Auschwitz, the death camp was first opened May 27, 1940 on the orders of Heinrich Himmler.  The first people ever to haft to go to Auschwitz were the Polish Political Prisoners.  When the Nazi’s were in power they started putting Jews into the camps to work and to be gassed.  Since there were so many Jews and prisoners coming to the camp, Rudolph Hess was given the assignment to make the camp bigger so it could hold 30,000 slaves.  In the process he had to build another room to hold 100,000 prisoners of war.

 

Adolph Hitler said, “My first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews”.  “I freed the Germans from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience, mortally…we will train young people before the whole world will tremble.  I want young people capable of violence, imperious, rentlessiously, and cruel”.  A Jewish lady said, “They expected the worst they don’t expect the unthinkable”.  Heinrich Heine said, “A society that burns its books will eventually burn its people”.

 

About 1 mile outside the camp of Auschwitz 1 another camp Auschwitz 11Birkenau.  This was the largest of all the camps.  The camp was finished being built March 1942 in the village Brzezinka.  The prisoners in August 1944, numbered around 100,000.  As many as 200,000 prisoners were confined here during its peak.  It was the largest populated camp.

    

One of the nicknames for this camp (Auschwitz) was “Konzentrations Larger”.  It meant that it was the world’s largest grave. 

 

Auschwitz covers an area of two hundred hectors.  Auschwitz was the largest concentration and death camp ever.  There were 6 million Jews killed just by being gassed.  Another 2 million killed by labor.  In Auschwitz over twenty thousand people could be gassed and cremated each day.

 

Between 1940 and 1945 four hundred and five thousand were recorded as labors.  About three hundred and forty thousand died through executions, beatings, starvation, and sickness.  Some of the prisoners survived from the help of German industrialist Oscar Schindler, who saved about 1000 Polish Jews by taking them to work in his business.

 

 

All over the world Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, mass killings, and the Holocausts.  The name of the town that Auschwitz was in was Oswiecim.  That city later changed its name to Auschwitz also.

 

Over the years they expanded the camp into three main parts.  Auschwitz 1, Auschwitz 11, Auschwitz111.  It also had 40 other sub-camps.  On July 1, 1942 Refuge camp Westerbrok officially became Transit camp Westerbrok sending Dutch sinti to their death in extermination camps in Poland.  Between 1942 and November 1944 over one hundred four thousand Jews, and 250 Romans passed through these camps.

 

In Auschwitz the men and the women were separated.  They were all stripped down and all their clothes were taken from them.  All of their hair was cut off, and the clothes the Nazi soldiers took from the people in the camps were shipped to Canada and sold at stores.  After the Nazi took all their stuff they were either sent to work or they were going to be gassed.

 

Auschwitz 11-Birkenau had the most cruel and most inhuman conditions out of all the camps.  Most of the prisoners in Birkenau were Jews, Poles, and Germans.  All of the gas chambers and crematoria were in Birkenau.  65 train loads with fifty eight thousand three hundred and eighty were directly sent to Birkenau to be gassed.

 

Auschwitz111-Monowitz was a labor camp like the rest of the forty other sub-camps.  The people at this camp were worked to the point of total exhaustion for the Nazi firms.  So when they shipped them off in trains to Birkenau, they would be weak and some of them would die.

 

As the trains with the Jewish transports stopped at the rampa in Birkenau the people inside the train cars were brutally forced to leave the cars in great hurry so they could take the cars back to the labors camps and fill the cars up with Jews and other prisoners.  When they were in lines the lines moved quickly to the place the Nazi soldiers were leading them, either to the gas chambers or either to forced labor.  The ones that were sent to the labor were killed the same day the ones were killed in the gas chambers.  All the bodies were cremated in the crematoria.

 

If there were any prisoners that survived and did not have to go to the chambers were sent to Quarantine.  A prisoner at Quarantine could last a few weeks at the latest.  While at any other labor camp you could last a few months.  If the slaves lasted longer than that they became weak and could hardly move to their surroundings.  After that all of them died and the S.S. Soviet soldiers invaded and destroyed the camps and gas chambers.  Only 667 prisoners escaped from Auschwitz. 

 

 

Derek Graves

7th Social Studies

Rossville Jr.  High

Holocaust Project

Spring 2003

Bibliography