Auschwitz was the German name for Oswiecim, a town in southern Poland which was annexed to the Reich after the
Polish campaign in September– October 1939. The name is now reserved for the complex of three Nazi
concentration camps, and 36 sub-camps, which were built outside the town in 1940–2. Auschwitz I was built in June 1940 for Polish political prisoners; Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, which could accommodate over 100,000 inmates, opened in October 1941; and Auschwitz III grew out of a camp at nearby Monowitz which supplied
forced labour for the nearby I. G. Farben synthetic rubber and oil plant. To help implement the
Final Solution gas chambers and crematoria capable of disposing of 2,000 bodies at a time, and using
zyklon-B gas, were constructed at Birkenau, making part of it a death-camp similar to those built for
OPERATION REINHARD. By 1944, according to some sources over 6,000 a day were being murdered and 250,000 Jews from Hungary were exterminated in six weeks. Elsewhere in the complex hundreds were dying daily from maltreatment, from the pseudo-medical experiments of Dr
Mengele, or from execution.
A resistance network operated within Auschwitz from the start, two Polish escapers from Auschwitz I brought the first detailed news of conditions within the camps to the outside world in 1942. The full extent of Birkenau's genocidal operations was not known, however, until two years later when three Jewish escapers reached Slovakia. In October 1944 there was a revolt when one gas chamber was blown up with explosives smuggled in from a nearby armaments factory, and another was set on fire. About 250 then escaped but they were all shot, as were another 200 who were also involved. Some weeks before the camps were liberated by Soviet forces in January 1945, the
SS had begun to demolish the installations, and all the surviving inmates fit to walk had been marched into Germany.
Later, the Soviet government announced that four million people may have died at Auschwitz; and this impossible figure passed unchallenged into conventional wisdom. Only in 1991, after the fall of
communism, did the Auschwitz museum issue a revised estimate of 1.2–1.5 million victims, of whom about 800,000 were Jews.
Norman Davies
Bibliography
Garlinski, J. , Fighting Auschwitz (London, 1975).
Gilbert, M. , Auschwitz and the Allies (London, 1981).
