"Death Camp"
Auschwitz-Birkenau was a Nazi death camp established in Poland. The reason
this camp was established was because the Nazis were running out of ideas
of what to do with the Jews, Gypsies, and their Prisoners Of War. As part
of the final solution the Nazis decided to open a number of death camps
to get rid of the Jews. One was Auschwitz in May 1941. Later, in 1942,
its twin sister Birkenau was opened. These two camps were side by side
and lined with a razor wire fence.
Jews were taken from their homes and sent by train to the camp. Upon their
arrival SS officers would separate the people. Some that could work were
sent to other camps to get forced labor from or were tattooed and sent
on into the camp of Auschwitz. On the train the Jewish prisoners could
see the tall stone gates with the razor wire fences and proclaimed they
could see "Hells Gate", the gate that led to Birkenau. One thing
the Jews feared most was the horrifying gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Upon arrival all children, pregnant women, and elderly or unfit men and women were sent directly to one of the many gassing facilities. The people to prepare to be gassed were stripped of their clothes, shoes, and wedding rings. The Nazis carried out the gassings by using Zyklon B, a gas formed in crystallized pellets that reacted to the air giving off a gas. The Zyklon B pellets were originally used as an insecticide in the cabins and barracks to kill the large number of grasshoppers. One day a man experimented with the Zyklon B pellets by placing several hundred Soviet captives under ground and gassing them with the pellets. This was the first use of Zyklon B for prisoners and it was definitely not the last. From then on Rudolf Hess decided to use set gassing facilities to exterminate the Jews. He said, "In the crowded cells death came almost instantaneously the moment the Zyklon B was thrown in. A short, almost smothered cry, and it was over . . . I must admit that this gassing set my mind at rest, for the mass extermination of the Jews was to start soon . . . Now we had the gas, and we had established the procedure." These were the words of the commander of Auschwitz-Birkenau himself.
At the turning point of World War II the Germans knew they were running
out of time. That's when they decided to exterminate all prisoners
immediately. Members of the SS were filling the gas chambers with
all Jews and gassing them as quickly as possible. They marched people to
pre dug pits and shot them. Prisoners were also burnt in large open
pits. In this year, 1914, the most horrific year for Jews there were
over 1 million killed and almost 6,000 men, women, and children gassed
a day at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.
On the day January 27, 1945 the allied troops invaded Auschwitz-Birkenau
liberating the few prisoners there were left. The Germans had shipped most
of the Jews farther from Auschwitz. The endless numbers of numbers of rotting
corpses sickened the troops. The allied nations forced the German public
to come and see the camps themselves making them wonder why they did it.
Rudolf Hess was captured in 1945 by the allies. Hess was an important witness
at the Nuremburg trials, he himself was tried at Warsaw for his horrible
war crimes. He was then hung at Auschwitz-Birkenau the once ever powerful
death camp he had once commanded.