The camp was still a prison, this time for thousands of German POWs the Soviets forced to do labor that echoed that of the original Auschwitz prisoners. Along with some Polish people imprisoned for declaring ethnic German status during the war, the German POWs maintained the site, tore apart barracks and dismantled the nearby IG Farben synthetic rubber plant where tens of thousands of prisoners had been forced to work as slave laborers.
And a small group of survivors came back to stay. In his book Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, , Huener tells the story of how the site went from operational death camp to memorial. Most of the cadre of men were Polish political prisoners, and none of them had experience with museums or historic preservation. But even during their imprisonments, they had decided Auschwitz should be preserved. But for others, it was a place to continue the plunder. Despite a protective guard, which included former prisoners, looters stole artifacts and searched through ash pits for gold tooth fillings and other valuables.
Huener says that there is no comprehensive answer to the question of how many of those early museum workers were Jews, or why they came back to Auschwitz. Other Jews who survived Auschwitz fled Poland after being liberated, living in displaced persons camps , scattering into a worldwide diaspora, or emigrating to British Palestine.
The museum staff lived in former SS offices and did everything from groundskeeping to rudimentary preservation work to exhibit design. They staved off looters, acted as impromptu tour guides to the hundreds of thousands of visitors who streamed toward the camp, and tried their best to preserve everything that remained of the camp.
Despite the lack of modern preservation technology and questions about how best to present evidence of years of mass murder, the former prisoners who fought to preserve Auschwitz succeeded. The most notorious of the over 40, sites of systematic Nazi atrocities would be passed on to future generations. Other sites would fare differently, depending on the extent of their destruction by the Nazis and the deterioration of time. An improvised gas chamber is located in the basement of the prison Block Later, a gas chamber is constructed in the crematorium.
Of the three camps established near Oswiecim as part of the Auschwitz camp complex, Auschwitz-Birkenau has the largest prisoner population. It is divided into nine sections separated by electrified barbed-wire fences and patrolled by SS guards and dogs.
The camp includes sections for women, men, Roma Gypsies , and families deported from the Theresienstadt ghetto. Auschwitz-Birkenau plays a central role in the German plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
Four large crematoria buildings are constructed between March and June Each has three components: a disrobing area, a large gas chamber, and crematorium ovens. Gassing operations continue until November Farben invested more than million Reichsmarks about 1. Prisoners selected for forced labor are registered and tattooed with identification numbers on their left arms in Auschwitz I.
They are then assigned to forced labor in Auschwitz or in one of the many subcamps attached to Auschwitz III. January 27, Soviet army liberates Auschwitz camp complex The Soviet army enters Auschwitz and liberates the remaining prisoners. Only a few thousand prisoners remain in the camp.
Almost 60, prisoners, mostly Jews, were forced on a death march from the camp shortly before its liberation. During the forced evacuation of Auschwitz, prisoners were brutally mistreated and many were killed. SS guards shot anyone who fell behind. During its brief existence, nearly 1 million Jews were killed in Auschwitz. Other victims included between 70, and 74, Poles, 21, Roma Gypsies , and about 15, Soviet prisoners of war. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia.
View the list of all donors. Trending keywords:. Featured Content. Tags Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics. Source: unesco. Auschwitz Birkenau was the principal and most notorious of the six concentration and extermination camps established by Nazi Germany to implement its Final Solution policy which had as its aim the mass murder of the Jewish people in Europe.
Built in Poland under Nazi German occupation initially as a concentration camp for Poles and later for Soviet prisoners of war, it soon became a prison for a number of other nationalities. Between the years it became the main mass extermination camp where Jews were tortured and killed for their so-called racial origins. In addition to the mass murder of well over a million Jewish men, women and children, and tens of thousands of Polish victims, Auschwitz also served as a camp for the racial murder of thousands of Roma and Sinti and prisoners of several European nationalities.
The Nazi policy of spoliation, degradation and extermination of the Jews was rooted in a racist and anti-Semitic ideology propagated by the Third Reich. Auschwitz Birkenau was the largest of the concentration camp complexes created by the Nazi German regime and was the one which combined extermination with forced labour.
At the centre of a huge landscape of human exploitation and suffering, the remains of the two camps of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau were inscribed on the World Heritage List as evidence of this inhumane, cruel and methodical effort to deny human dignity to groups considered inferior, leading to their systematic murder. The fortified walls, barbed wire, railway sidings, platforms, barracks, gallows, gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz Birkenau show clearly how the Holocaust, as well as the Nazi German policy of mass murder and forced labour took place.
The collections at the site preserve the evidence of those who were premeditatedly murdered, as well as presenting the systematic mechanism by which this was done.
The personal items in the collections are testimony to the lives of the victims before they were brought to the extermination camps, as well as to the cynical use of their possessions and remains. The site and its landscape have high levels of authenticity and integrity since the original evidence has been carefully conserved without any unnecessary restoration.
Criterion vi : Auschwitz Birkenau, monument to the deliberate genocide of the Jews by the German Nazi regime and to the deaths of countless others, bears irrefutable evidence to one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. It is also a monument to the strength of the human spirit which in appalling conditions of adversity resisted the efforts of the German Nazi regime to suppress freedom and free thought and to wipe out whole races. The site is a key place of memory for the whole of humankind for the Holocaust, racist policies and barbarism; it is a place of our collective memory of this dark chapter in the history of humanity, of transmission to younger generations and a sign of warning of the many threats and tragic consequences of extreme ideologies and denial of human dignity.
Within the It is the most representative part of the Auschwitz complex, which consisted of nearly 50 camps and sub-camps. The Auschwitz Birkenau camp complex comprises brick and wooden structures 57 in Auschwitz and 98 in Birkenau and about ruins.
There are also ruins of gas chambers and crematoria in Birkenau, which were dynamited in January The overall length of fencing supported by concrete poles is more than 13 km. Individual structures of high historical significance, such as railway sidings and ramps, food stores and industrial buildings, are dispersed in the immediate setting of the property.
These structures, along with traces in the landscape, remain poignant testimonies to this tragic history. The camp included sections for women; men; a family camp for Roma Gypsies deported from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; and a family camp for Jewish families deported from the Theresienstadt ghetto. Auschwitz-Birkenau was also a killing center and played a central role in the German effort to kill the Jews of Europe.
Bunker I began operating in spring , the larger Bunker II in mid-summer These gassing facilities soon proved inadequate for the task of murdering the large numbers of Jewish deportees being sent to Auschwitz. Between March and June , four large crematoria were built within Auschwitz-Birkenau, each with a gas chamber, a disrobing area, and crematory ovens. Gassing of newly arrived transports ceased at Auschwitz by early November Jewish deportees arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau immediately underwent selection.
The SS staff chose some of the able-bodied for forced labor and sent the rest directly to the gas chambers, which were disguised as shower installations to mislead the victims. The belongings of all deportees were confiscated and sorted in the "Kanada" Canada warehouse for shipment back to Germany.
Canada symbolized wealth to the prisoners. Trains arrived at Auschwitz frequently with transports of Jews from virtually every country in Europe occupied by or allied to Germany. These transports arrived from early to early November The approximate breakdown of deportations from individual countries:. With the deportations from Hungary , the role of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the German plan to murder the Jews of Europe achieved its highest effectiveness. Between late April and early July , approximately , Jews were deported from Hungary.
Of the nearly , Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, approximately , of them were sent directly to the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau. They deployed approximately , at forced labor in the Auschwitz camp complex.
The SS authorities transferred many of these Hungarian Jewish forced laborers within weeks of their arrival in Auschwitz to other concentration camps in Germany and Austria. On October 7, , several hundred prisoners assigned to Crematorium IV at Auschwitz-Birkenau rebelled after learning that they were going to be killed.
During the uprising, the prisoners killed three guards and blew up the crematorium and adjacent gas chamber. The prisoners used explosives smuggled into the camp by Jewish women who had been assigned to forced labor in a nearby armaments factory.
The Germans crushed the revolt and killed almost all of the prisoners involved in the rebellion. The Jewish women who had smuggled the explosives into the camp were publicly hanged in early January The Auschwitz SS stopped gassing newly arrived prisoners by early November On orders from Himmler, camp officials began dismantling the crematoria.
The SS destroyed the remaining gassing installations as Soviet forces approached in January It housed prisoners assigned to work at the Buna synthetic rubber works, located on the outskirts of the small village of Monowice. In the spring of , German conglomerate I. Farben established a factory in which its executives intended to exploit concentration camp labor to manufacture synthetic rubber and fuels.
Farben invested more than million Reichsmarks about 2. Between July and October there was a pause in transports, due to a typhus epidemic and quarantine. Between and , the SS authorities at Auschwitz established 44 subcamps. Some subcamps, such as Freudenthal and Bruenn Brno , were located in Moravia. In general, subcamps that produced or processed agricultural goods were administratively subordinate to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Subcamps whose prisoners were deployed at industrial and armaments production or in extractive industries e. This division of administrative responsibility was formalized after November
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