Auschwitz Concentration Camp

Oświęcim, Poland

Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of German Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I (the original camp), Auschwitz II–Birkenau (a combination concentration/extermination camp), Auschwitz III–Monowitz (a labor camp to staff an IG Farben factory), and 45 satellite camps.

Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of prisoners took place in September 1941, and Auschwitz II–Birkenau went on to become a major site of the Nazi 'Final Solution to the Jewish question'. From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed with the pesticide Zyklon B. At least 1.1 million prisoners died at Auschwitz, around 90 percent of them Jewish; approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romani and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 400 Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and tens of thousands of people of diverse nationalities. Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.

In the course of the war, the camp was staffed by 7,000 members of the German Schutzstaffel (SS), approximately 12 percent of whom were later convicted of war crimes. Some, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss, were executed. The Allied Powers refused to believe early reports of the atrocities at the camp, and their failure to bomb the camp or its railways remains controversial. One hundred forty-four prisoners are known to have escaped from Auschwitz successfully, and on October 7, 1944, two Sonderkommando units—prisoners assigned to staff the gas chambers—launched a brief, unsuccessful uprising.

As Soviet troops approached Auschwitz in January 1945, most of its population was evacuated and sent on a death march. The prisoners remaining at the camp were liberated on January 27, 1945, a day now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the following decades, survivors, such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, and Elie Wiesel, wrote memoirs of their experiences in Auschwitz, and the camp became a dominant symbol of the Holocaust. In 1947, Poland founded a museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, and in 1979, it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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Oświęcim, Poland
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Details

Founded: 1940
Category: Miscellaneous historic sites in Poland

Rating

4.8/5 (based on Google user reviews)

User Reviews

餅乾 (7 months ago)
Very informative, expect to take a whole day if you are walking both sides. Camp 1 (museum) has everything you need to know written, but for camp2 it’s best with guided tour or research before hand.
Jan Gerstenberger (8 months ago)
One of the must see place if you are nearby. A piece of the most terrible european history, which shouldn't be forgotten. Very impressive. Get your ticket in advance on the web, as you can get guider in your language.
S W (8 months ago)
Incredibly somber and emotional experience. Seeing the scale of what happened here is overwhelming. We visited on a nice sunny day, but I couldn’t help but feel what the conditions must have felt like for those held within the camp during the harsh polish winters. A must see for anyone to remind us of what happened and try to ensure it can never happen again.
Maxine Ann Bailey (9 months ago)
Very detailed tour, thank you Cristof. Very heartbreaking to learn of the humiliation, pain and suffering before being murdered by the sick and evil Germans involved. What they did after death was appalling and my heart bleeds for the victims.
Vjatseslav Lanberg (9 months ago)
A huge museum, which is being restored to this day and is still being preserved. Book the tour in advance because you can get alone and for free only after 15:00. We got a very nice girl guide, it was very interesting and pleasant to listen to. We visited both camps, the total tour took about 4 hours. This place is very atmospheric, creepy. It is obligatory for everyone to visit, you need to know and not forget the history so that there are no more such things.
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