwitz initially had one gas chamber at the Auschwitz I camp, but this was soon expanded. By , four new crematoria, with gas chambers attached, had been built in Auschwitz II. Approximately 1. Not everyone who arrived at the extermination camps was murdered on arrival.
Both were issued ill-fitting work shoes, sometimes clogs. They had no change of clothing and slept in the same clothes they worked in. Each day was a struggle for survival under unbearable conditions. Prisoners were housed in primitive barracks that had no windows and were not insulated from the heat or cold. There was no bathroom, only a bucket. Each barrack held about 36 wooden bunkbeds, and inmates were squeezed in five or six across on the wooden plank.
As many as inmates lodged in a single barrack. Inmates were always hungry. Food consisted of watery soup made with rotten vegetables and meat, a few ounces of bread, a bit of margarine, tea, or a bitter drink resembling coffee. Diarrhea was common. People weakened by dehydration and hunger fell easy victim to the contagious diseases that spread through the camp. Some inmates worked as forced laborers inside the camp, in the kitchen or as barbers, for example.
Women often sorted the piles of shoes, clothes, and other prisoner belongings, which would be shipped back to Germany for use there. The storage warehouses at Auschwitz-Birkenau, located near two of the crematoria, were called "Canada," because the Poles regarded that country as a place of great riches.
At Auschwitz, as at hundreds of other camps in the Reich and occupied Europe where the Germans used forced laborers, prisoners were also employed outside the camps, in coal mines and rock quarries, and on construction projects, digging tunnels and canals.
Under armed guard, they shoveled snow off roads and cleared rubble from roads and towns hit during air raids. A large number of forced laborers eventually were used in factories that produced weapons and other goods that supported the German war effort.
Many private companies, such as I. Farben and Bavarian Motor Works BMW , which produced automobile and airplane engines, eagerly sought the use of prisoners as a source of cheap labor. Escape from Auschwitz was almost impossible. Electrically charged barbed-wire fences surrounded both the concentration camp and the killing center.
Guards, equipped with machine guns and automatic rifles, stood in the many watchtowers. The lives of the prisoners were completely controlled by their guards, who on a whim could inflict cruel punishment on them.
Prisoners were also mistreated by fellow inmates who were chosen to supervise the others in return for special favors by the guards.
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