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 Auschwitz I main camp was a place of extermination, effected mainly by depriving people of elementary living conditions.
It was also a centre for immediate extermination. Here too were the main supply stores, workshops and Schutzstaffel SS companies. Work in these administrative and economic units and companies was the main form of forced labour for the inmates in this camp. Birkenau was the largest camp in the Auschwitz complex.
It became primarily a centre for the mass murder of Jews brought there for extermination, and of Roma and Sinti prisoners during its final period. Sick prisoners and those selected for death from the whole Auschwitz complex — and, to a smaller extent, from other camps — were also gathered and systematically killed here. It ultimately became a place for the concentration of prisoners before they were transferred inside the Third Reich to work for German industry.
The property is of adequate size to ensure the complete representation of the features and processes that convey its significance. Potential threats to the integrity of the property include the difficulty in preserving the memory of the events and their significance to humanity. The Auschwitz camp complex has survived largely unchanged since its liberation in January The remaining camp buildings, structures and infrastructure are a silent witness to history, bearing testimony of the crime of genocide committed by the German Nazis.
They are an inseparable part of a death factory organized with precision and ruthless consistency. The attributes that sustain the Outstanding Universal Value of the property are truthfully and credibly expressed, and fully convey the value of the property. At Auschwitz I, the majority of the complex has remained intact. The Memorial today is i. KL Auschwitz was the largest of the German Nazi concentration camps and extermination centers. Over 1. The authentic Memorial consists of two parts of the former camp: Auschwitz and Birkenau.
A visit with an educator allows better understanding of this unique place. There is no way to understand postwar Europe and the world without an in-depth confrontation between our idea of mankind and the remains of Auschwitz. In the official Auschwitz Memorial podcast "On Auschwitz," we discuss the details of the history of the German Nazi Auschwitz camp as well as our contemporary memory of this important and special place. They differed from concentration camps primarily in that aside from a small number of prisoners needed to handle the mass murder installations operating the gas chambers and crematoria , burning bodies in the open air and sort out the property plundered from the murdered, no other people were kept there and therefore no large numbers of barracks or other living quarters were necessary.
The Jews brought to those centers were driven directly from the unloading ramp to the gas chambers and killed. Aside from murdering the Jews in extermination centers, annihilating the Roma and implementing long-term extermination plans concerning Slavs, the Germans theoretically killed only those Poles who actively fought the occupant or violated German laws.
In practice, however, the occupation authorities obviously extended the repression goals farther than simply fighting the resistance, to include those merely suspected, or potentially dangerous, due to their social status. On that basis people classified as belonging to the so-called leading social class, mainly members of the Intelligentsia, were killed in Poland.
Those actions, having a form of pre-planned extermination campaigns, met all the prerequisites of genocide. Although sometimes attempts were made to invest them with a preventive and repressive significance, they were actually based, as suggested by the words of Nazi leaders, on deeper foundations, namely those of the cultural and intellectual degradation of the Polish nation through the removal of its Intelligentsia.
Also of genocidal nature were all kinds of terrorist and repressive actions within the frame of collective responsibility such as pacifications, street arrests and executions of hostages.
The aim was not only to incapacitate psychologically but also to physically decimate the whole population. Nazi German concentration camps, the biggest of which was Auschwitz , were one of many measures serving the practical realization of the extermination policy beside, among others, executions and annihilation in prisons and various penal camps and ghettos.
Concentration camps used as the main annihilation method hunger combined with physical exhaustion. The death of prisoners was also accelerated by other conditions of existence in the camps: the lack of proper clothes, rest and medical care, poor sanitary conditions, as well as insufficient living conditions.
Unlike the victims of the extermination centers killed immediately upon their arrival in the gas chambers , the prisoners of concentration camps stayed there for shorter or longer periods some of them managed to survive the war. Concentration camps, being an alternative to mass executions , were a tool for the physical elimination and served at the same time the cause of disguising the crimes committed there.
The Nazi German Auschwitz concentration camp was set up in for Polish political prisoners and began to function also as an extermination center of the Jews in Due to these two roles and the predominant number of Jews and Poles in the general number of victims of the camp its history may be divided into two periods:. The concentration camp in Auschwitz opened 10 months after the outbreak of the war and, together with the Stutthof camp set up in and the Majdanek camp set up in , was one of the main sites of deportation and murder of Poles.
They were brought to and imprisoned in Auschwitz throughout its entire time of operation. Auschwitz had the function of the primary Nazi extermination center for Jews from European countries occupied by Third Reich or dominated by its allies. The intensity of the extermination campaign in the second period was several times higher. Those incarcerated and murdered in the camp included also the Roma , Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners of more than 20 nationalities.
In total almost 50 sub-camps of Auschwitz were established between In November , due to growing difficulties in managing the growing complex and more and the increasingly distinct functions of each part of it, the Auschwitz camps were divided into:.
It included Monowitz as well as sub-camps that did not fall under the Birkenau camp, mainly those located near the industrial centers. The Auschwitz I camp housed mainly the central employment office, the political department or the camp Gestapo, the garrison administration, central supply warehouses, workshops and SS enterprises — most of the camp prisoners were employed there. The largest mass murder installations in occupied Europe — in the form of gas chambers — were created in Birkenau, where the Nazis murdered most of the Jewish deportees.
In the last period of operation it also became a concentration site and labor distribution point for the German industry in the depths of the Third Reich. The tasks of the Auschwitz III camp mainly consisted of renting the slave labor of prisoners to German companies, therefore it included sub-camps established at the nearby industrial enterprises.
The second administrative division of Auschwitz, In November , two months before the liberation, another administrative division was carried out, and this division of the camps lasted until the liberation of Auschwitz in January Irrespective of the administrative divisions, commanders of all Auschwitz camps and sub-camps always reported to the main camp commander in Auschwitz I being, at the same time, the garrison commander and having the right to solve any disputes with respect to the remaining commanders.
From August through mid-January the Germans transferred approximately 65 thousand male and female prisoners out of Auschwitz to be employed as a slave labor force for various enterprises in the depths of the Third Reich. Movable property of the camp was transported away, mainly large amounts of construction materials as well as goods plundered from the victims of mass murder.
The technical elements of all gas chambers and crematoria but one were dismantled or disassembled by the end of the year. In mid-January , when the front line was broken by the Red Army and its troops were approaching Cracow, 70 km away from the camp, the final evacuation of prisoners started. From 17 to 21 January approximately 56 thousand male and female prisoners were taken out of Auschwitz and its sub-camps in marching columns.
Having reached the indicated railway station they were transported farther to the west in freight cars. Both evacuation routes, by rail or on foot, were littered with the bodies of prisoners who had either been shot or had died due to exhaustion or cold. An estimated 9 thousand prisoners of Auschwitz died during that operation.
On 20 January the SS blew up the gas chambers and crematoria that had already been put out of service some time earlier while the last one, still fully operational, was blown up on 26 January. On 23 January the warehouses , where the goods belonging to the victims of the extermination were stored, were set on fire.
After the final evacuation almost 9 thousand prisoners, mostly the ill and exhausted left behind in the camp by Germans, found themselves in an uncertain situation. Approximately Jewish prisoners were murdered in the period between the forced departure of the last evacuation columns and the arrival of the Soviet soldiers. It was only a matter of coincidence that the most of the remaining prisoners survived.
More than Soviet soldiers died while liberating the area. Approximately other prisoners were liberated in the sub-camps before 27 January and shortly after that date.
The ill were taken care of by several Soviet field hospitals and the so-called Camp Hospital of the Polish Red Cross which was set up by Polish volunteers, mainly residents of Cracow and nearby towns. Those prisoners who were in a relatively good physical condition left Auschwitz immediately after the liberation, going home on their own or in organized transports. Most patients admitted to hospitals did the same three or four months later. The German Nazis deported to Auschwitz at least 1.
Of that amount, thousand were registered and incarcerated in the concentration camp as prisoners while thousand were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival. They included almost thousand Jews , 70 thousand Poles , 21 thousand Roma , 14 thousand Soviet prisoners of war and more than 10 thousand prisoners of other nationalities.
Number of deportees. Percentage of the total number of deportees. Number of victims. Percentage of all victims. Other groups. Roma Gypsies. Soviet POWs. Country of origin.
Hungary according to the borders during the war. The Netherlands. When the Soviets entered Auschwitz, they found thousands of emaciated detainees and piles of corpses left behind. To complete this mission, Hitler ordered the construction of death camps. Auschwitz, the largest and arguably the most notorious of all the Nazi death camps, opened in the spring of Auschwitz originally was conceived as a concentration camp, to be used as a detention center for the many Polish citizens arrested after Germany annexed the country in These detainees included anti-Nazi activists, politicians, resistance members and luminaries from the cultural and scientific communities.
For one thing, it was situated near the center of all German-occupied countries on the European continent. For another, it was in close proximity to the string of rail lines used to transport detainees to the network of Nazi camps. However, not all those arriving at Auschwitz were immediately exterminated.
At its peak of operation, Auschwitz consisted of several divisions. The original camp, known as Auschwitz I, housed between 15, and 20, political prisoners. Birkenau, the biggest of the Auschwitz facilities, could hold some 90, prisoners. It also housed a group of bathhouses where countless people were gassed to death, and crematory ovens where bodies were burned. The majority of Auschwitz victims died at Birkenau.
More than 40 smaller facilities, called subcamps, dotted the landscape and served as slave-labor camps. The largest of these subcamps, Monowitz, also known as Auschwitz III, began operating in and housed some 10, prisoners. By mid, the majority of those being sent by the Nazis to Auschwitz were Jews.
Upon arriving at the camp, detainees were examined by Nazi doctors.
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