Auschwitz, a place with heartbreaking stories

More than 49 million people have visited the Auschwitz concentration camp memorial in southern Poland since it opened in 1947. More than two million visitors from around the world visit it each year. However, since the coronavirus epidemic, the number of visitors has been reduced to around 500,000. Until 1945, this massive Nazi concentration camp complex stretched some 50 kilometers west of Krakow, on the outskirts of the small town of Auschwitz. Today, there is a state museum and memorial there.

In the past, it was an industrial killing machine of unimaginable proportions. The museum alone, in the main Auschwitz camp, and the sprawling Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site, as it can be seen today, cover 191 hectares. DW summarizes what "Auschwitz" means here, in historical facts and figures:

1. The city of Oświęcim (Auschwitz)

Auschwitz, in Polish Oświęcim, was originally a small city that belonged to Austria, Prussia and then Poland again. In 1348, it was incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire and the German language became the official language.

The city's economy improved when a train station began operating around 1900. After World War I, the city became part of Poland again. Accommodation was needed for the many temporary and migrant workers in the surrounding industrial areas of Upper Silesia and Bohemia. They were housed in newly built brick houses and wooden barracks. Later, these constructions were the base of the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.

Shortly after the start of World War II, in September 1939, the city was occupied by the German Wehrmacht and annexed to the German Reich. In 1940, SS squads, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, were able to quickly turn the area into a concentration camp, the main camp Auschwitz I. Later, Auschwitz II, another huge Auschwitz death camp compound, was added. -Birkenau.

2. The Jewish Population

Before World War II, more than half of Auschwitz's 12,000 residents were Jewish. The Jewish community had grown significantly as a result of immigration. There were hardly any Germans in the place. This changed after Hitler's Wehrmacht attacked Poland on September 1, 1939 and occupied the country.

The Jewish population was forced to cede their homes to Germans, they were isolated in ghettos or, like many other Poles, deported, forced to do forced labor. The remaining Polish Jews lived crowded together and isolated from the rest of the population in the old town. From 1940, forced by the SS, they built the planned concentration camp or were sent to other parts of the country for forced labor. The few survivors were murdered at Auschwitz, after 1942.

3. The Strategic Axis

The city was located at a railway junction strategically favorable to the Nazis, because the southern railway lines from Prague and Vienna intersected with those of Berlin, Warsaw and the industrial areas of northern Silesia . This strategic axis had all the requirements for planned mass transport from the so-called "Old Reich", that is, the areas of Germany within the 1937 borders.

Adolf Eichmann, an SS officer, was responsible for the rail transport of deportees to death camps in the east. He also prepared the files for the "Wannsee Conference" on January 20, 1942, at the Reich Security Office in Berlin. There the murderous plan of a "final solution to the European Jewish question" was decided.

4. The concentration camps

After Dachau (the first concentration camp, in 1933), Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen and the Ravensbrück women's camp, Auschwitz was the seventh and largest concentration camp. In addition to the main concentration camp (Auschwitz I), there was the huge Birkenau death camp (Auschwitz II), where the crematoria were located, other smaller concentration camps, and there were also the Buna and Monowitz labor camps.

After the Wannsee Conference, from the spring of 1942, the Auschwitz concentration camp expanded to become a systematic killing and extermination machine. The executor of this politically and racially motivated Nazi ideology was Rudolf Höss, who was in charge of the concentration camp as SS commander. Until his replacement in November 1943, he was responsible for the SS guards and for the entire administration of the Auschwitz camp.

5. The sphere of influence of the SS

The SS were in charge of instructing and directing the guards of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. As early as the spring of 1942, 2,000 SS guards were deployed to the compound. Towards the end of World War II, in the late summer of 1944, more than 4,000 SS members were on duty there. This included concentration camp guards, typists, nurses, etc. That is, employed by the SS without any rank insignia. During the entire period, more than 8,000 SS members and their relatives worked in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Control of the local industrial and artisan businesses, which had settled around Auschwitz to profit from the construction of the concentration camp, was also in the hands of the SS. There the so-called "SS settlement" took place, where the guards lived with their families, outside the concentration camp fence. It was a part of the city with many amenities for local residents.

6. The factory of death

From 1942, the camp became a place of mass extermination. About 80 percent of the new arrivals were not registered as prisoners, but were sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arrival. In the spring of 1943, additional ovens were put into operation in the newly built crematoria in the Auschwitz-Birkenau expanded camp complex. The SS proved its ability to function with the transport and extermination of prisoners: after an agonizing journey, 1,100 men, women and children were murdered in a gas chamber filled with Zyklon B. Their ashes were scattered in the surrounding lakes.

The Auschwitz concentration camp construction supervisor, SS officer Karl Bischoff, reported to Berlin in the summer of 1943: "From now on, 4,756 corpses can be cremated in 24 hours." To speed up sorting at the arrival of the transports, a three-way ramp was built in Birkenau, which can still be seen today in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In the late fall of 1944, the last transport of Jews from all of Europe arrived at Auschwitz. Among those deported from the occupied Netherlands was 15-year-old Anne Frank. His diaries, preserved by chance, are a harrowing contemporary document of the persecution of the Jews by the National Socialists.

7. Death toll

The number of Holocaust victims at Auschwitz varies. Every year new details appear due to findings in historical archives and heritage. The exact number of victims cannot be determined. Scientific estimates assume that more than five million people were deported to the Nazi concentration camp system. Very few prisoners survived.

In December 2019, the results of a research project commissioned by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial were published. More than 60 percent of the prisoners registered by the SS concentration camp administration at that time could be identified. However, the figure does not include the more than 900,000 deportees who were never registered and were killed immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Prisoner ID numbers were only tattooed on those who had survived the selection process on the so-called "Jewish ramp" and were destined to work for the system in the SS camps. Most of the deportees, old, sick, women and small children, were taken directly to the gas chambers without being searched and were brutally murdered there by the SS.

According to information from the memorial, more than 1.1 million people died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. 90 percent of them were Jews, most from Hungary, Poland, Italy, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Croatia, the Soviet Union, Austria, and Germany. Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, Catholics and followers of Jehovah's Witnesses, people with disabilities and political opponents were also victims of the Nazi extermination machine.

8. The liberation of the concentration camp prisoners

When the Soviet Army arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945, the soldiers saw only horrible images: barely 7,000 emaciated and emaciated prisoners had survived. dying, 500 of them were children. Very few could stand upright, many lay listlessly on the ground. They were too weak to march west in freezing temperatures, as SS guards forced tens of thousands of prisoners to do on so-called "death marches."

The SS hastily evacuated the concentration camp at the end of January and tried to remove the traces of their murderous machinery: files, death certificates, many things were quickly burned. Few documents and photos have survived. Most of the camp's barracks, gas chambers and crematoria were blown up on purpose.

Between 56,000 and 58,000 prisoners were sent on foot, in groups of 1,000 to 2,500 people. Almost none wore shoes or warm clothing; most wore only the fine cotton clothing of concentration camp prisoners. According to estimates, up to 15,000 prisoners died during these evacuation transports from Auschwitz. They starved and froze to death.

9. Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial

In early 1946, the Soviet occupation authorities handed over the concentration camp to the Polish state. The "Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum" was founded as a monument in 1947, by decision of the Polish parliament and promoted by ex-prisoners.

The memorial includes facilities, buildings, and barracks that have been preserved from the Auschwitz I concentration camp (main concentration camp), the nearly empty site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp (Auschwitz II), as well as the area of the current museum. The first exhibition took place in cooperation with Israel's official Holocause memorial institution, Yad Vashem.

Since 1979, the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

10. The last witnesses

Every year, on January 27, the "liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp" in 1945 is celebrated as a historical day and for collective memory. solemn hour of commemoration in the German Bundestag.

Traditionally, moving speeches are delivered on the day featuring German presidents, European politicians, Jewish witnesses to the Holocaust such as cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and the late Ruth Klüger, as well as other writers and historians. International Holocaust Remembrance Day has been taking place since 2005.

During the annual "March of the Living," from the former Auschwitz concentration camp to Birkenau, the last surviving former concentration camp inmates march hand in hand with young people from around the world. In 2020 and 2021, this could only be done digitally due to the coronavirus. The number of eyewitnesses, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, is decreasing. Their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—not just from Jewish families—will soon be left alone to carry the memories.

(rmr/rml)