Auschwitz

Auschwitz The largest concentration camp ever, its main sites were the labour camp Auschwitz and the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland. Owing to its proximity to the industrial areas of Upper Silesia, a forced labour camp was established in June 1940. In spring 1941 the chemical conglomerate IG Farben set up a large factory there to benefit from the camp's cheap labour. IG Farben produced, among other things, the poisonous gas Cyclon B, whose effectiveness was ‘tested’ for the first time in the new camp at Birkenau on 900 Soviet prisoners of war in September 1941. Subsequently, mostly Jews, but also homosexuals, gypsies, and other groups which the German Nazis wanted to exterminate, were murdered there before the camp's liberation in January 1945.

Upon their arrival from all over German-occupied Europe, the prisoners were sorted according to their fitness for work. The majority, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were sent to the gas chambers for immediate extermination, while around 20 per cent were sent to the labour camps until they, too, were too weak to work and were exterminated. A total of 405,000 people were admitted to the labour camps, of whom more than 260,000 died. Those sent to the extermination camps were never registered, but are estimated between one and a half and two million. The camp was vacated and destroyed by the Germans on 1 November 1944. Around 60,000 prisoners were sent on a march westwards and large numbers died of illness and exhaustion. On 27 January 1945, the advancing Russians liberated around 5,000 frail inmates who had been left behind.