Auschwitz concentration camp (German: Konzentrationslager
Auschwitz) was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and
operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during
World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I (the base camp); Auschwitz
II–Birkenau (the extermination camp); Auschwitz III–Monowitz (a labor camp to
staff an IG Farben factory), and 45 satellite camps.
Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish political
prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of
prisoners took place in September 1941, and Auschwitz II–Birkenau went on to
become a major site of the Nazi "Final Solution to the Jewish
question". From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered
Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where
they were killed with the pesticide Zyklon B. At least 1.1 million prisoners
died at Auschwitz, around 90 per cent of them Jewish; approximately 1 in 6 Jews
killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. Others deported to Auschwitz included
150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 400
Jehovah's Witnesses, and tens of thousands of people of diverse nationalities.
Living conditions were brutal, and many of those not killed in the gas chambers
died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions,
and medical experiments.
In the course of the war, the camp was staffed by 6,500 to
7,000 members of the German Schutzstaffel (SS), approximately 15 per cent of
whom were later convicted of war crimes. Some, including camp commandant Rudolf
Höss, were executed. The Allied Powers refused to believe early reports of the
atrocities at the camp, and their failure to bomb the camp or its railways
remains controversial. 144 prisoners are known to have successfully escaped
Auschwitz, and on October 7, 1944, two Sonderkommando units—prisoners assigned
to staff the gas chambers—launched a brief, unsuccessful uprising.
Prison Life:
The prisoners' day began at 4:30 am (an hour later in
winter) with morning roll call. Dr. Miklos Nyiszli describes roll call as
beginning 3:00 am and lasting four hours. The weather was cold in Auschwitz at
that time of day, even in summer. The prisoners were ordered to line up
outdoors in rows of five and had to stay there until 7:00 am, when the SS
officers arrived. Meanwhile the guards would force the prisoners to squat for
an hour with their hands above their heads or levy punishments such as beatings
or detention for infractions such as having a missing button or an improperly
cleaned food bowl. The inmates were counted and re-counted. Nyiszli describes
how even the dead had to be present at roll call, standing supported by their
fellow inmates until the ordeal was over. When he was a prisoner in 1944–45,
five to ten men would be found dead in the barracks each night. The prisoners
assigned to Mengele's staff slept in a separate barracks and were awoken at
7:00 am for a roll call that only took a few minutes.
0 comments:
Post a Comment