Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau; Auschwitz III-Monowitz; and dozens of subcamps. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million died. The death toll includes 960,000 Jews, 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,00 other Europeans.
About Auschwitz concentration camp in brief
Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau; Auschwitz III-Monowitz; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis’ Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million died. The death toll includes 960,000 Jews, 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,00 other Europeans. The ideology of National Socialism combined elements of eugenics, antisemitism, pan-Germanism, and territorial expansionism. The Allies’ failure to act on early reports of atrocities in the camp by bombing it or its railways remains controversial. In the decades after the war, survivors such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, and Elie Wiesel wrote memoirs of their experiences, and the camp became a dominant symbol of theocaust. In 1947 Poland founded the Auschwitz- Birkenau State Museum on the site of Auschwitz and in 1979 it was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The camp at Auschwitz was established in April 1940, at first as a quarantine camp for Polish political prisoners. The first inmates, German criminals brought to the camp in May 1940 as functionaries, established the camp’s reputation for sadism.
Only 789 staff ever stood trial for their crimes; several, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss, were executed. As the Soviet Red Army approached Auschwitz in January 1945, toward the end of the war,. the SS sent most of the camp’s population west on a death march to camps inside Germany and Austria. Most were delivered from all occupied Europe to German extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz, Bełżecno, Cheibrno, Treblinka, Majeru, and Sobrno. Most prisoners were ordinary German soldiers and local collaborators, and from early 1942 to early 1942, senior Nazis, including Reinhard Heydrich, wrote letters to senior Nazis outlining the Final Solution. At least 802 prisoners tried to escape, 144 successfully, and on 7 October 1944 two Sonderkommando units, consisting of prisoners who staffed the gas chambers, launched an unsuccessful uprising. By the end of the first phase of the Holocaust, 500,000–800,000 Soviet Jews had been killed in mass shootings by a combination of German Einsatzgruppen, German soldiers, ordinary German soldiers and local collaborators. In January 1945 Soviet troops entered the camp on 27 January 1945. The day commemorated since 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and it is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Auschwitz camp is now home to the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland.
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