Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camp
Birkenau began operating as an extermination centre in 1942 and became the largest killing site in history. The original camp at Auschwitz had been a Polish barracks converted in 1940 for Polish political prisoners, and the vastly larger camp at Birkenau three kilometres away was built by Soviet prisoners of war, most of whom died doing it. Gassing with Zyklon B, a cyanide pesticide used for delousing, was tested on Soviet prisoners in September 1941, and two converted farmhouses began operating in 1942 while four purpose-built crematorium buildings with underground undressing rooms and gas chambers were completed in 1943. The camp's decisive feature was the railway. A spur was run directly into Birkenau in 1944, and transports arrived from every part of occupied Europe — France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Slovakia, Hungary — with people told they were being resettled and instructed to label their luggage. Selection took place on the ramp. Those judged fit for labour were registered and tattooed; the rest, generally between two-thirds and nine-tenths of a transport, were taken straight to the chambers. The Hungarian deportations of May to July 1944 killed some 320,000 people in eight weeks. At least 1.1 million people were murdered at the complex, around 960,000 of them Jews, along with Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners. The Sonderkommando who worked the crematoria revolted in October 1944 and blew up one of them. The SS dynamited the rest in January 1945. Detailed reports reached the Allies from escapees in 1944, including the Vrba-Wetzler report, and the argument about whether the railway lines should have been bombed has run ever since. The site was made a museum by the Polish parliament in 1947 and receives some two million visitors a year.
- Year: 1942 CE
- Category: Political
