Auschwitz-Birkenau

History of a man-made Hell

The Auschwitz II camp location was selected on March 1, 1941 when Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the head of all the concentration camps, visited Auschwitz for the first time. He stood on the railroad overpass in Auschwitz and decided that the village of Birkenau, which he could see in the distance, would be an ideal place to expand the Auschwitz concentration camp because of its proximity to the railroad lines. The Polish name for the village was Brzezinka. The word Birkenau means birch tree meadow. The grove of birch trees at the western end of the Auschwitz II camp is shown in the photo above. Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, was the largest of the Nazi death camps; it had a total of 2 very large underground gas chambers, 2 smaller gas chambers, plus 2 old farmhouses that were used for gassing the Jews. In the photo above, the Krema IV and Krema V gas chambers are located to the left, but out of camera range. The victims have been fooled into thinking that they are going to take a shower. The real shower room was in the building called the Central Sauna, which was across the road from where these prisoners are waiting. The shower building was called the Sauna because there were steam cabinets, resembling those used to take a steam bath, which were used to disinfect the prisoner clothing with hot steam. Birkenau was opened on October 7, 1941 as a Prisoner of War camp for soldiers captured during the German invasion of the Soviet Union which had begun on June 22, 1941. Most of the Soviet POWs quickly died from starvation, disease and overwork; they were buried in mass graves on the northern side of the vast Birkenau camp. Out of over 13,000 POWs who were brought to Birkenau, only 92 were alive on January 17, 1945 when the last roll call was taken. The Germans did not feel the need to treat the Soviet soldiers in accordance with the Geneva Convention of 1929, because the Soviet Union had not signed the Convention and was not treating German POWs according to the laws of the Convention. The first Birkenau prisoners had to tear down the brick houses in the Polish village of Brzezinka, which the Germans called Birkenau, and use the bricks to construct primitive barracks, built on the ground without foundations. Eventually, the houses in 6 more Polish villages were torn down in order to expand the Birkenau camp. Birkenau was built on marshy ground which had to be drained. The photo below shows prisoners digging a drainage ditch at the western end of the camp. Jewish prisoners digging drainage ditch at Birkenau According to a book entitled "Auschwitz," which I purchased in 1998 from the museum at Auschwitz I: "Increasing the capacity of Auschwitz to supply slave labour was of prime importance to the Nazis; from the moment the camp was established, prisoners were employed in expanding it." The ruins of the vast Birkenau camp in the winter of 2005 The Birkenau camp is huge, covering 425 acres. The boundaries of Birkenau stretch a mile in one direction and a mile and a half in the other direction. When construction was completed, it had over 300 buildings with a capacity of 200,000 prisoners. When the camp was abandoned in January 1945, another section that would provide housing for 50,000 more prisoners was partially completed. This was by far the largest camp in the Nazi concentration camp system, and the overwhelming majority of the prisoners were Jews who did not work. There were no factories at Birkenau; the whole camp was intended to be a death factory for gassing the Jews. Jews were sent to Birkenau to be gassed Auschwitz-Birkenau did not start out as a death factory; it evolved over time. The gassing of the Jews began on a small scale at the main camp in 1941, and it was not until the Summer of 1943 that four gas chambers at Birkenau were in full operation. In one year, in 1942, there were 2.7 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, but only 200,000 out of this number were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The gassing operation at Birkenau in 1942 was nothing more than two make-shift gas chambers in a couple of old farm houses; the bodies were buried in mass graves because there were as yet no crematory ovens at Birkenau. In 1943, the construction of four new brick buildings, called Krema II, Krema III, Krema IV and Krema V, was completed. The four new buildings all contained ovens for cremating the bodies, and homicidal gas chambers where the Jews were gassed with Zyklon-B. The numbering of the crematory buildings took into consideration that the first crematorium, in the main camp, was now called Krema I. There was a total of 500,000 Jews killed in all the Nazi concentration camps in 1943, and half of these deaths occurred in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The source for this information is a book entitled "Auschwitz, A New History," written by Laurence Rees, and published in 2005. According to a German document dated 28 June 1943, issued by the Central Management of the Building section of the Waffen SS and Police, the four new crematoria at Birkenau had a combined capacity of 4,416 corpses in a 24-hour period. When problems with the ovens in Krema IV and Krema V developed, bodies were burned in pits on the north side of Krema V, as shown in secret photos taken in the camp. View of Birkenau gate from inside the camp When the former Commandant, Rudolf Hoess, returned to Birkenau in May 1944, the first thing he did was to order the construction of a railroad line that went through the Birkenau gate and continued on into the camp, right up to the gas chambers in Krema II and Krema II at the western end of the main camp road. The gassing of the Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau was not a secret; all the prisoners knew what was going on. The gas chambers at Birkenau were just outside the barbed wire fence around the camp, within plain sight of the prisoners. Numerous survivors testified that they could see the smoke coming out of the tall chimneys of the crematoria day and night. Newcomers who inquired about their loved ones, who were missing, were told that they had gone "up the chimney." When the Hungarian Jews, shown in the photo below, were brought to Birkenau, beginning in late April 1944, the camp became so over-crowded that the prisoners were sleeping five to a bed and five prisoners were sharing one coffee cup. Hungarian Jews arrive at Birkenau in May 1944 The photo below shows elderly and disabled Jews, who have just arrived inside the Birkenau camp on a train and are waiting to be transported by trucks to the gas chamber. Elderly and disabled Jews wait for trucks to take them to the gas chambers Between September 1943 and May 1944, thousands of Jewish prisoners were sent from the Theresienstadt Ghetto to the Birkenau camp. Theresienstadt was the so-called "Paradise Ghetto" in what is now the Czech Republic; this was where the Nazis allowed a Red Cross inspection after first cleaning up the camp to impress the delegates. The Red Cross was also allowed to inspect the Auschwitz camp and beginning in February 1943, food packages were sent to the Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. According to the Red Cross report, Vol. III, p. 80: "From the autumn of 1943 until May 1945, about 1,112,000 parcels with a total weight of 4,500 tons were sent off to the concentration camps." The prisoners from Theresienstadt were housed in a special "Family Camp" at Birkenau where men, women and children were allowed to live together and wear their own clothes; they did not have to work and were given special privileges. In order to create a false impression about what it was really like in Birkenau, the prisoners in the Family Camp were encouraged to send letters and postcards to various countries, including neutral countries. According to Danuta Czech, the decision to liquidate the Family Camp was made on July 2, 1944. Dr. Josef Mengele selected 3,080 of the Jews in the Family Camp to be sent to work in various camps in Germany and the rest were sent to the gas chamber. In two successive actions, according to information given by the Auschwitz Museum, the Jews in the Family Camp were gassed on March 3, 1944 and on July 11 and 12, 1944. According to a guidebook sold by the Auschwitz Museum, there were 20,943 Roma (Gypsies) who were brought to the Birkenau camp. Whole families arrived together, including small children; they lived in another special Family Camp and did not have to work. According to the autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, entitled "Death Dealer," many of the Gypsy children suffered from an illness called "Noma," which reminded him of leprosy. Gypsy children suffered from an illness called Noma According to Rudolf Hoess, Heinrich Himmler inspected the Gypsy camp on his visit in July 1942. Hoess wrote in his autobiography: Himmler inspected everything thoroughly. He saw the over-crowded barracks, the inadequate hygienic conditions, the overflowing infirmaries and the sick in the isolation ward. [...] Himmler saw everything in detail, as it really was. Then he ordered me to gas them. Those who were still able to work were to be selected, just as with the Jews. The selection of the Gypsies took two years, according to Hoess; 1408 Gypsies who were able to work were transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where there is a memorial sculpture in commemoration of the Roma. The Gypsy Family camp was liquidated on August 2, 1944, according to the autobiography of Commandant Rudolf Hoess, who wrote the following: By August 1944 there were only about four thousand Gypsies left and these had to go into the gas chambers. Until that time they did not know what fate was in store for them. Only as they were marched barrack after barrack to Crematory I did they figure out what was going on. When Hoess wrote that the Gypsies were marched to Crematory 1, he was undoubtedly referring to Krema II, which was a short distance from the Gypsy camp. Crematory 1, or Krema I in German, was in the main Auschwitz camp, three kilometers from Birkenau. The Museum guidebook says that the number of Gypsies gassed on August 2, 1942 in Krema IV was 2,897. Hoess had a tendency to exaggerate; he confessed that 3 million people died at Auschwitz-Birkenau while he was the commandant there. Today, that number has been reduced by more than half by other reliable sources. It was not until May 1944 that the Birkenau camp became a killing factory on a mass scale with trains bringing 437,402 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz between April 29, 1944 and July 9, 1944. Many of them were sent directly to the gas chambers without going through a selection process to save those who were capable of working in the factories. Trains brought Hungarian Jews into the Birkenau camp in 1944 Zyklon-B was used at Auschwitz-Birkenau for gassing the Jews, but it was also used to disinfect the clothing of the prisoners in an attempt to prevent typhus which is spread by body lice. The German word for a room where clothing was disinfected with Zyklon-B was Gaskammer, the same term that is used by German-speaking Holocaust historians today to mean a homicidal gas chamber. In spite of all the effort to prevent typhus, there were two serious epidemics, one in the Summer of 1942 and another in the Summer of 1943. On July 23, 1942, Commandant Hoess ordered the whole Birkenau camp to be quarantined for fear that the epidemic would spread. On July 7, 1943, he again decreed that the Birkenau camp was off-limits to the German soldiers who were the camp administrators. The gassing of the Jews continued even while the camp was quarantined because of typhus. Eventually, typhus spread to the concentration camps in Germany in December 1944 and this caused many deaths in the last months of the war, particularly in the Bergen-Belsen camp where 35,000 prisoners died in only two months time. Half of all the deaths at Dachau were in the last six months of the war when a typhus epidemic was out of control in the camp. One method that was used to end the typhus epidemics at Auschwitz-Birkenau was the gassing of the sick prisoners. On August 29, 1942, there were 746 prisoners from the Birkenau camp hospital who were gassed. In 1981, the West German Prosecutor's Office issued a warrant for the arrest of Dr. Josef Mengele for his crime of sending 507 Gypsy men and 528 Gypsy women to the gas chamber on May 25, 1943 because they were suspected of being infected with typhus. Dr. Mengele had died in 1979 in Brazil, but his death was kept a secret. The prisoners considered the hospital to be the anteroom of the gas chamber; the fear of being gassed kept many of them from going to the infirmary which caused even more deaths. After visiting the factory site at the Auschwitz III camp, also known as Monowitz, on July 17 and 18, 1942, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler witnessed the gassing of Jews in the little white house, according to Laurence Rees, the author of "Auschwitz, a New History." The next day, on July 19th, Himmler ordered that the "resettlement" of the entire Jewish population of occupied Poland be completed by December 31, 1942. According to Rees, "resettlement" was a Nazi euphemism for murder. At that time, Auschwitz-Birkenau was not yet equipped to be a death factory, having only the two old farm houses that were being used as gas chambers. Himmler's order for the deportation and genocide of the Jews was made even before the means of systematic killing was in place. The Jews were told that they were going to be resettled in the East and they were encouraged to bring all their valuables with them to the Auschwitz camp. Their luggage was confiscated as soon as they arrived and all their possessions were taken from them. Their clothing was disinfected and then sent back to Germany to be given to the civilians. The photo below shows prisoners sorting the luggage and belongings that were brought to Birkenau on a transport of Hungarian Jews in May 1944. Jewish prisoners at Birkenau sort the belongings taken from a transport train Luggage piled up, waiting to be taken to clothing warehouses Holocaust survivor Ann Feig Rosenheck was 13 years old in 1944 when the Hungarian Jews in her town were sent first to a ghetto and then to the death camp at Birkenau, where 92 members of her family were killed. Rosenheck spoke to an 8th grade English class at Kate Collins Middle School in Waynesboro, VA in 2008; she told the students that she herself narrowly escaped death in the gas chamber. Rosenheck survived because on the day that she was taken to the crematorium to be gassed, the building was locked. Rosenheck was sent instead to a munitions factory that was a sub-camp of Dachau. In April 1945, she was evacuated to the main Dachau camp where she was liberated by American troops on April 29, 1945. The gassing of the Jews at Birkenau stopped at the end of October 1944; the evacuation of the survivors to other concentration camps in the West had already begun in early October. Anne Frank and her sister Margo were on one of the first transports out of Auschwitz, which took them to Bergen-Belsen, where they both died of typhus. Auschwitz survivor Zev Kedem arrived at Birkenau on November 3, 1944, according to a talk that he gave to students at Colorado State University for Holocaust Awareness week in March 2008. Ten-year-old Kedem's name had been on "Schindler's List," and he had been among the 1,100 prisoners at the Plaszow camp who were sent to Oskar Schindler's factory in Brinlitz in what is now the Czech Republic. Less than a week after he arrived at Schindler's factory, Kedem and his father were sent to Auschwitz along with four other boys and their fathers because the boys were under 13 years of age and were too young to work in the factory. According to Kedem, the gas chambers had closed just the day before, on the orders of Adolf Hitler. Kedem survived a death march out of Auschwitz and a train ride from Germany to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria where he was sent to work in a factory in one of the Mauthausen sub-camps. According to the testimony of Rudolf Hoess at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, when he was a defense witness for Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest number of prisoners in the 425-acre Birkenau camp, at any one time, was 140,000. On July 12, 1944, there were 92,705 prisoners in the whole camp complex, according to the roll call taken that day. In the main camp, there were 14,386 men. At Birkenau, there were 19,711 men and 31,406 women. There were 26,705 men in Auschwitz III. This total did not include the Hungarian Jews who were not registered, according to Danuta Czech. They were held in section B III of Birkenau, called Mexico, while they waited to be gassed or sent to another camp. On January 18, 1945, all three of the Auschwitz camps and the 40 satellite camps were abandoned by the Nazis. According to Danuta Czech, who wrote a book entitled "Auschwitz Kalendarium," the total count from the last roll call on January 17, 1945 was 67,012 prisoners in all three Auschwitz camps. According to Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, the prisoners were given a choice between staying in the camps until the Soviet troops arrived or going on a 50-kilometer death march through two feet of snow to the border of the old German Reich where they would be put on trains and taken to camps in Germany. Around sixty thousand prisoners chose to go with the Germans and many of them didn't survive the march. Those who couldn't keep up were shot and their bodies were left in the snow. Many more died on the trains taking them to Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen or Mauthausen. Otto Frank chose to stay in the camp and he survived. On January 20, 1945, the Germans came back to the camp to blow up the Krema II and Krema III buildings along with their underground gas chambers. Krema IV had already been blown up by the prisoners during a revolt in October 1944. On January 26, 1945, the Germans came back again to blow up Krema V. The next day, at 3 p.m. on January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers of the First Army of the Ukrainian Front, commanded by Marshal Koniev, entered the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps, according to an Auschwitz Museum guidebook. However, a book entitled "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Nazi Germany," written by Robert Smith Thompson, and copyrighted in 2003, gives the startling information that the Soviet army crossed the Vistula river, near Auschwitz, on January 17, 1945. The following quote, regarding the Birkenau camp, is from page 310 of this book: "The Soviets almost immediately dynamited the gas chambers." No explanation was given by the author as to why the Soviets would want to destroy the evidence of the gassing of the Jews at Birkenau. Krema V after it was blown up by the Germans Ruins of Krema II at Birkenau Selection for the gas chamber or labor Auschwitz III - aka Monowitz Monowitz gas chamber? Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors of Birkenau camp Death Statistics History of Auschwitz Home This page was last updated on September 12, 2008