Auschwitz camp. Auschwitz concentration camp. Concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Concentration camps

A museum was created on the territory of the camp in 1947, which is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Above the entrance to the first of the camps of the complex (Auschwitz 1), the Nazis placed the slogan: “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work sets you free”). The cast iron inscription was stolen on the night of Friday 12/18/2009 and found three days later, sawn into three parts and prepared for transportation to Sweden, 5 men suspected of this crime were arrested. After the theft, the inscription was replaced by a copy made during the restoration of the original in 2006.

Structure

The complex consisted of three main camps: Auschwitz 1, Auschwitz 2 and Auschwitz 3.

Auschwitz 1

After this area of ​​Poland was occupied by German troops in 1939, Auschwitz was renamed Auschwitz. The first concentration camp in Auschwitz was Auschwitz 1, which subsequently served as the administrative center of the entire complex. It was founded on May 20, 1940, on the basis of two- and three-story brick buildings of former Polish and earlier Austrian barracks. Due to the fact that it was decided to create a concentration camp in Auschwitz, the Polish population was evicted from the territory adjacent to it. This happened in two stages; the first took place in June 1940. Then about 2 thousand people living near the former barracks of the Polish army and the buildings of the Polish tobacco monopoly were evicted. The second stage of eviction, July 1940, involved residents of Korotkaya, Polnaya and Legionov streets. In November of the same year, a third eviction occurred; it affected the Zasole district. Eviction activities continued in 1941; in March and April, residents of the villages of Babice, Budy, Rajsko, Brzezinka, Broszczkowice, Plawy and Harmenze were evicted. In general, people were evicted from an area of ​​40 km" and it was declared the camp’s area of ​​interest; in 1941-1943, subsidiary agricultural camps were created on this territory: fish farms, poultry and cattle farms.

On September 3, 1941, by order of the deputy camp commandant, SS Obersturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the first test of gas etching with Zyklon B was carried out in block 11, as a result of which about 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 other prisoners, mostly sick, died. The test was considered successful and one of the bunkers was converted into a gas chamber and crematorium. The cell operated from 1941 to 1942, and then it was rebuilt into an SS bomb shelter. The chamber and crematorium were subsequently recreated from the original parts and exist to this day as a monument to Nazi brutality.

Auschwitz 2

Auschwitz 2 (also known as Birkenau, or Brzezinka) is what is usually meant when talking about Auschwitz itself. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies and prisoners of other nationalities were kept there in one-story wooden barracks. The number of victims of this camp was more than a million people. Construction of this part of the camp began in October 1941. There were four construction sites in total. In 1942, the operation of Section I began (there were men's and women's camps); in 1943-44 - camps located on construction site II (Gypsy camp, men's quarantine camp, men's hospital camp, Jewish family camp, warehouses and "Depot camp", that is, a camp for Hungarian Jews). In 1944, construction began on construction site III; Jewish women lived there in unfinished barracks in June and July 1944, whose names were not included in the camp registration books. This camp was also called “Depotcamp”, and then “Mexico”. Section IV was never developed.

New prisoners arrived daily by train to Auschwitz 2 from all over occupied Europe. Those who arrived were divided into four groups.

The first group, which made up approximately ¾ of all those brought, was sent to the gas chambers within several hours. This group included women, children, old people and all those who had not passed a medical examination to determine their full suitability for work. More than 20,000 people could be killed in the camp each day.

Auschwitz 2 had 4 gas chambers and 4 crematoria. All four crematoria came into operation in 1943: 1.03 - crematorium I, 25.06 - crematorium II, 22.03 - crematorium III, 4.04 - crematorium IV. The average number of corpses burned in 24 hours, taking into account a three-hour break per day for cleaning the ovens, in the 30 ovens of the first two crematoria was 5,000, and in the 16 ovens of crematoria I and II - 3,000.

The second group of prisoners was sent to slave labor at industrial enterprises of various companies. From 1940 to 1945 In the Auschwitz complex, about 405 thousand prisoners were assigned to factories. Of these, more than 340 thousand died from disease and beatings, or were executed. There is a known case when the German tycoon, Oskar Schindler, saved about 1000 Jews by ransoming them to work in his factory and taking them from Auschwitz to Krakow.

The third group, mostly twins and dwarfs, were sent to various medical experiments, in particular to Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the “angel of death.”

The fourth group, mostly women, were selected into the "Canada" group for personal use by the Germans as servants and personal slaves, as well as for sorting the personal property of prisoners arriving at the camp. The name "Canada" was chosen as a mockery of Polish prisoners - in Poland the word "Canada" was often used as an exclamation when seeing a valuable gift. Previously, Polish emigrants often sent gifts to their homeland from Canada. Auschwitz was partly maintained by prisoners, who were periodically killed and replaced with new ones. About 6,000 SS members watched everything.

By 1943, a resistance group had formed in the camp, which helped some prisoners escape, and in October 1944, the group destroyed one of the crematoria. In connection with the approach of Soviet troops, the Auschwitz administration began evacuating prisoners to camps located in Germany. On January 25, the SS set fire to 35 warehouse barracks, which were full of things taken from Jews; they did not have time to take them out.

When Soviet soldiers occupied Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they found about 7.5 thousand surviving prisoners there, and in the partially surviving warehouse barracks - 1,185,345 men's and women's suits, 43,255 pairs of men's and women's shoes, 13,694 carpets , a huge number of toothbrushes and shaving brushes, as well as other small household items. More than 58 thousand prisoners were taken away or killed by the Germans.

In memory of the victims of the camp, Poland created a museum on the site of Auschwitz in 1947.

Auschwitz 3

Auschwitz 3 was a group of approximately 40 small camps set up in factories and mines around a common complex. The largest of these camps was Manowitz, which took its name from a Polish village located on its territory. It became operational in May 1942 and was assigned to IG Farben. Such camps were regularly visited by doctors and the weak and sick were selected for the Birkenau gas chambers.

On October 16, 1942, the central leadership in Berlin issued an order to build a kennel for 250 service dogs in Auschwitz; it was planned on a grand scale and 81,000 marks were allocated. During the construction of the facility, the point of view of the camp veterinarian was taken into account and all measures were taken to create good sanitary conditions. They did not forget to set aside a large area with lawns for dogs, and built a veterinary hospital and a special kitchen. This fact deserves special attention if we imagine that simultaneously with this concern for animals, the camp authorities treated with complete indifference to the sanitary and hygienic conditions in which thousands of camp prisoners lived. From the memoirs of Commandant Rudolf Höss:

Over the entire history of Auschwitz, there were about 700 escape attempts, 300 of which were successful, but if someone escaped, all his relatives were arrested and sent to the camp, and all prisoners from his block were killed. This was a very effective method of preventing escape attempts. In 1996, the German government declared January 27, the day of the liberation of Auschwitz, an official day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust.

Chronology

Categories of prisoners

• Gypsies
• members of the resistance movement (mostly Polish)
• Jehovah's Witnesses (purple triangles)
• German criminals and antisocial elements
• Homosexuals

Concentration camp prisoners were designated by triangles (“winkels”) of different colors, depending on the reason for which they were sent to the camp. For example, political prisoners were designated with red triangles, criminals with green triangles, antisocial prisoners with black triangles, members of the Jehovah's Witnesses organization with purple triangles, and homosexuals with pink triangles.

Camp jargon

• “Canada” - a warehouse with things from the murdered Jews; there were two “Canadas”: the first was located on the territory of the mother camp (Auschwitz 1), the second - in the western part in Birkenau;
• "capo" - a prisoner who performs administrative work and supervises the work crew;
• “Muslim(s)” - a prisoner who was in a stage of extreme exhaustion; they resembled skeletons, their bones were barely covered by skin, their eyes were clouded, and general physical exhaustion was accompanied by mental exhaustion;
• “organization” - find a way to get food, clothing, medicine and other household items not by robbing your comrades, but, for example, by secretly taking them from warehouses controlled by the SS;
• “go to the wire” - commit suicide by touching the barbed wire under high voltage current (often the prisoner did not have time to reach the wire: he was killed by the SS sentries keeping watch on the watchtowers);

Number of victims

The exact number of deaths in Auschwitz is impossible to establish, since many documents were destroyed, in addition, the Germans did not keep records of victims sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arrival. Modern historians agree that between 1.1 and 1.6 million people were killed at Auschwitz, most of whom were Jews. This estimate was obtained indirectly, through a study of deportation lists and a study of data on the arrival of trains at Auschwitz.

French historian Georges Weller in 1983 was one of the first to use deportation data, and based on it he estimated the number of people killed at Auschwitz at 1,613,000 people, 1,440,000 of whom were Jews and 146,000 Poles. A later work by the Polish historian Franciszek Pieper, considered the most authoritative to date, provides the following assessment:

• 1,100,000 Jews
• 140,000-150,000 Poles
• 100,000 Russians
• 23,000 gypsies

In addition, an unknown number of homosexuals were killed in the camp.

Of the approximately 16 thousand Soviet prisoners of war held in the camp, 96 people survived.

Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943, in his testimony at the Nuremberg Tribunal estimated the death toll at 2.5 million, although he claimed that he did not know the exact number because he did not keep records. This is what he says in his memoirs.

However, it must be taken into account that Hess did not indicate such states as Austria, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, USSR, Italy.

Eichmann, in his report to Himmler, gave the figure of 4 million Jews exterminated in all camps, in addition to 1 million killed in mobile cells. It is possible that the figure of 4 million dead (2.5 million Jews and 1.5 million Poles), long carved on a memorial in Poland, was taken from this report. The latter estimate was perceived rather skeptically by Western historians, and was replaced by 1.1-1.5 million in post-Soviet times.

Experiments on people

Medical experiments and experiments were widely practiced in the camp. The effects of chemicals on the human body were studied. The latest pharmaceuticals were tested. Prisoners were artificially infected with malaria, hepatitis and other dangerous diseases as an experiment. Nazi doctors trained in performing surgeries on healthy people. Castration of men and sterilization of women, especially young women, accompanied by removal of the ovaries, were common.

According to the memoirs of David Sures from Greece:

Economy of Auschwitz

The Auschwitz administration took professional pride in turning the camp into a profitable enterprise - in addition to the use of luggage and personal belongings, the remains of victims were also subject to disposal: dental crowns made of precious metals, women's hair used for stuffing mattresses and making linings, bones ground into bone meal, from which produced superphosphate at German chemical plants, and much more. Particularly large profits were generated by the exploitation of slave labor of prisoners from the so-called subsidiary camps of Auschwitz, turned into a means of slow murder (under Auschwitz III, 45 of them were created, mainly in Silesia). In addition to the camp itself, income was received by the state treasury of the Third Reich, where from this source in 1943 more than two million marks were received monthly, and especially by the largest German companies (I. G. Farbenindustri, Krupp, Siemens-Schuckert and many others) , for whom the exploitation of Auschwitz prisoners was several times cheaper than the labor of civilian workers. The Aryan population of the Third Reich also received tangible benefits from the camp, among whom clothes, shoes and other personal belongings (including children's toys) of the victims of Auschwitz, as well as “German science” were distributed (special hospitals, laboratories and other institutions were built in Auschwitz, where German professors and doctors who carried out monstrous “medical experiments” had unlimited human material at their disposal (see Concentration camps).

Resistance

There is evidence that even under the conditions of Auschwitz there was Jewish resistance to the machine of terror. According to some reports, there were isolated attempts at uprising on the trains that were transporting Jews to the camp; Jews were part of underground groups created by prisoners of different nationalities in Auschwitz, and, in particular, preparing escapes (out of 667 escape attempts, only 200 were successful, including for several Jews; from the testimony of two of them, A. Wetzler and W. Rosenberg , who escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944 and reached Slovakia two weeks later, the governments and public of Western countries for the first time received reliable information about what was happening in the camp); There were quite numerous cases of indirect resistance - loud, contrary to categorical prohibitions, singing prayers on the way to the gas chambers, secret prayer meetings and fasting on Yom Kippur in labor camps, etc. The largest act of resistance occurred on September 4 or 5 (by other data - October 7) 1944, when a group of Sonderkommando, consisting of Greek Jews, set fire to one of the crematoria and threw two nearby SS men into the flames. The rebels even managed to cut the barbed wire and get out of the camp, but the camp's many thousands of SS personnel, brought into action by the Auschwitz administration, which feared a general uprising (historians do not deny the possibility of such a plan), quickly dealt with them.

Evacuation

In November 1944, G. Himmler, wanting to hide traces of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz, ordered the dismantling of the gas chamber equipment and the evacuation of the surviving camp prisoners deep into Germany. The Nazi leadership intended to completely destroy all camp buildings, razing Auschwitz to the ground, but did not have time to implement these plans - Soviet troops burst into the camp on January 27, 1945, and found 7,650 emaciated and sick prisoners there, preserved crematoria, part of the barracks and numerous camp documents. At the so-called Auschwitz trials (in Poland, starting in 1947, then in England, France, Greece and other countries, and since 1960 in Germany and Austria), retribution overtook only a small part of the SS camp personnel - out of several hundred who appeared before the trial, several dozen were sentenced to death (including commandant O.R. Hess and B. Tesch, who supervised the construction of crematoria); the majority were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, and some were acquitted (in particular, G. Peters, general director of the Degesh company, which supplied Zyklon-B gas to Auschwitz). Many SS officers who served in Auschwitz managed to escape and find refuge in some countries of Africa and South America (among them I. Mengele, the chief physician of Auschwitz).

Auschwitz in faces

SS officers

• Aumeier Hans - head of the camp from January 1942 to 08/18/1943.
• Baretski Stefan - block chief in the men's camp in Birkenau from autumn 1942 to January 1945.
• Behr Richard - commandant of Auschwitz from 05/11/1944, from 07/27 - head of the CC garrison
• Bischof Karl - head of camp construction from October 1, 1941 until the fall of 1944.
• Virts Eduard - doctor of the SS garrison in the camp from September 6, 1942, conducted cancer research in block 10 and performed operations on prisoners who were at least suspected of having cancer
• Gartenstein Fritz - commander of the SS garrison of the camp since May 1942.
• Gebhardt - SS commander in the camp until May 1942.
• Gesler Franz - head of the camp kitchen in 1940-1941.
• Höss Rudolf - camp commandant until November 1943.
• Hoffmann Franz-Johann - second commander at Auschwitz 1 from December 1942, then commander of the Gypsy camp in Birkenau, from December 1943 - first commander of the Auschwitz 1 camp
• Grabner Maximilian - head of the political department in the camp until December 1, 1943.
• Kaduk Oswald - block chief, later report chief from 1942 to January 1945; took part in the selection of prisoners both in the camp hospital in Auschwitz 1 and in Birkenau
• Kitt Bruno - head doctor of the hospital in the Birkenau women's camp, where he selected sick prisoners to send them to the gas chambers
• Karl Clauberg - gynecologist, on Himmler's orders, conducted criminal experiments on female prisoners in the camp, studying sterilization methods
• Claire Joseph - head of the disinfection department from spring 1943 to July 1944; carried out mass extermination of prisoners using gas
• Josef Kramer - commandant of the Birkenau camp from 8.05 to November 1944.
• Langefeld Joanna - head of the women's camp in April-October 1942
• Liebegenschel Arthur - commandant of Auschwitz 1 from November 1943 to May 1944, at the same time he headed the garrison of this camp
• Moll Otto - at various times held the position of head of crematoria, and was also responsible for burning corpses in the open air
• Palich Gerhard - reportfuhrer since May 1940, from November 11, 1941, he personally shot prisoners in the courtyard of block No. 11; after the opening of the gypsy camp in Birkenau, he became its commander; spread terror among prisoners, was distinguished by extraordinary sadism
• Thilo Heinz - camp doctor in Birkenau from October 9, 1942, participated in selection at the railway platform and camp hospital, directing the disabled and sick to the gas chambers
• Uhlenbrock Kurt - doctor of the SS garrison of the camp, carried out selection among prisoners, directing them to the gas chambers
• Vetter Helmut, an employee of the IG-Farbenindustry and Bayer, studied the effects of new drugs on camp prisoners
• Heinrich Schwartz - head of the labor department of the camp from November 1941, from November 1943 - commandant of the Auschwitz 3 camp
• Schwarzhuber Johann - head of the men's camp in Birkenau from November 22, 1943.

Prisoners

see also

• Rudolf Höss - concentration camp commandant
• Holy Martyr Maximilian Kolbe
• Karl Fritzsch - deputy commandant of the concentration camp
• Witold Pilecki
• Frantisek Gajovnicek
• Joseph Kovalsky

Footnotes

Sources and links

• Article " Auschwitz» in the Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia
• The business does not promise big dividends Michael Dorfman
• Memoirs of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Franz Höss
• . newsru.com (2005-03-22). Archived from June 11, 2013. Retrieved June 10, 2013.
• Josef Mengele - factfile (English) . telegraph.co.uk.
• Search for mengele on nytimes.com
• Documentary film "Josef Mengele. Doctor from Auschwitz" (2008). Dir. Leonid Mlechin.

April 27 marked the 75th anniversary of the opening of the notorious fascist concentration camp Auschwitz (Auschwitz), which killed about 1,400,000 people in less than five years of its existence. This post will once again remind us of the crimes committed by the Nazis during the Second World War, which we have no right to forget.

The Auschwitz camp complex was created by the Nazis in Poland in April 1940 and included three camps: Auschwitz 1, Auschwitz 2 (Birkenau) and Auschwitz 3. Over the course of two years, the number of prisoners varied from 13 thousand to 16 thousand, and by 1942 it reached 20 thousand people

Simone Weil, honorary president of the Shoah Memorial Foundation, Paris, France, former prisoner of Auschwitz: “We worked more than 12 hours a day on heavy earthworks, which, as it turned out, were mostly useless. We were hardly fed. But still our fate was not the worst. In the summer of 1944, 435,000 Jews arrived from Hungary. Immediately after they left the train, most of them were sent to the gas chamber." Everyone, without exception, had to work six days a week. About 80% of prisoners died from harsh working conditions in the first three to four months.

Mordechai Tsirulnitsky, former prisoner No. 79414: “On January 2, 1943, I was enlisted in the team for dismantling the belongings of prisoners arriving at the camp. Some of us were engaged in disassembling the arriving items, others were sorting, and the third group was packing for shipment to Germany. The work went on continuously around the clock, day and night, and yet it was impossible to cope with it - there were so many things. Here, in a bundle of children’s coats, I once found the coat of my youngest daughter, Lani.”
All those arriving at the camp had their property taken away, including dental crowns, from which up to 12 kg of gold was smelted per day. A special group of 40 people was created to extract them.

The photo shows women and children on the Birkenau railway platform, known as the "ramp". Deported Jews were selected here: some were immediately sent to death (usually those who were considered unfit for work - children, old people, women), others were sent to a camp.

The camp was created by order of SS Reisführer Heinrich Himmler (pictured). He visited Auschwitz several times, inspecting the camps and also giving orders for their expansion. Thus, it was on his orders that the camp was expanded in March 1941, and five months later an order was received to “prepare a camp for the mass extermination of European Jews and develop appropriate methods of killing”: on September 3, 1941, gas was used for the first time to exterminate people. In July 1942, Himler personally demonstrated its use on prisoners of Auschwitz 2. In the spring of 1944, Himmler came to the camp with his last inspection, during which he ordered the killing of all incapacitated gypsies.

Shlomo Venezia, former prisoner of Auschwitz: “The two largest gas chambers were designed for 1,450 people, but the SS forced 1,600–1,700 people there. They followed the prisoners and beat them with sticks. Those behind pushed those in front. As a result, so many prisoners ended up in cells that even after death they remained standing. There was nowhere to fall"

Various punishments were provided for violators of discipline. Some were placed in cells in which they could only stand. The offender had to stand like that all night. There were also sealed chambers - those inside were suffocating from lack of oxygen. Torture and executions were widespread.

All concentration camp prisoners were divided into categories. Each had its own patch on their clothing: political prisoners were designated by red triangles, criminals by green, Jehovah's Witnesses by purple, homosexuals by pink, and Jews, in addition, had to wear a yellow triangle.

Stanislava Leszczynska, Polish midwife, former prisoner of Auschwitz: “Until May 1943, all children born in the Auschwitz camp were brutally killed: they were drowned in a barrel. After the birth, the baby was taken to a room where the child’s cry was cut off and the splash of water could be heard to the women in labor, and then... the woman in labor could see the body of her child thrown out of the barracks and torn apart by rats.”

David Sures, one of the Auschwitz prisoners: “Around July 1943, ten other Greeks and I were put on some list and sent to Birkenau. There we were all stripped and subjected to X-ray sterilization. One month after sterilization, we were called to the central department of the camp, where all those sterilized underwent castration surgery.”

Auschwitz became notorious largely due to the medical experiments that Dr. Josef Mengele conducted within its walls. After monstrous “experiments” in castration, sterilization, and irradiation, the lives of the unfortunates ended in gas chambers. Mengele's victims included tens of thousands of people. He paid special attention to twins and dwarfs. Of the 3 thousand twins who underwent experiments in Auschwitz, only 200 children survived.

By 1943, a resistance group had formed in the camp. She, in particular, helped many escape. Over the entire history of the camp, about 700 escape attempts were made, 300 of which were successful. To prevent new escape attempts, it was decided to arrest and send to camps all the relatives of the escapee, and kill all prisoners from his block.

In the photo: Soviet soldiers communicate with children liberated from a concentration camp

About 1.1 million people were killed on the territory of the complex. At the time of liberation on January 27, 1945, by the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front, 7 thousand prisoners remained in the camps, whom the Germans did not have time to transfer to other camps during the evacuation.

In 1947, the Sejm of the Polish People's Republic declared the territory of the complex a Monument to the Martyrdom of Polish and other peoples, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum was opened on June 14.

He ordered the construction of a new camp near the Polish city of Auschwitz (about 60 km west of Krakow). The Auschwitz concentration camp (or Auschwitz in German) quickly became the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp. By the time of liberation, it included three large camps and 45 additional ones.

Auschwitz 1 ("main camp") was the primary camp. It housed prisoners, was the site of medical experiments, as well as Block 11 (a place of brutal torture) and the Black Wall (a place of execution). The infamous inscription “Arbeit macht Frei” (“Work makes you free”) was placed above the entrance to Auschwitz 1. Auschwitz 1 also housed the administration of the entire camp complex.

Auschwitz 2 (or "Birkenau") was built in early 1942 about 3 km from Auschwitz 1 and was the real killing center of the Auschwitz death camp. It was in Birkenau that horrific selections were carried out on the ramp (railway platform), after which people stood in line at camouflaged gas chambers. Birkenau was much larger than Auschwitz I and housed the largest number of prisoners, including separate sections for women and gypsies.

Auschwitz 3 (or "Buna-Monowitz") was the last to be built as "housing" for the prisoner workers at the Buna synthetic rubber plant in Monowitz. Forty-five other camps also housed prisoners who were used for forced labor.

Arrival and selection at Auschwitz

Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, asocial citizens, criminals, prisoners of war were rounded up, stuffed into cattle cars and sent by train to Auschwitz. When trains arrived at Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, new arrivals were ordered to leave all their belongings in the carriage, get off the train and line up on a railway platform known as a ramp.

Families arriving together were immediately brutally separated: an SS officer, usually a doctor, divided the people into two groups. Most women, children, elderly men, and those who appeared incapacitated or ill were sent to line up to the left; most of the young men and those who looked strong enough to withstand the hard work lined up to the right.

To be on the left meant immediate death in the gas chambers, and those who remained on the right became prisoners of the camp. (Most prisoners would later die from starvation, hard labor and/or torture). At the end of the selection, a group of Auschwitz prisoners (called “Canada”) collected all the things remaining on the train and sorted them into huge piles, which were then stored in warehouses.

These items (including clothing, glasses, medical supplies, shoes, books, photographs, jewelry, and prayer shawls) were periodically packaged and shipped back to Germany.

Gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz

The people who were sent to the left were the majority. They did not know that they had been selected to be killed. The entire system of mass murder was built on keeping this secret. If the victims knew that they were heading towards their death, they would certainly not comply.

But they didn’t know, so the victims did what the Nazis wanted from them. They were informed that they were going to be sent to work and that for this they needed to undergo disinfection and a shower.

They were taken into the first room, where they had to take off all their clothes. Completely undressed, men, women and children were led into a large room that looked like a large shower (there were even models of shower heads hanging on the walls).

The doors were tightly closed and Zyklon-B granules were poured into a hole in the roof or window, which turned into a poisonous gas as soon as it came into contact with air.

The gas killed quickly, but still not instantly. The victims, finally realizing that this was not a shower, climbed on top of each other, trying to find clean air under the ceiling. The rest scratched at the door, breaking their fingers into blood.

After everyone in the room was dead, the room had to be ventilated and the bodies removed. This was done by special teams (Sonderkommando), assembled from prisoners. It was also their duty to search the bodies and remove all the gold from them, and then place the bodies in crematoriums.

Although Auschwitz 1 had a gas chamber, most of the massacres occurred at Auschwitz 2: Birkenau had four main gas chambers, each with its own crematorium. Each of these gas chambers was capable of killing about 6,000 people per day.

Those sent to the right during ramp selection went through humiliating procedures to become camp prisoners.

All their clothes and personal belongings were taken from them, and their heads were shaved. They were given striped prison clothes and a pair of boots, which often did not fit. Each was then registered, had a number tattooed on his arm, and was transferred to one of the Auschwitz camps to work.

The new arrivals were thrown into a cruel, unfair, monstrous camp life. During the first week in Auschwitz, most learned what fate befell their loved ones, those who were sent to the left. Some never recovered from the news.

In the barracks, prisoners slept in groups of four on wooden bunks. The toilet was a bucket, which usually overflowed by morning.

In the morning, all the prisoners lined up in front of the barracks for roll call. Standing outside for hours during roll call, in hot and cold weather, was torture in itself.

After roll call, the prisoners walked to the place where they were supposed to work for the day. While some prisoners worked in the factories, others worked outside. After hours of hard work, the prisoners returned to the camp for another roll call.

Food was meager and usually consisted of a bowl of soup and bread. Prisoners were deliberately driven to death by starvation and extreme hard labor.

Medical experiments at Auschwitz

In addition, on the ramp, Nazi doctors selected subjects for experiments among the newly arrived people. They were most interested in twins and dwarfs, but they also selected for experiments people with any other characteristics, for example, with eyes of different colors.

At Auschwitz there was a team of doctors who carried out experiments, but the two most famous were Dr. Carl Clauberg and Dr. Josef Mengele. Dr. Clauberg focused on finding ways to sterilize women using unconventional methods such as X-rays and injections of various substances into the uterus. Dr. Mengele experimented with identical twins, hoping to find the secret to cloning "true Aryans."

When, at the end of 1944, the Nazis realized that the Russians were successfully advancing towards Germany, they decided to destroy evidence of their atrocities at Auschwitz. Himmler ordered the destruction of the crematoria, and human ashes were buried in huge pits and covered with grass. Many warehouses were emptied and their contents were sent back to Germany.

In mid-January 1945, the Nazis removed the last 58,000 prisoners from Auschwitz and sent them on a death march. They planned to drive these exhausted prisoners to camps closer to or inside Germany.

On January 27, 1945, the Russians reached Auschwitz. When they entered the camp, they found 7,650 prisoners who had been left behind. The camp was liberated and the prisoners were freed.

Auschwitz is a city that has become a symbol of the mercilessness of the fascist regime; the city where one of the most senseless dramas in human history unfolded; a city where hundreds of thousands of people were brutally murdered. In the concentration camps located here, the Nazis built the most terrible conveyor belts of death, exterminating up to 20 thousand people every day... Today I begin to talk about one of the most terrible places on earth - the concentration camps at Auschwitz. I warn you, the photographs and descriptions left below may leave a heavy mark on the soul. Although I personally believe that every person should touch and let through these terrible pages of our history...

There will be very few of my comments on the photographs in this post - this is too sensitive a topic, on which, it seems to me, I do not have the moral right to express my point of view. I honestly admit that visiting the museum left a heavy scar on my heart that still refuses to heal...

Most of the comments on the photos are based on the guidebook (

The concentration camp at Auschwitz was Hitler's largest concentration camp for Poles and prisoners of other nationalities, whom Hitler's fascism doomed to isolation and gradual destruction by hunger, hard work, experimentation, and immediate death through mass and individual executions. Since 1942, the camp has become the largest center for the extermination of European Jews. Most of the Jews deported to Auschwitz died in gas chambers immediately after arrival, without registration or identification with camp numbers. That is why it is very difficult to establish the exact number of those killed - historians agree on a figure of about one and a half million people.

But let's return to the history of the camp. In 1939, Auschwitz and its surroundings became part of the Third Reich. The city was renamed Auschwitz. In the same year, the fascist command came up with the idea of ​​​​creating a concentration camp. The deserted pre-war barracks near Auschwitz were chosen as the site for the creation of the first camp. The concentration camp is named Auschwitz I.

The education order dates back to April 1940. Rudolf Hoess is appointed camp commandant. On June 14, 1940, the Gestapo sent the first prisoners to Auschwitz I - 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnow.

The gate leading to the camp is with the cynical inscription: “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes you free), through which the prisoners went to work every day and returned ten hours later. In a small square next to the kitchen, the camp orchestra played marches that were supposed to speed up the movement of prisoners and make it easier for the Nazis to count them.

At the time of its founding, the camp consisted of 20 buildings: 14 one-story and 6 two-story. In 1941-1942, with the help of prisoners, one floor was added to all one-story buildings and eight more buildings were built. The total number of multi-story buildings in the camp was 28 (except for the kitchen and utility buildings). The average number of prisoners fluctuated between 13-16 thousand prisoners, and in 1942 reached over 20 thousand. Prisoners were placed in blocks, also using attics and basements for this purpose.

Along with the increase in the number of prisoners, the territorial volume of the camp increased, which gradually turned into a huge plant for exterminating people. Auschwitz I became the base for a whole network of new camps.

In October 1941, after there was no longer enough space for the newly arrived prisoners at Auschwitz I, work began on the construction of another concentration camp, called Auschwitz II (also known as Bireknau and Brzezinka). This camp was destined to become the largest in the system of Nazi death camps. I .

In 1943, in Monowice near Auschwitz, another camp was built on the territory of the IG Ferbenindustrie plant - Auschwitz III. In addition, in 1942-1944, about 40 branches of the Auschwitz camp were built, which were subordinate to Auschwitz III and were located mainly near metallurgical plants, mines and factories that used prisoners as cheap labor.

Arriving prisoners were taken away from their clothes and all personal items, they were cut, disinfected and washed, and then they were given numbers and registered. Initially, each of the prisoners was photographed in three positions. Since 1943, prisoners began to be tattooed - Auschwitz became the only Nazi camp in which prisoners received tattoos with their number.

Depending on the reasons for their arrest, prisoners received triangles of different colors, which, along with their numbers, were sewn onto their camp clothes. Political prisoners were given a red triangle; Jews wore a six-pointed star consisting of a yellow triangle and a triangle of the color that corresponded to the reason for their arrest. Black triangles were given to gypsies and those prisoners whom the Nazis considered antisocial elements. Jehovah's Witnesses received purple triangles, homosexuals received pink triangles, and criminals received green triangles.

The scanty striped camp clothing did not protect the prisoners from the cold. Linen was changed at intervals of several weeks, and sometimes even at monthly intervals, and the prisoners did not have the opportunity to wash it, which led to epidemics of various diseases, especially typhus and typhoid fever, as well as scabies.

The hands of the camp clock mercilessly and monotonously measured the life of the prisoner. From the morning to the evening gong, from one bowl of soup to the next, from the first count until the moment when the prisoner's corpse was counted for the last time.

One of the disasters of camp life was the inspections at which the number of prisoners was checked. They lasted for several, and sometimes over ten hours. Camp authorities very often announced penalty checks, during which prisoners had to squat or kneel. There were also cases when they were ordered to hold their hands up for several hours.

Along with executions and gas chambers, grueling labor was an effective means of exterminating prisoners. Prisoners were employed in various sectors of the economy. At first they worked during the construction of the camp: they built new buildings and barracks, roads and drainage ditches. A little later, the industrial enterprises of the Third Reich began to increasingly use the cheap labor of prisoners. The prisoner was ordered to do the work at a run, without a second of rest. The pace of work, the meager portions of food, as well as constant beatings and abuse increased the mortality rate. During the return of prisoners to the camp, the dead or wounded were dragged or carried on wheelbarrows or carts.

The prisoner's daily caloric intake was 1300-1700 calories. For breakfast, the prisoner received about a liter of “coffee” or a decoction of herbs, for lunch - about 1 liter of lean soup, often made from rotten vegetables. Dinner consisted of 300-350 grams of black clay bread and a small amount of other additives (for example, 30 g of sausage or 30 g of margarine or cheese) and a herbal drink or “coffee.”

At Auschwitz I, most prisoners lived in two-story brick buildings. Living conditions throughout the camp's existence were catastrophic. The prisoners brought in by the first trains slept on straw scattered on the concrete floor. Later, hay bedding was introduced. About 200 prisoners slept in a room that barely accommodated 40-50 people. The three-tier bunks installed later did not improve living conditions at all. Most often there were 2 prisoners on one tier of bunks.

The malarial climate of Auschwitz, poor living conditions, hunger, scanty clothing that was not changed for a long time, unwashed and unprotected from the cold, rats and insects led to mass epidemics that sharply reduced the ranks of prisoners. A large number of patients who came to the hospital were not admitted due to overcrowding. In this regard, SS doctors periodically carried out selections both among patients and among prisoners in other buildings. Those who were weakened and had no hope of a quick recovery were sent to death in gas chambers or killed in a hospital by injecting a dose of phenol directly into their hearts.

That is why the prisoners called the hospital “the threshold of the crematorium.” At Auschwitz, prisoners were subjected to numerous criminal experiments carried out by SS doctors. For example, Professor Karl Clauberg, in order to develop a quick method of biological destruction of the Slavs, conducted criminal sterilization experiments on Jewish women in building No. 10 of the main camp. Dr. Josef Mengele, as part of genetic and anthropological experiments, conducted experiments on twin children and children with physical disabilities.

In addition, in Auschwitz there were carried out various kinds experiments with the use of new drugs and preparations: toxic substances were rubbed into the epithelium of prisoners, skin transplants were carried out... During these experiments, hundreds of prisoners died.

Despite the difficult living conditions, constant terror and danger, the camp prisoners carried out secret underground activities against the Nazis. It took different forms. Establishing contacts with the Polish population living in the area around the camp made possible the illegal transfer of food and medicine. Information was transmitted from the camp about crimes committed by the SS, lists of names of prisoners, SS men and material evidence of crimes. All parcels were hidden in various objects, often specially intended for this purpose, and correspondence between the camp and the centers of the resistance movement was encrypted.

In the camp, work was carried out to provide assistance to prisoners and explanatory work in the field of international solidarity against Hitlerism. Cultural activities were also carried out, which consisted of organizing discussions and meetings at which prisoners recited the best works of Russian literature, as well as secretly holding religious services.

Check area - here the SS men checked the number of prisoners.

Public executions were also carried out here on a portable or common gallows.

In July 1943, the SS hanged 12 Polish prisoners on it because they maintained relations with the civilian population and helped 3 comrades escape.

The yard between buildings No. 10 and No. 11 is fenced with a high wall. Wooden shutters placed on the windows in block No. 10 were supposed to make it impossible to observe the executions carried out here. In front of the “Wall of Death,” the SS shot several thousand prisoners, mostly Poles.

In the dungeons of building No. 11 there was a camp prison. In the halls on the right and left sides of the corridor, prisoners were placed awaiting the verdict of the military court, which came to Auschwitz from Katowice and, during a meeting that lasted 2-3 hours, imposed from several dozen to over a hundred death sentences.

Before execution, everyone had to undress in the washrooms, and if the number of those sentenced to death was too small, the sentence was carried out right there. If the number of those sentenced was sufficient, they were taken out through a small door to be shot at the “Wall of Death.”

The system of punishment that the SS administered in Hitler's concentration camps was part of a well-planned, deliberate extermination of prisoners. A prisoner could be punished for anything: for picking an apple, relieving himself while working, or for pulling out his own tooth to exchange it for bread, even for working too slowly, in the opinion of the SS man.

Prisoners were punished with whips. They were hung by their twisted arms on special poles, placed in the dungeons of a camp prison, forced to perform penalty exercises, stances, or sent to penalty teams.

In September 1941, an attempt was made here to mass exterminate people using the poisonous gas Zyklon B. About 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick prisoners from the camp hospital died then.

The cells located in the basements housed prisoners and civilians who were suspected of having connections with prisoners or assisting in escapes, prisoners sentenced to starvation for the escape of a cellmate, and those whom the SS considered guilty of violating camp rules or against whom an investigation was underway. .

All the property that the people deported to the camp brought with them was taken away by the SS. It was sorted and stored in huge barracks in Auszewiec II. These warehouses were called “Canada”. I will tell you more about them in the next report.

The property located in the warehouses of the concentration camps was then transported to the Third Reich for the needs of the Wehrmacht.Gold teeth that were removed from the corpses of murdered people were melted down into ingots and sent to the SS Central Sanitary Administration. The ashes of the burned prisoners were used as manure or they were used to fill nearby ponds and river beds.

Items that previously belonged to people who died in gas chambers were used by SS men who were part of the camp staff. For example, they appealed to the commandant with a request to issue strollers, things for babies and other items. Despite the fact that looted property was constantly being transported by trainloads, the warehouses were overcrowded, and the space between them was often filled with piles of unsorted luggage.

As the Soviet Army approached Auschwitz, the most valuable things were urgently removed from warehouses. A few days before the liberation, the SS men set fire to warehouses, erasing traces of the crime. 30 barracks burned down, and in those that remained, after liberation, many thousands of pairs of shoes, clothes, toothbrushes, shaving brushes, glasses, dentures were found...

While liberating the camp at Auschwitz, the Soviet Army discovered about 7 tons of hair packed in bags in warehouses. These were the remains that the camp authorities did not manage to sell and send to the factories of the Third Reich. The analysis showed that they contain traces of hydrogen cyanide, a special toxic component of drugs called “Cyclone B”. From human hair, German companies, among other products, produced hair tailor's beads. Rolls of beading found in one of the cities, located in a display case, were submitted for analysis, the results of which showed that it was made from human hair, most likely women's hair.

It is very difficult to imagine the tragic scenes that played out every day in the camp. Former prisoners - artists - tried to convey the atmosphere of those days in their work.

Hard work and hunger led to complete exhaustion of the body. From hunger, prisoners fell ill with dystrophy, which very often ended in death. These photographs were taken after liberation; they show adult prisoners weighing from 23 to 35 kg.

In Auschwitz, in addition to adults, there were also children who were sent to the camp along with their parents. First of all, these were the children of Jews, Gypsies, as well as Poles and Russians. Most Jewish children died in gas chambers immediately after arriving at the camp. A few of them, after careful selection, were sent to a camp where they were subject to the same strict rules as adults. Some of the children, such as twins, were subjected to criminal experiments.

One of the most terrible exhibits is a model of one of the crematoria in the Auschwitz II camp. On average, about 3 thousand people were killed and burned in such a building per day...

And this is the crematorium in Auschwitz I. It was located behind the camp fence.

The largest room in the crematorium was the morgue, which was converted into a temporary gas chamber. Here in 1941 and 1942, Soviet prisoners and Jews from the ghetto organized by the Germans in Upper Silesia were killed.

The second part contains two of the three ovens, reconstructed from preserved original metal elements, in which about 350 bodies were burned during the day. Each retort housed 2-3 corpses at a time.

The word Auschwitz (or Auschwitz) in the minds of many people is a symbol or even the quintessence of evil, horror, death, a concentration of the most unimaginable inhuman cruelties and torture.
Many today dispute what former prisoners and historians say happened here. This is their personal right and opinion. But having visited Auschwitz and seen with my own eyes huge rooms filled with... glasses, tens of thousands of pairs of shoes, tons of cut hair and... children's things... You feel empty inside. And my hair is moving in horror. The horror of realizing that this hair, glasses and shoes belonged to a living person. Maybe a postman, or maybe a student. To an ordinary worker or trader at the market. Or a girl. Or a seven year old child. Which they cut off, removed, and threw into a common pile. To hundreds more of the same.
Auschwitz. A place of evil and inhumanity.

1. The young student Tadeusz Uzynski arrived in the first echelon with prisoners. The Auschwitz concentration camp began operating in 1940 as a camp for Polish political prisoners. The first prisoners of Auschwitz were 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnow. At the time of its founding, the camp had 20 buildings - former Polish military barracks. Some of them were converted for mass housing of people, and 6 more buildings were additionally built. The average number of prisoners fluctuated between 13-16 thousand people, and in 1942 reached 20 thousand. The Auschwitz camp became the base camp for a whole network of new camps - in 1941, the Auschwitz II - Birkenau camp was built 3 km away, and in 1943 - Auschwitz III - Monowitz. In addition, in 1942-1944, about 40 branches of the Auschwitz camp were built, built near metallurgical plants, factories and mines, which were subordinate to the Auschwitz III concentration camp. And the camps Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II - Birkenau completely turned into a plant for the extermination of people.

2. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, prisoners were selected and those who were found suitable by SS doctors for work were sent for registration. Rudolf Höss, the head of the camp, told them on the very first day that they “... arrived at a concentration camp, from which there is only one way out - through the crematorium pipe.” Arriving prisoners were taken away clothes and all personal items, they had their hair cut, registered and appropriated personal numbers. Initially, each prisoner was photographed in three positions

3. In 1943, a tattoo of the prisoner’s number on the arm was introduced. For babies and young children, the number was most often tattooed on the thigh. According to the Auschwitz State Museum, this concentration camp was the only Nazi camp in which prisoners had numbers tattooed.

4. Depending on the reasons for the arrest, prisoners received triangles of different colors, which, along with their numbers, were sewn onto their camp clothes. Political prisoners were given a red triangle, criminals were given a green triangle. Gypsies and antisocial elements received black triangles, Jehovah's Witnesses received purple ones, and homosexuals received pink ones. Jews wore a six-pointed star consisting of a yellow triangle and a triangle of the color that corresponded to the reason for the arrest. Soviet prisoners of war had a patch in the form of the letters SU. The camp clothes were quite thin and provided almost no protection from the cold. Linen was changed at intervals of several weeks, and sometimes even once a month, and the prisoners did not have the opportunity to wash it, which led to epidemics of typhus and typhoid fever, as well as scabies

5. Prisoners in the Auschwitz I camp lived in brick blocks, in Auschwitz II-Birkenau - mainly in wooden barracks. Brick blocks were only in the women's section of the Auschwitz II camp. During the entire existence of the Auschwitz I camp, there were about 400 thousand prisoners of different nationalities, Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners of building No. 11 awaiting conclusion of the Gestapo police tribunal. One of the disasters of camp life was the inspections at which the number of prisoners was checked. They lasted several, and sometimes over 10 hours (for example, 19 hours on July 6, 1940). Camp authorities very often announced penalty checks, during which prisoners had to squat or kneel. There were tests when they had to hold their hands up for several hours.

6. Housing conditions varied greatly in different periods, but they were always catastrophic. The prisoners, who were brought in at the very beginning in the first trains, slept on straw scattered on the concrete floor.

7. Later, hay bedding was introduced. These were thin mattresses filled with a small amount of it. About 200 prisoners slept in a room that barely accommodated 40-50 people.

8. With the increase in the number of prisoners in the camp, the need arose to densify their accommodation. Three-tier bunks appeared. There were 2 people lying on one tier. The bedding was usually rotted straw. The prisoners covered themselves with rags and whatever they had. In the Auschwitz camp the bunks were wooden, in Auschwitz-Birkenau they were both wooden and brick with wooden flooring.

9. The toilet of the Auschwitz I camp, compared to the conditions in Auschwitz-Birkenau, looked like a real miracle of civilization.

10. Toilet barracks in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp

11. Washroom. The water was only cold and the prisoner only had access to it for a few minutes a day. Prisoners were allowed to wash extremely rarely, and for them it was a real holiday

12. Sign with the number of the residential block on the wall

13. Until 1944, when Auschwitz became an extermination factory, most prisoners were sent to grueling labor every day. At first they worked to expand the camp, and then they were used as slaves in the industrial facilities of the Third Reich. Every day, columns of exhausted slaves went out and entered through gates with the cynical inscription “Arbeit macht Frei” (Work makes you free). The prisoner had to do the work running, without a second of rest. The pace of work, meager portions of food and constant beatings increased the mortality rate. During the return of prisoners to the camp, those killed or exhausted, who could not move on their own, were dragged or carried in wheelbarrows. And at this time, a brass band consisting of prisoners played for them near the gates of the camp.

14. For every inhabitant of Auschwitz, block No. 11 was one of the most terrible places. Unlike other blocks, its doors were always closed. The windows were completely bricked up. Only on the first floor there were two windows - in the room where the SS men were on duty. In the halls on the right and left sides of the corridor, prisoners were placed awaiting the verdict of the emergency police court, which came to the Auschwitz camp from Katowice once or twice a month. During 2-3 hours of his work, he imposed from several dozen to over a hundred death sentences.

15. The cramped cells, which sometimes housed a huge number of people awaiting sentencing, had only a tiny barred window near the ceiling. And on the street side near these windows there were tin boxes that blocked these windows from the influx of fresh air

16. Those sentenced to death were forced to undress in this room before execution. If there were few of them that day, then the sentence was carried out right here.

17. If there were many condemned, they were taken to the “Wall of Death,” which was located behind a high fence with a blank gate between buildings 10 and 11. Large numbers of their camp number were written on the chests of undressed people with an ink pencil (until 1943, when tattoos appeared on the arm), so that later it would be easy to identify the corpse.

18. Under the stone fence in the courtyard of block 11, a large wall was built of black insulating boards, lined with absorbent material. This wall became the last facet of life for thousands of people sentenced to death by the Gestapo court for unwillingness to betray their homeland, attempted escape and political “crimes.”

19. Fibers of death. The condemned were shot by the reportfuehrer or members of the political department. For this, they used a small-caliber rifle so as not to attract too much attention with the sounds of shots. After all, very close there was a stone wall, behind which there was a highway.

20. In the Auschwitz camp there was a whole system of punishments for prisoners. It can also be called one of the fragments of their deliberate destruction. The prisoner was punished for picking an apple or finding a potato in a field, relieving himself while working, or for working too slowly. One of the most terrible places of punishment, often leading to the death of a prisoner, was one of the basements of building 11. Here in the back room there were four narrow vertical sealed punishment cells measuring 90x90 centimeters in perimeter. Each of them had a door with a metal bolt at the bottom.

21. The punished person was forced to squeeze inside through this door and it was bolted. A person could only be standing in this cage. So he stood there without food or water for as long as the SS men wanted. Often this was the last punishment in the life of a prisoner.

23. In September 1941, the first attempt was made to mass exterminate people using gas. About 600 Soviet prisoners of war and about 250 sick prisoners from the camp hospital were placed in small batches in sealed cells in the basement of the 11th building.

24. Copper pipelines with valves were already installed along the walls of the cells. Gas flowed through them into the chambers...

25. The names of the exterminated people were entered into the “Day Status Book” of the Auschwitz camp

26. Lists of people sentenced to death by the extraordinary police court

27. Found notes left by those sentenced to death on scraps of paper

28. In Auschwitz, in addition to adults, there were also children who were sent to the camp along with their parents. These were the children of Jews, Gypsies, as well as Poles and Russians. Most Jewish children died in gas chambers immediately after arriving at the camp. The rest, after a strict selection, were sent to a camp where they were subject to the same strict rules as adults.

29. Children were registered and photographed in the same way as adults and designated as political prisoners.

30. One of the most terrible pages in the history of Auschwitz were medical experiments by SS doctors. Including over children. For example, Professor Karl Clauberg, in order to develop a quick method of biological destruction of the Slavs, conducted sterilization experiments on Jewish women in building No. 10. Dr. Josef Mengele conducted experiments on twin children and children with physical disabilities as part of genetic and anthropological experiments. In addition, various kinds of experiments were carried out at Auschwitz using new drugs and preparations, toxic substances were rubbed into the epithelium of prisoners, skin transplants were carried out, etc.

31. Conclusion on the results of X-rays carried out during the experiments with the twins by Dr. Mengele.

32. Letter from Heinrich Himmler in which he orders the start of a series of sterilization experiments

33. Maps of anthropometric data records of experimental prisoners as part of Dr. Mengele’s experiments.

34. Pages of the register of the dead, which contain the names of 80 boys who died after injections of phenol as part of medical experiments

35. List of released prisoners placed in a Soviet hospital for treatment

36. Since the fall of 1941, a gas chamber using Zyklon B gas began to function in the Auschwitz camp. It was produced by the Degesch company, which received about 300 thousand marks of profit from the sale of this gas during the period 1941-1944. To kill 1,500 people, according to Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, about 5-7 kg of gas was needed.

37. After the liberation of Auschwitz, a huge number of used Zyklon B cans and cans with unused contents were found in the camp warehouses. During the period 1942-1943, according to documents, about 20 thousand kg of Zyklon B crystals were delivered to Auschwitz alone.

38. Most Jews doomed to death arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with the conviction that they were being taken “to settlement” in eastern Europe. This was especially true for Jews from Greece and Hungary, to whom the Germans even sold non-existent building plots and lands or offered work in fictitious factories. That is why people sent to the camp for extermination often brought with them the most valuable things, jewelry and money.

39. Upon arrival at the unloading platform, all things and valuables were taken from people, SS doctors carried out a selection of deported people. Those who were declared unable to work were sent to gas chambers. According to the testimony of Rudolf Hoess, there were about 70-75% of those who arrived.

40. Items found in Auschwitz warehouses after the liberation of the camp

41. Model of the gas chamber and crematorium II of Auschwitz-Birkenau. People were convinced that they were being sent to a bathhouse, so they looked relatively calm.

42. Here prisoners are forced to take off their clothes and are taken to the next room, which imitates a bathhouse. There were shower holes located under the ceiling through which no water ever flowed. About 2,000 people were brought into a room of about 210 square meters, after which the doors were closed and gas was supplied to the room. People died within 15-20 minutes. The gold teeth of the dead were pulled out, rings and earrings were removed, and women's hair was cut off.

43. After this, the corpses were transported to the ovens of the crematoria, where the fire roared continuously. When the ovens overflowed or when the pipes were damaged from overload, the bodies were destroyed in the burning areas behind the crematoria. All these actions were carried out by prisoners belonging to the so-called Sonderkommando group. At the peak of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, its number was about 1,000 people.

44. A photograph taken by one of the members of the Sonderkommando, which shows the process of burning those dead people.

45. In the Auschwitz camp, the crematorium was located behind the camp fence. Its largest room was the morgue, which was converted into a temporary gas chamber.

46. ​​Here in 1941 and 1942, Soviet prisoners of war and Jews from the ghettos located in Upper Silesia were exterminated.

47. In the second hall there were three double ovens, in which up to 350 bodies were burned during the day.

48. 2-3 corpses were placed in one retort.

49. The crematorium was built by the company Topf and Sons from Erfurt, which installed ovens in four crematoria in Brzezinka in 1942-1943.

50. Building No. 5 is now the most terrible. Here is material evidence of Nazi crimes at Auschwitz

51. Thousands of glasses, the arms of which are intertwined like the fates of the people who took them off before the last trip to the “bathhouse”

52. The next room is half filled with personal hygiene products - shaving brushes, toothbrushes, combs...

54. Hundreds of prostheses, corsets, crutches. Disabled people were unsuitable for work, so upon arrival at the camp, only one fate awaited them - a gas chamber and a crematorium.

56. A two-story room, which, up to the ceiling of the first floor, is filled with metal utensils that were in the prisoners’ suitcases - bowls, plates, teapots...

57. Suitcases with the names of deported people written on them.

58. All property that the deported people brought was sorted, stored, and the most valuable was exported to the Third Reich for the needs of the SS, the Wehrmacht and the civilian population. In addition, prisoners' items were used by employees of the camp garrison. For example, they turned to the commandant with written requests to issue strollers, things for babies, and other items.

59. One of the most ominous rooms is a huge room, littered with mountains of shoes on both sides. Which was once worn by living people. Those who took it off in front of the “bathhouse”.

60. Silent witnesses to the last minutes of their owners’ lives

62. The Red Army, which liberated the camp in Auschwitz, discovered about 7,000 kg of hair packed in bags in warehouses that had not been burned by the Germans. These were the remains that the camp authorities did not have time to sell and send to factories. An analysis carried out at the Institute of Forensic Sciences showed that they contained traces of hydrocyanic acid, a poisonous component that was part of Cylon B. German companies produced tailor's beads from human hair.

63. Found children's things.

64. It’s impossible to stand the sight of them. I want to get out of here quickly

66. And again mountains of shoes. Children's.

67. The steps of the barracks, which currently house the exhibitions of the Auschwitz State Museum, have been crushed by millions of human feet that have visited this museum of horror for almost 70 years.

68. The gates of the death factory were closed on January 27, 1945, when 7 thousand prisoners abandoned by the Germans waited for the Red Army detachments...

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