Opened ten months after the outbreak of the war, the Auschwitz concentration camp was the first such camp in occupied Poland. Along with the Majdanek and Stutthof camps, which were opened in 1941, it was one of the main sites of the deportation and annihilation of Poles.

The Intelligentsia

Aside from people who violated or were suspected of violating occupation regulations or of involvement in the resistance movement, some people were imprisoned in Auschwitz because they had enjoyed esteem before the war due to their education, public activity, and social status—prewar government officials, politicians, teachers at every level from elementary to university, doctors, regular army officers, clergy, and religious. The Germans regarded them as destined to oppose the occupation regime. Regardless of the reason for their arrest, all such individuals were regarded as political prisoners. 

People Detained in Random Street Sweeps

The category of political prisoners also encompassed completely innocent people arrested at random during stop-and-check operations on the street, sweeps of public buildings and private dwellings, or so-called street roundups. Of the 1,666 people in the first transport from Warsaw on August 15, 1940, 1,153 had been detained in street roundups.

Hostages

Some of the Poles imprisoned in Auschwitz were hostages. They were shot in reprisal for resistance activity in a given area, in cases where the Germans failed to apprehend those responsible.

“Return Not Desired”

Some prisoners were already under a death sentence when they arrived in Auschwitz. Among them were individuals sent to the camp by local police units with a note in their files reading: “Rückkehr unerwünscht” (return not desired), “nicht uberstellen” (do not transfer), or whose files were marked with a red “X.” In some cases, the date of the execution was even specified. At regular intervals, the Political Department ran a check on the prisoner files, pulling out those marked in the way described above, and drawing up a list of the names. After confirmation by the commandant, these prisoners were called to the camp chancellery for their personal data to be checked, and were shot that same day.

“Reeducation” Prisoners

Beginning on July 16, 1941, the Katowice District Gestapo began sending workers employed at factories in Silesia, mostly Poles, to Auschwitz “for reeducation.”  Not numbered among the political prisoners, they had the special status of reeducation prisoners (Erziehungshäftlinge − EH for short). They lived in the same conditions as the other prisoners in the camp. What distinguished them from other prisoners is that they were imprisoned for a limited period—officially up to a maximum of 8 weeks, but in practice often much longer. About 11 thousand prisoners in this category were imprisoned in Auschwitz.

Victims of the Summary Court

People who were never entered in the camp records were executed in Auschwitz. Formally, therefore, they were not Auschwitz prisoners. They were sentenced to death under “special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung) on the orders of a local security police post, with confirmation by the Reich Main Security Office.

Also shot at Auschwitz were people from the eastern part of the so-called Province of Upper Silesia (the parts of Upper Silesia and Małopolska annexed by the German Reich) who were sentenced to death by the security police summary court, reactivated in June 1942. This court passed death sentences on Poles, and sometimes Jews, even for minor infractions. Beginning in February 1943, the court sat in session on the grounds of the camp. Prisoners held at the disposal of the police, referred to in the camp for that reason as police prisoners, were held until trial first in block 2a, and later in block 11. It is estimated that from 3 to 4.5 thousand Polish victims of the summary court were shot or gassed in Auschwitz.

The Euthanasia Program

Poles were also put to death in the Auschwitz camp as part of the conduct in Poland of the so-called euthanasia program, the killing of the incurably ill. This category comprised the mentally ill above all, but also included the elderly and those unable to care for themselves, especially those residing in care facilities. On June 23, 1942, 556 patients from the mental hospitals in Kobierzyn near Cracow and Kalwaria Zebrzydowska were put to death under the euthanasia program.

Poles from the Zamość Region

In late 1942, there were plans to make Auschwitz one of the main destinations for the deportation of Polish civilians expelled from the Zamość region, the northeastern part of the General Government. The plans called for 3 transports of 1,000 people each to be sent to Auschwitz each week. Unexpected developments on the Eastern Front—the defeat at Stalingrad—led to the cancellation of this plan. The Germans managed to deport 1,301 of these people. Most of them died soon as a result of cold or hunger, or were killed by lethal injection of phenol or in the gas chambers.

Warsaw Residents during the Uprising

The last large group of Poles to be imprisoned in Auschwitz consisted of 13 thousand residents of Warsaw—men, women, and children—who arrived in August and September 1944. Their deportation was connected with the Uprising then underway in the city: the German authorities decided to remove the civilians who remained alive and raze Warsaw.