Auschwitz (1940-1945), one of four Nazi concentration camps founded in occupied territory that was part of the prewar Polish state (the other three were at Majdanek, Warsaw, and Płaszów), was the largest Nazi concentration camp—a place for the gradual annihilation of prisoners—and, at the same time, the largest center for the immediate, direct extermination of Jews.

Although the camp was founded for Poles and had a Polish majority among its prisoners for the first two years it was in operation, there were also Jews among the deportees to Auschwitz from the very start. The relatively small numbers of Jews transported there in 1940-1941 were placed in the camp like other prisoners, that is, on an individual basis, usually for violating German law or the police and administrative regulations.

Jews

Mass transports of Jews to Auschwitz began in 1942. On the basis of a 1941 decree from Himmler and after a preparatory period, Auschwitz was included in the plans for the destruction of 11 million European Jews. Presented at the conference in Berlin-Wannsee on January 20, 1942, the plan called for Europe to be “swept” from west to east, in order to detain all Jews from infants to the elderly, and to deport them to killing places. The main sites for the killing would be extermination centers equipped with gas chambers, as used already in the euthanasia centers in Germany where over 70 thousand mentally ill German citizens and thousands of concentration camp prisoners had been killed.

Under Himmler’s decree, Auschwitz was to play a key role in these extermination plans (along with the extermination centers in Chełmno on the Ner, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, and also, to a lesser degree, at the concentration camp in Majdanek). In making his decision, Himmler took into account the “favorable location in terms of transport” and the fact that “this area can easily be isolated and camouflaged.” The exact date for the start of the mass extermination of Jews in Auschwitz Concentration Camp is not known. It probably took place shortly after the Wannsee conference. Relatively small groups of Jews were killed at this time in crematorium I in the main camp.

Gas chambers

The operational use of the gas chambers in Auschwitz was preceded by experiments intended to find the most effective chemical agent and to work out the proper method for its use. About 600 Soviet POWs and 250 sick Poles were killed in such experimentation from September 3-5, 1941. Afterwards, the morgue at crematorium I in the main camp was adapted for use as a gas chamber. Several hundred people at a time could be killed in this room.

The provisional gas chambers

In the spring of 1942, a second gas chamber went into operation in a specially adapted farmhouse whose owner had been expelled. The house stood outside the fence of the Birkenau camp, which was then under construction. Camp commandant Rudolf Höss and Adolf Eichmann, the Reich Main Security Office representative in charge of deportation to extermination center, close this house together during a visit by Eichmann.

The adaptation work involved partially walling up the windows and reconfiguring the interior. According to Höss, about 800 people at a time could be killed in the house. Two barracks for undressing were erected nearby. This gas chamber was withdrawn from service in the spring of 1943, after the entry into use of the new gas chambers at crematoria II-V. 

A second house belonging to a farmer who had been expelled, and also standing outside the Birkenau camp fence, was adapted as a gas chamber in mid-1942. Höss estimated that 1,200 people at a time could be killed in this house. Three barracks for undressing were erected nearby. This gas chamber was also withdrawn from use in the spring of 1943. It was put back into use in the spring of 1944, at the time of the extermination of the Hungarian Jews.

The four large gas chambers and crematoria

The construction of 4 large gas chambers and crematoria began in Birkenau in 1942. They went into operation between March 22 and June 25-26, 1943. The gas chambers at crematoria II and III, like the undressing rooms, were located underground, while those at crematoria IV and V stood at ground level. About 2 thousand people at a time could be put to death in each of them. According to calculations made by the Zentralbauleitung on June 28, 1943, the crematoria could burn 4,416 corpses per day—1,440 each in crematoria II and III, and 768 each in crematoria IV and V. This meant that the crematoria could burn over 1.6 million corpses per year. Prisoners assigned to do the burning stated that the daily capacity of the four crematoria in Birkenau was higher—about 8 thousand corpses.

The construction of another facility according to a new design, crematorium VI, never progressed beyond the planning stage.

Murdering people in the gas chambers

In principle, all Jews classified because of their age or physical condition as unfit for labor were subject to immediate extermination directly after their arrival in the camp, without being registered or assigned a number.

In addition to the Jews, a certain number of Soviet POWs, estimated by witnesses as several thousand men, were killed with gas. A certain number of Poles were also killed in the gas chamber. The first group of prisoners selected and killed in a gas chamber outside the camp, at the Sonnenstein euthanasia center, consisted mostly of Poles. Cases are also known of the killing in the gas chambers of groups of Poles selected in the so-called camp hospital, numbering up to several hundred at a time, or as a punishment for the revolt of the penal company, or sentenced to death by the summary court. Several thousand Gypsies also died in the gas chambers. Prisoners of other nationalities also died during the period, from mid-1941 to the spring of 1943, when selection took place in the camp, usually in the blocks for the sick.

The unloading ramps and selections

Selections of mass Jewish transports took place on three railroad unloading platforms, or ramps. SS doctors made most of the decisions about who was qualified for labor, and who was killed immediately.

The first unloading ramp, located adjacent to the main camp, was in use throughout the period when the camp was in operation and mainly served the main camp. This is where the first transport of 728 prisoners from Tarnów was unloaded on June 14, 1940. Later transports of Poles also arrived here, as did, from 1942, some mass transports of Jews. It was also at this ramp, during the years 1941-1942, before the building of the Buna sub-camp, that the prisoners constructing the Buna-Werke (the IG Farbenindustrie plant) boarded the train that carried them to labor, and disembarked on their return to the camp.

The second ramp [the so-called “Alte Judenrampe”] went into operation in 1942. It was located on the grounds of the Oświęcim freight station, between the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps. This is where the majority of the mass transports of Jews arrived between 1942 and May 1944, as well as the mass transports of Gypsies who were imprisoned in the Birkenau camp beginning in February 1943.

At first, selections of mass Jewish transports took place sporadically. Only after July 4, 1942 did selection take place regularly. Almost all the mass transports of Jews to Auschwitz after that date were subject to selection.

The third ramp was built from 1943 inside the Birkenau camp, and went into operation in May 1944 in connection with the anticipated arrival of transports of Hungarian Jews. The railroad spur along this ramp ran as far as gas chambers and crematoria II and III. Aside from the 430 thousand Hungarian Jews, 67 thousand Jews from the Łódź ghetto and some of the transports from the ghetto in Terezin and from Slovakia were unloaded at this ramp. From this point on, mass selections of Jews took place inside the camp, before the eyes of thousands of prisoners. Transports of Poles from Warsaw during the Uprising there, sent to Auschwitz by way of the transit camp in Pruszków, were also unloaded here.

All three ramps also served as embarkation points for prisoners transferred from Auschwitz to sub-camps and other concentration camps.

The selection procedure carried out on the ramps was as follows: families were divided after leaving the train cars and all the people were lined up in two columns. The men and older boys were in one column, and the women and children of both sexes in the other. Next, the people were led to the camp doctors and other camp functionaries conducting selection. They judged the people standing before them on sight and, sometimes eliciting a brief declaration as to their age and occupation, decided whether they would live or die. 

Age was one of the principal criteria for selection. As a rule, all children below 16 years of age (from 1944, below 14) and the elderly were sent to die. As a statistical average, about 20% of the people in transports were chosen for labor. They were led into the camp, registered as prisoners, and assigned the next numbers in the various series. Of the approximately 1.1 million Jews deported to Auschwitz, about 200 thousand were chosen in this way. The remainder, about 900 thousand people, were killed in the gas chambers.

The extermination procedure in the gas chambers

Trucks carried those too infirm to walk, and the rest marched. These people had to disrobe before entering the gas chambers. In crematorium I, they undressed either in the yard (surrounded by a wall) or in the antechamber. Wooden barracks were erected for this purpose at bunkers 1 and 2. There were special undressing rooms at crematoria II-V.

When large numbers of transports were arriving in 1944, the people assigned to death in the gas chamber in crematorium V also disrobed in the open air. After the Sonderkommando was quartered in the undressing room in crematorium IV, the people sent to die there undressed in a specially constructed barracks.

The SS men kept the people fated to die unaware of what awaited them. They were told that they were being sent to the camp, but that they first had to undergo disinfection and bathe. After the victims undressed, they were taken into the gas chamber, locked in, and killed with Zyklon B gas.

After they were killed, Sonderkommando prisoners dragged the corpses out of the gas chambers. They cut off the women’s hair and removed all metal dental work and jewelry. Then they burned the corpses in pits, on pyres, or in the crematorium furnaces. (Until September 1942, some of the corpses were buried in mass graves; these corpses were burned from September to November 1942.)

Bones that did not burn completely were ground to powder with pestles and then dumped, along with the ashes, in the rivers Soła and Vistula and in nearby ponds, or strewn in the fields as fertilizer, or used as landfill on uneven ground and in marshes.

The demolition of the gas chambers

The first crematorium and gas chamber, and the two “bunkers,” were withdrawn from use in 1943, when the four large crematoria and gas chambers in Birkenau went into operation.

The gas chamber in crematorium I in the Auschwitz main camp was used for the last time in December 1942, although the crematorium furnaces there functioned until July 1943.

The crematorium I building was adapted as an air-raid shelter in 1944. The first provisional gas chamber, bunker 1, was demolished in 1943, while the second, returned to operational use in the spring of 1944, was demolished in the fall of 1944.

As part of the overall liquidation of the evidence of crime, crematoria II and II together with their gas chambers were partially dismantled in late 1944, and blown up in January 1945. Crematorium IV was partially burned during the Sonderkommando mutiny on October 7, 1944, and later dismantled. Crematorium V functioned until the very end, and was blown up on January 26, 1945, the day before the liberation of the camp.

The number of victims

Until the end of its existence, the Auschwitz camp was above all a place of extermination. In other camps, the death rate was lowered from 1943 in an effort to conserve the labor force. In Auschwitz, however, where new transports, mostly of Jews, arrived continuously and kept the camp supplied with laborers, human life never had any great significance.

Historians estimate that between 1 and 1.5 million people perished in Auschwitz during the less than 5 years of its existence. The majority, from 1 to 1.35 million people, were Jews. The second most numerous group, from 70 to 75 thousand, was the Poles, and the third most numerous, about 20 thousand, the Gypsies. About 15 thousand Soviet POWs and 10 to 15 thousand prisoners of other ethnic backgrounds (including Czechs, Byelorussians, Yugoslavians, French, Germans, and Austrians) also died there.

In view of the role that it played in the realization of the Nazi extermination plans, Auschwitz is known around the world as a symbol of Nazi genocide, and especially of the destruction of the Jews.