3. • Concentration Camp
• Concentration Camp + Work Camp
• Concentration Camp + Work Camp + Extermination Camp
Birkenau and the other components of the Auschwitz complex combined in a single
place and time the functions of concentration camps like Mauthausen or Dachau with those
of direct extermination centers like Treblinka or Bełżec.
It represented a new category of Nazi camp, intended to carry out the economic and
exterminationist tasks of the Nazi state simultaneously and in the most efficient manner possible.
7. Auschwitz I: Stammlager:
Main Dates
1940
27 April – Following a number of inspections at various sites, Heinrich Himmler,
Commander of the SS, gives out the order to establish a concentration camp in the former
rtillery barracks in Oświęcim, known at the time as Auschwitz.
14 June – German authorities direct the first transport of political prisoners to Auschwitz
– 728 Poles, including a small group of Polish Jews. This day is recognized as the day the
amp started functioning.
n the period 1940-1945 about 405,000 prisoners are registered at the camp, of which
270,000 were men.
• 19 June – First relocation of local people in order to prevent them from witnessing the
crimes, contacting prisoners and helping them escape.
The next waves of relocation were connected with plans to develop Auschwitz. In total,
the Germans moved at least 5,000 Poles from Oświęcim and its nearby villages.
In addition, they deported to nearby ghettos the entire Jewish population of Oświęcim
(approx. 7,000).
Eight villages are destroyed and more than a hundred buildings demolished, located in
Oświęcim and the direct vicinity of the camp.
• Autumn – Polish resistance informs the Polish Government in exile in London about the
camp.
8. Auschwitz II – Birkenau:
Main Dates:
1941
• 1 March – Commander of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, pays his first inspection visit to Auschwitz.
His gives out orders to expand the camp and to supply IG Farbenindustrie with 10,000 prisoners to build
industrial plants.
• 6 June – First transport of Czech political prisoners. The start of deportation to Auschwitz of
non-Polish prisoners.
• 3 September – First mass murder of people with the use of Cyclone B. About 600 Soviet and
250 Polish prisoners die.
• Autumn – Camp authorities start operating the first gas chamber in Auschwitz I.
• October – Establishment of a Soviet POWs camp in Auschwitz I - 10,000 POW’s - In that same month, they
began being marched every day to the construction site in the village of Brzezinka (Until January
1942 – they were all dead)
• Work starts on building the second part of the camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, in place of the
Demolished village of Brzezinka.
9. Turning Point – Late 1941 – Early 1942
In reality, the camp never served its original function. While construction was still
underway, in February 1942 at the latest, the Germans decided to change the nature
of the camp and make it an integral part of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
This decision would seem to have been made for two reasons:
First place, the collapse of the German drive on Moscow and the entry into the war of the
USA, with its vast economic and military potential, radically altered the German strategic situation
in political, economic, and military terms. This situation compelled the leaders of the Third Reich
to begin treating the POWs as a labor resource, and to exploit them more widely in German
industry – mainly in Industry armament. The Birkenau camp did not meet these conditions, since
there were no industrial facilities in the Oświęcim area where the POWs could be employed.
Because of this change in policy towards Soviet POWs, the German leadership no longer directed
incoming transports from the front to Birkenau, distributing them instead to POW camps and
their labor details, such as the POW camp in Cieszyn, which supplied POWs to plants in Upper Sile
Second place, the decision to send mass transports of Jews to the concentration camps in
order to exploit them in the German war economy, and the designation of Auschwitz as one of th
centers for their extermination as well as a distribution point for Jewish labor resources, meant th
quarters had to be prepared in which they could be held temporarily. The Birkenau camp was
under construction, and, since it was no longer to be used as a POW camp, this must have seemed
like the best solution to the problem. Auschwitz II, in turn, was above all a center for the
extermination of Jews brought there to be killed.
10.
11. Auschwitz II – Birkenau: Main Dates: 1942
1 March – Auschwitz II-Birkenau starts functioning. The first of the camps to be founded inside
Birkenau, in March 1942, was the men’s camp for prisoners of various nationalities.
Until July 1943, it was located in sector BIb.
20 March - Start of mass extermination of Jews in the gas chambers. (“Bunker I” – “Red House”)
26 March – First 2,000 women arrive in Auschwitz (out of about 130,000 registered in the
camp to the end of its existence).
March-June - Start of deportation to Auschwitz of Jews from France and Belgium
March-June – Start-up of temporary gas chambers alongside Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
Spring – So-called Judenrampe, located between Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau
starts functioning.
The women’s camp opened in August 1942. Located in sector BIa
May – Start of deportation to Auschwitz of 300,000 Jews from Poland and 23,000 Jews
from Germany and Austria.
July – Start of deportation to Auschwitz of 60,000 Jews from Holland.
The construction of a complex of four gigantic gas chambers and crematoria began in mid-1942.
12. • Jews
• Poles
• Sinti and Roma
• Soviet POWs
• Jehovah’s Witnesses
• Other ethnic groups: Czechs; Byelorussians; Germans; French; Russians;
Yugoslavians; Ukrainians; and other nationalities: There were prisoners in Auschwitz
from almost every country in Europe, and even some non-Europeans.
13. Numbers of murdered people in the camp
• Jews: 1.2-1.3 million
• Poles: 80-70 thousands
• Sinti and Roma : 23-25 thousands
•Soviet POWs: 15 thousands
•Jehovah’s Witnesses
•Homosexuals:
•Other ethnic groups: Germans, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Yugoslav
•Registered prisoners: 405,000
15. “People arrive. They look through the crowd of those who
are waiting, those who await them. They kiss them and say
the trip exhausted them.
People leave.
They say good-bye to those who are not leaving and hug the children…
But there is a station where those who arrive are those who are leaving, a station
where those who arrive have never arrived, where those who have left never came back…
And when they arrive They believe they have arrived
In Hell
Possibly.
And yet they did not believe it.
They had no idea you could take a train to Hell but since they were there they got their
courage up and got ready to face what was coming
Together with their children, their wives and their old parents with their family memories,
and family papers.
They expect the worst – they do not expect the unthinkable…”
(Charlotte Delbo)
16. Selection
“When we arrived in Auschwitz,
we were already numb: the
bones, the legs were not moving
anymore. Two men in striped
uniforms, because they heard
us speaking Ladino, they told us
in Ladino, 'We are Greeks from Saloniki.
Give the children to the old people,' they told us. Again, we didn't [understand]
what this meant. How can you understand, 'Give the children to the old people?' And then
they were afraid to talk to us and that's all, 'Give the children to the old people.'"
(Laura Varon)
17. Johann Paul Kremer
Johann Paul Kremer, was born in 1883, Germany. He had three
Doctor degrees: MD and two PhD.
He joined the Nazi party in July 1932, and became an SS member
in 1935. In August 29th
, 1942, he appointed to be a doctor in
Auschwitz, where he stayed three month. He then was send back to
Münster university were he stayed until the war ended. Couth by
the British who also find his diary.
He was sent to Krakow for the first Auschwitz trial in 1947 and
sentence to death. He was saved from death because of his age
and was imprisoned 10 years in Poland. After his relies in
January 1958, he came back to Germany and began to present
himself as victim.
This raise public attention and eventually he was trial again and
sentenced to 10 more years. But, the Germans took of the years
he served in the Polish prison, so he was sent free.
He died as a free man in January 1965.
18. Three days later he perform selection in the women camp:
"September 5, 1942: At noon was present at special action in the women's cam
(Moslems) – the most horrible of all horrors […] Because of the special ration
that comes with it, consisting of a liter of liquor, five cigarettes, 100 grams of
sausage, and bread, the men are eager for such operations."
The day after he described his superb dinner and another selection
that was performed immediately after:
"September 6, 1942: Today an excellent Sunday dinner: tomato soup,
one half chicken with potatoes and red cabbage, dessert and magnificent
vanilla ice-cream […] In the evening at 8 o'clock attended another special
action outdoors."
This time he also attended the murder itself:
"September 6, 1942: […] 1,013 Jewish men, women, and children arrive from Drancy
[…] 16 men and 38 women are admitted to the camp as prisoners […] If one assumes
that the Schmelt Organization took about 200 men, about 759 people die in the gas
chambers of Birkenau. Dr. Kremer is present at the gassing.“
(J. P. Kremer, "Diary of Johann Paul Kremer ", in KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS, Oświęcim, 2003.)
19.
20. The Women Camp
• From the end of March until mid-August 1942, a total of 17,000 women, the majority of them Jewish,
were brought to Auschwitz.
• In mid-August 1942 the women camp transfer to Birkenau (probably around 5,000 died Before).
• About 131,000 female prisoners were registered and given serial numbers over the
history of the women’s camp:
1942: 28,000
1943: 56,000
1944: 47,000
• Nationalities:
The overwhelming majority of women registered in the camp were Jewish:
Jewish women: 82,000
Polish women: 31,000
Sinti and Roma: 11,000
Russians and Germans (and others): 6,000
• The evacuation of the camp: 18,672 women left with the last death march: More then 8,000 died on
the way. Many of them dead after they arrived to other camps.
• About 4,000 women were left in Auschwitz complex and were liberated by the Russian in 27.1.1945.
21. The Sauna
“They told us to get undressed and they shaved us. They shaved my beautiful blonde hair
and my two sister’s hair and we were standing naked before the soldiers.
For me it was a shock because I was a religious girl. I was never undressed
in front of a man and they made all sorts of dirty jokes about our bodies.
They stared at us and I was standing there shivering, naked, without a hair on my body,
exposed. I felt like an animal and I thought, “That’s the end.”
(Tova Berger)
22.
23. Daily Life - Hygiene
"I want to say that even when we had free time during the
war, in Auschwitz, for example, we would no t often think.
One's head would be empty.
Empty means nothing, there was nothing in it. Zero, there
was no will, no desire for anything.
If we wanted to bathe, we would not exert much effort in
attempting to do it. We rarely bathed. It was glorious when
we did.
We did not know what a tooth brush was. There were no
changes of underwear, not even one. Women missed their
period. Under those circumstances, we were not saddened
by this. It was even considered better that way, as there were
no sanitary conditions.
No bandages, no underwear. It seemed to me, and so we would tell each other, that the Germans
probably put something in our food to sterilize us. They wanted, so we thought, to prevent us
from bearing children. This feeling spread among all the women.
When we had come from home everything was still normal, we were women in every sense,
but here it had all gone wrong.
Only later, when we had reached Sweden, and after treatment, did our periods return. We had
lived in fear that we could not set up a family. [..] imagine conditions where a woman cannot take
care of her own hygiene. It was strangulation" (Bella Rozenblum)
24. Pregnancies
“We had a midwife in our block [..] and she
said ‘you have a boy’. And she took the baby.
To this day, I don’t know where the baby is. I begged her – I heard the baby crying,
and I begged her to give me the baby. I said, I don’t want to live, I want to die with my baby,
give me my baby.
I had no.. you know, I lost the strength for anything.
I can’t fight anymore, I want to die. She looked at me, sat down, and begged me to lower
my voice. She said, ‘you are so beautiful, you will find a husband, you will have children.’
and I said, I can’t live, I want to die. To this day, I don’t know where my baby is.”
(Arina B.)
25. “I delivered women pregnant in the eighth, seventh, sixth, fifth month,
always in a hurry, always with my five fingers, in the dark, under terrible
conditions. No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy these
babies. After years and years of medical practice, childbirth was still to me
the most beautiful, the greatest miracle of nature. I loved those newborn
babies not as a doctor but as a mother and it was again and again my own
child whom I killed to save the life of a woman.”
(Dr. Gisella Perl)
“And so, the Germans succeeded in making murderers of even us. To this day the picture
of those murdered babies haunts me. Our own children had perished in the gas chambers
and were cremated in the Birkenau ovens, and we dispatched the lives of others before their
first voices had left their tiny lungs.”
(Olga Lengyel)
26.
27. “I beg you
do something
learn a dance step
something to justify your existence
something that gives you the right
to be dressed in your skin in your body hair
learn to walk and to laugh
because it would be too senseless
after all
for so many to have died
while you live
doing nothing with your life.”
(Charlotte Delbo)
