Auschwitz Silver Coin Holocaust Poland World War II Israel I Jewish Remberence

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Seller: Top-Rated Seller checkoutmyunqiuefunitems ✉️ (3,666) 99.9%, Location: Manchester, Take a look at my other items, GB, Ships to: WORLDWIDE, Item: 276333807953 Auschwitz Silver Coin Holocaust Poland World War II Israel I Jewish Remberence. Further information: § Gas chambers. The camp badge for non-Jewish Polish political prisoners. Crematorium I, first gassings. Early policies. Reference no. 31. Designated 1979 (3rd session). Criteria vi. Holocaust Remeberance Coin 75th Anniversary of Auschwitz Liberation 2020 This is a Nickle Dark Silver Coin to commemorate 75th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz which was also International Holocaust Remberence Day 2020 One side has the infamous sign from the entrance to Auschwitz "Arbeit Macht Frei" which ironically translates to "Work Sets You Free" In the background is a building from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp It has the words "75th Anniversary Auschwitz Liberation 1945 - 2020" and the phrase "Never Forget! Never Again!" The other side has the train tracks entrance to nearby Birkenau Camp with the words "International Holocaust Rememberance Day 27 Jan 2020" The coin is 40mm in diameter, weighs about 1 oz and it comes in air-tight acrylic coin holder. in Excellent Condition
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Tianjin, Kuala Lumpur, Toronto, Milan, Shenyang, Dallas, Fort Worth, Boston, Belo Horizonte, Khartoum, Riyadh, Singapore, Washington, Detroit, Barcelona,, Houston, Athens, Berlin, Sydney, Atlanta, Guadalajara, San Francisco, Oakland, Montreal, Monterey, Melbourne, Ankara, Recife, Phoenix/Mesa, Durban, Porto Alegre, Dalian, Jeddah, Seattle, Cape Town, San Diego, Fortaleza, Curitiba, Rome, Naples, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Tel Aviv, Birmingham, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Manchester, San Juan, Katowice, Tashkent, Fukuoka, Baku, Sumqayit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Sapporo, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Taichung, Warsaw, Denver, Cologne, Bonn, Hamburg, Dubai, Pretoria, Vancouver, Beirut, Budapest, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Campinas, Harare, Brasilia, Kuwait, Munich, Portland, Brussels, Vienna, San Jose, Damman , Copenhagen, Brisbane, Riverside, San Bernardino, Cincinnati and Accra International Holocaust Remembrance Day     Article     Talk     Read     Edit     View history Tools From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia There are a number of Holocaust memorial days, though not all on the same day. International Holocaust Remembrance Day Советские солдаты общаются с детьми, освобожденными из Освенцима.jpeg Liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Red Army soldiers, January 1945 Date    27 January Frequency    Annual Part of a series on The Holocaust Bundesarchiv Bild 183-N0827-318, KZ Auschwitz, Ankunft ungarischer Juden.jpg Jews on selection ramp at Auschwitz, May 1944 Responsibility Early policies Victims Ghettos Camps Atrocities Resistance International response Aftermath Lists Resources Remembrance     vte The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, is an international memorial day on 27 January that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities between 1933 and 1945 by Nazi Germany, an attempt to implement their "final solution" to the Jewish question. 27 January was chosen to commemorate the date when the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. The day remembers the killing of six million Jews, two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population, and millions of others by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.[1][2] It was designated by United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 on 1 November 2005.[3] The resolution came after a special session was held earlier that year on 24 January to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and the end of the Holocaust.[4][5][6][7] Many countries have instituted their own Holocaust memorial days. Many, such as the UK's Holocaust Memorial Day, also fall on 27 January, while others, such as Israel's Yom HaShoah, are observed at other times of the year. The General Assembly Resolution 60/7 Resolution 60/7 establishing 27 January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day urges every member nation of the U.N. to honor the memory of Holocaust victims, six million Jews, “one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities,” and encourages the development of educational programs about Holocaust history to help prevent future acts of genocide. It rejects any denial of the Holocaust as an event and condemns all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief. It also calls for actively preserving the Holocaust sites that served as Nazi death camps, concentration camps, forced labor camps and prisons, as well as for establishing a U.N. programme of outreach and mobilization of society for Holocaust remembrance and education.[3] Resolution 60/7 and the International Holocaust Day was an initiative of the State of Israel. Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Israel, Silvan Shalom, was the head of the delegation of Israel to the United Nations.[8] The essence of the text lies in its twofold approach: one that deals with the memory and remembrance of those who were massacred during the Holocaust and the other with educating future generations of its horrors.     The International Day in memory of the victims of the Holocaust is thus a day on which we must reassert our commitment to human rights. [...]     We must also go beyond remembrance, and make sure that new generations know this history. We must apply the lessons of the Holocaust to today’s world. And we must do our utmost so that all peoples may enjoy the protection and rights for which the United Nations stands. — Message by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon for the second observance of the Holocaust Victims Memorial Day on 19 January 2008[9] Commemorations at the United Nations      This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "International Holocaust Remembrance Day" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) In 2006, 2007 and 2008, Holocaust Remembrance Weeks were organized by The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme. This programme is part of the Outreach Division of the United Nations Department of Public Information and was established under General Assembly resolution 60/7. In 2006 On January 24, the opening of the Holocaust Remembrance Week took place at United Nations Headquarters with the unveiling of an exhibit "No Child's Play – Remembrance and Beyond" in the Visitors' Lobby. This travelling exhibit, produced by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, opened a window into the world of children during the Shoah. It focused on toys, games, artwork, diaries and poems highlighting some of the personal stories of the children and providing a glimpse into their lives during the Holocaust. The exhibition told the story of survival – the struggle of these children to hold on to life. On 25 January the screening of the movie Fateless by Lajos Koltai took place in the Dag Hammarskjöld Auditorium. On 27 January, the United Nations Department of Public Information held the first universal observance of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day at United Nations Headquarters. In the General Assembly Hall a memorial ceremony and lecture was held under the theme "Remembrance and Beyond". It featured welcoming remarks by former Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information Shashi Tharoor; a videotaped message by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan; statements by the permanent representatives of Israel and Brazil to the United Nations, and by Gerda Weissmann Klein, Holocaust survivor, author and historian Gerda and Kurt Klein Foundation; narration of photographs of Holocaust victims memorialized on "Pages of Testimony" in the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem; as well as a performance by The Zamir Chorale of Boston; and a lecture by Professor Yehuda Bauer, academic advisor to Yad Vashem, and the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research.[10][11] In 2007 On January 29, the second annual observance of the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust was held in the General Assembly Hall at United Nations Headquarters.[12] Shasta Tharp, former Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, introduced a programme that began with a video message from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Statements were then made by Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa, president of the sixty-first session of the General Assembly, and Ambassador Dan Gillerman, Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations.[13] The keynote "Remembrance and Beyond" address was given by Madame Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor, president of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and a member of the Constitutional Council of France. The observance focused on the importance of infusing today's youth with the lessons of the Holocaust so that future generations may work to prevent hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice. Marie Noel, a student at the College of Saint Elizabeth, shared her experiences visiting former concentration camps in Poland. The memorial ceremony also focused on the disabled community as one of the many victim groups of the Nazi regime. Thomas Schindlmayr of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs highlighted the importance of education in promoting tolerance and ending discrimination against all minorities, particularly in light of the adoption by the General Assembly on 13 December 2006 of the landmark Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Additionally, a musical performance was given by HaZamir: The International Jewish High School Chamber Choir, a project of the Zamir Choral Foundation, founded and directed by Matthew Lazar. Netanel Hershtik, cantor of the New York Synagogue, recited the Kaddish. During the observance the United Nations Department of Public Information also launched a new website and resource for United Nations member states, educators and non-governmental organizations entitled "Electronic Notes for Speakers" developed for the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme by Yad Vashem – the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, and the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education and the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris.[14] The electronic notes provide survivor testimony and information materials that will equip speakers with the tools needed to conduct briefings on the Holocaust and lessons to be learned from it. The United Nations bookstore made available ten volumes of autobiographical accounts of Holocaust survivors published jointly by The Holocaust Survivors' Memoirs Project and Yad Vashem – the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes Remembrance Authority. An initiative of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust Survivors' Memoirs Project has collected over 900 manuscripts. Its mission is to provide both the victims and the survivors of the Holocaust with the dignity of a permanent historical presence, not as impersonal statistics but as individuals with names, voices and emotions. The United Nations bookstore also had a discussion by Daniel Mendelsohn about his book The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million. The Department of Public Information also marked the Holocaust Remembrance Week with two exhibits in the United Nations visitors' lobby. The first, entitled "The Holocaust against the Sinti and Roma and Present Day Racism in Europe", focused on the experience of the Roma and Sinti during the Holocaust. The second exhibit featured artwork, created by Holocaust survivors, exploring the meaning and experience of the Holocaust.[15] On 31 January, a special screening of Volevo solo Vivere (I Only Wanted to Live), directed by Mimmo Calopresti, took place. The film tells the moving story of nine Italian survivors of Auschwitz. The following day Nazvy svoie im'ia (Spell Your Name), directed by Serhiy Bukovsky, was also screened. The film, about the Holocaust in Ukraine, tells the story of local people who escaped brutal execution and those who rescued friends and neighbours during the Holocaust. Both films, produced by USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, were shown in the Dag Hammarskjold Library Auditorium. On 2 February, the third discussion paper in the Holocaust and Genocide series was published, about Hitler, Pol Pot and Hutu Power.[16] In 2008 Throughout the week of January 28th 2008, the United Nations Department of Public Information organized a number of events around the world to remember the victims of the Holocaust and underscore the value of human life.[17] The 2008 observance focused on the need to ensure the protection of human rights for all. It coincided with the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Holocaust Remembrance Day began with the joint launch of a new United Nations Holocaust Remembrance postage stamp issued simultaneously, for the first time, with a national stamp by the Israel Postal Company.[18] The two stamps bear the same design. On 28 January 2008, at United Nations Headquarters in New York, the daughter of United States Congressman Tom Lantos, himself a Holocaust survivor, delivered a keynote address "Civic Responsibility and the Preservation of Democratic Values" at the memorial ceremony and concert held in the General Assembly Hall. Other speakers included Srgjan Kerim (Macedonia), president of the sixty-second session of the General Assembly, Ambassador Dan Gillerman, Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations, and Kiyo Akasaka, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information.[17] The ceremony also featured a concert with the Tel Aviv University Buchmann-Mehta School of Music symphony orchestra in cooperation with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by maestro Zubin Mehta.[19] On 30 January 2008, the first permanent exhibit on the Holocaust and the United Nations was unveiled. Produced by the Holocaust and United Nations Outreach Programme, it presents an overview of the Holocaust in the context of World War II and the founding of the United Nations. It is seen by the 400,000 visitors who visit the United Nations Headquarters annually. In preparation for the exhibit opening, Elizabeth Edelstein, Director of Education for the Museum of Jewish Heritage, briefed the United Nations tour guides on the history of the Holocaust to further their understanding of this watershed event. Around the world United Nations offices organized events to mark the Day of Commemoration. In Brazil, an observance was held on 25 January with the president of the country, Jose Inacio Lula da Silva, and the Mayor of Rio de Janeiro, César Maia. In Madagascar, a permanent exhibit on the Holocaust was unveiled at the United Nations Information Centre. The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme also coordinated a video conference for students with the United Nations information centres in Antananarivo, Madagascar, and Lomé, Togo, and educators at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. At the United Nations office in Ukraine a round-table discussion was organized in partnership with the Ministry of Education and the Ukrainian Holocaust Study Centre. In Tokyo on 29 January, an educational workshop targeting young students focused on the links between the Holocaust and human rights issues. Also, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provided information material in English and Spanish to a number of United Nations information centers for use in their reference libraries. To help carry out its educational mission, the Department of Public Information participated in a panel discussion with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the afternoon of 28 January to highlight the importance of Holocaust education, organized by B'nai B'rith International. A second exhibit, "Carl Lutz and the Legendary Glass House in Budapest", was co-sponsored by the Carl Lutz Foundation and the Permanent Missions of Switzerland and Hungary. Carl Lutz, the Swiss Vice-Consul in Budapest, had issued certificates of emigration to place tens of thousands of Jews under Swiss protection.[17] In 2019 In January 2019, Albanian Ambassador to the UN Besiana Kadare on behalf of Albania co-hosted together with the World Jewish Congress and the United Nations Department of Global Communications an event on the theme "A story of humanity: the rescue of Jews in Albania".[20] Kadare delivered remarks at the United Nations at a briefing entitled "Holocaust Remembrance: Demand and Defend your Human Rights", marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day and reflecting on the genocide of six million European Jews during World War Two, and the little-known record of Albanians during the Holocaust in Albania, which took in thousands of Jews who would otherwise have ended up in the Nazi death camps.[21][22] In 2020 In January 2020, Chelsea FC unveiled a mural by Solomon Souza on an outside wall of the West Stand at Stamford Bridge stadium to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day. The mural is part of Chelsea's 'Say No to Antisemitism' campaign funded by club owner Roman Abramovich. Included on the mural are depictions of footballers Julius Hirsch and Árpád Weisz, who were killed at Auschwitz concentration camp, and Ron Jones, a British prisoner of war known as the 'Goalkeeper of Auschwitz'.[23] Commemorations outside the United Nations Main article: Holocaust memorial days Commemoration at Vienna's Heldenplatz, 2015 Photograph: Christian Michelides Commemorations are held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC,[24] and at Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem.[25] In Austria, commemorations of the Remembrance Day are held at the Heldenplatz in Vienna since 2012. The broad platform Jetzt Zeichen setzen! calls for participation of the civil society. Speakers include survivors of the Holocaust, antifascist activists and politicians hailing from parties throughout the political spectrum. In Israel, the national Holocaust memorial day is known as Yom HaShoah, which is held on the 27th of Nisan. However, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day is also held in Israel, on which day government officials, diplomats and ambassadors visit Yad Vashem and there are ceremonies throughout the country. Every year, as part of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs presents the annual report on antisemitism[26] before the Israeli government. The report reviews the main trends and incidents of the last year, in terms of antisemitism and combating antisemitism. See also     Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust (United States)     European Day of the Righteous     Holocaust memorial days     Holocaust Memorial Day (UK)     International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance     National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust (Romania)     United Nations Holocaust Memorial     Liberation (Holocaust memorial)     World Holocaust Forum     Yom HaShoah (April or May)     Roma Holocaust Memorial Day (2 August)     Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (24 April)     Bengali Genocide Remembrance Day (25 March)     Holodomor Memorial Day (4th Saturday of November)     International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Rwanda Genocide (7 April)     Kwibuka, marking the start of the annual official mourning period for the victims of the Rwandan genocide (7 April)     National Day of Remembrance (Cambodia) (20 May)     Pontian Greek Genocide Remembrance Day (May 19)     United Nations International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime (9 December) References "Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution". encyclopedia.ushmm.org. Retrieved 27 January 2019. "International Holocaust Remembrance Day" (PDF). Retrieved 24 January 2022. "Resolution 60/7 Holocaust Remembrance" (PDF). United Nations. 1 November 2005. Retrieved 24 January 2022. "28th Special Session of the General Assembly (1st meeting)". United Nations. 24 January 2005. Retrieved 27 January 2022. "28th Special Session of the General Assembly (2nd meeting)". United Nations. 24 January 2005. Retrieved 27 January 2022. "International Holocaust Remembrance Day". www.ushmm.org. Retrieved 27 January 2019. "International Holocaust Remembrance Day". 27 January 2019. Retrieved 27 January 2019. DW staff / AFP (dre/ktz) (24 January 2005). "UN Marks Liberation of Nazi Death Camps". DW.COM. Retrieved 27 January 2022. "Message by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon for the second observance of the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, full text". United Nations. 19 January 2007. Retrieved 27 January 2012. "The United Nations Holocaust Memorial Day" (PDF). 29 November 2018. Archived from the original (PDF) on 29 November 2018. Sources: Calendar of events for the 2006 Holocaust Remembrance Week at United Nations Headquarters "webcast". United Nations. Retrieved 27 January 2012. "Statements and other documents related to the Holocaust Observance Day". United Nations. 17 January 2011. Retrieved 27 January 2012. "The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Program - Education & E-Learning - Yad Vashem". www.yadvashem.org. Archived from the original on 29 November 2018. Retrieved 30 January 2017. Sources: United Nations Press Releases for 2007 Holocaust Remembrance Week "The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme: Hitler, Pol Pot and Hutu Power: Distinguishing Themes of Genocidal Ideology". www.un.org. 2007. Retrieved 30 January 2017. "2008 Commemoration". United Nations. Retrieved 27 January 2014. "Commemorative Stamps". Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme. United Nations. 28 January 2008. Retrieved 27 January 2014. "Memorial Ceremony and Concert, audio and webcast". United Nations. Retrieved 27 January 2014. "Besiana Kadare: "A story of humanity: the rescue of Jews in Albania"". Albspirit. 4 February 2019. Retrieved 19 December 2019. "'Leaders who sanction hate speech' encourage citizens to do likewise, UN communications chief tells Holocaust remembrance event". UN News. 31 January 2019. Retrieved 19 December 2019. "WJC and Albanian Mission to UN Held Special Briefing on Rescue of Albanian Jews During Holocaust". The Jewish Voice. 4 February 2019. Retrieved 19 December 2019. "Chelsea unveils mural with Jewish soccer players murdered at Auschwitz". The Jerusalem Post. "International Holocaust Remembrance Day". Ushmm.org. Archived from the original on 30 January 2012. Retrieved 27 January 2012. International Holocaust Remembrance Day Archived 2 February 2020 at the Wayback Machine on the Yad Vashem website     "Annual report on anti-Semitism" (PDF). mda.gov.il (in Hebrew). 2016. Retrieved 5 February 2017. 23. "Yesterdays and then Tomorrows: Holocaust Anthology of Testimonies and Readings", compiled and edited by Safira Rapoport, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002. External links Wikimedia Commons has media related to International Holocaust Remembrance Day.     International Holocaust Remembrance Day on the Yad Vashem website     International Holocaust Remembrance Day on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website     The United Nations' International Holocaust Remembrance Day page     Statement by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on IHRD     U.N. Events, Messages, & More for the United Nations' International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust     OSCE "Holocaust Memorial Days in the OSCE Region" reports Authority control: National Edit this at Wikidata         Poland Categories:     International observancesJanuary observancesUnited Nations daysHolocaust remembrance daysGerman flag flying days Holocaust European history Alternate titles: Hurban, Shoʾah Written by Fact-checked by Last Updated: Apr 4, 2023 • Article History Samuel Bak: Smoke Samuel Bak: Smoke See all media Date:     1933 - 1945 Location:     Austria Germany Hungary Poland Context:     Nazism resistance Third Reich World War II Holocaust remembrance days Major Events:     Kristallnacht Key People:     Anne Frank Hermann Göring Adolf Hitler Edith Stein Elie Wiesel Recent News Apr. 4, 2023, 10:49 AM ET (AP) Grassroots faith leaders navigate a Northern Ireland in flux Twenty-five years ago, the Good Friday Agreement halted much of the violence of Northern Ireland’s Troubles Mar. 24, 2023, 11:40 AM ET (AP) Poland honors citizens who helped Jews during Holocaust Poland's president has taken part in nationwide observances Friday to honor Poles who risked — and often lost — their lives trying to save Jews from the Holocaust during the Nazi German occupation of Poland Holocaust, Hebrew Shoʾah (“Catastrophe”), Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban (“Destruction”), the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this “the final solution to the Jewish question.” Yiddish-speaking Jews and survivors in the years immediately following their liberation called the murder of the Jews the Ḥurban, the word used to describe the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 bce and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 ce. Shoʾah (“Catastrophe”) is the term preferred by Israelis and the French, most especially after Claude Lanzmann’s masterful 1985 motion picture documentary of that title. It is also preferred by people who speak Hebrew and by those who want to be more particular about the Jewish experience or who are uncomfortable with the religious connotations of the word Holocaust. Less universal and more particular, Shoʾah emphasizes the annihilation of the Jews, not the totality of Nazi victims. More particular terms also were used by Raul Hilberg, who called his pioneering work The Destruction of the European Jews, and Lucy S. Dawidowicz, who entitled her book on the Holocaust The War Against the Jews. In part she showed how Germany fought two wars simultaneously: World War II and the racial war against the Jews. The Allies fought only the World War. The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. This word was chosen because in the ultimate manifestation of the Nazi killing program—the extermination camps—the bodies of the victims were consumed whole in crematoria and open fires. Nazi anti-Semitism and the origins of the Holocaust Discover how the Jews were discriminated, excluded and systematically disposed of their rights during Hitler's Reich Discover how the Jews were discriminated, excluded and systematically disposed of their rights during Hitler's Reich See all videos for this article Even before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they had made no secret of their anti-Semitism. As early as 1919 Adolf Hitler had written, “Rational anti-Semitism, however, must lead to systematic legal opposition.…Its final objective must unswervingly be the removal of the Jews altogether.” In Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”; 1925–27), Hitler further developed the idea of the Jews as an evil race struggling for world domination. Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in religious anti-Semitism and enhanced by political anti-Semitism. To this the Nazis added a further dimension: racial anti-Semitism. Nazi racial ideology characterized the Jews as Untermenschen (German: “subhumans”). The Nazis portrayed the Jews as a race and not as a religious group. Religious anti-Semitism could be resolved by conversion, political anti-Semitism by expulsion. Ultimately, the logic of Nazi racial anti-Semitism led to annihilation. Hitler’s worldview revolved around two concepts: territorial expansion (that is, greater Lebensraum—“living space”—for the German people) and racial supremacy. After World War I the Allies denied Germany colonies in Africa, so Hitler sought to expand German territory and secure food and resources—scarce during World War I—in Europe itself. Hitler viewed the Jews as racial polluters, a cancer on German society in what has been termed by Holocaust survivor and historian Saul Friedländer “redemptive anti-Semitism,” focused on redeeming Germany from its ills and ridding it of a cancer on the body politic. Historian Timothy Snyder characterized the struggle as even more elemental, as “zoological,” and “ecological,” a struggle of the species. Hitler opposed Jews for the values they brought into the world. Social justice and compassionate assistance to the weak stood in the way of what he perceived as the natural order, in which the powerful exercise unrestrained power. In Hitler’s view, such restraint on the exercise of power would inevitably lead to the weakening, even the defeat, of the master race. book burning book burning When Hitler came to power legally on January 30, 1933, as the head of a coalition government, his first objective was to consolidate power and to eliminate political opposition. The assault against the Jews began on April 1 with a boycott of Jewish businesses. A week later the Nazis dismissed Jews from the civil service, and by the end of the month the participation of Jews in German schools was restricted by a quota. On May 10 thousands of Nazi students, together with many professors, stormed university libraries and bookstores in 30 cities throughout Germany to remove tens of thousands of books written by non-Aryans and those opposed to Nazi ideology. The books were tossed into bonfires in an effort to cleanse German culture of “un-Germanic” writings. A century earlier Heinrich Heine—a German poet of Jewish origin—had said, “Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.” In Nazi Germany the time between the burning of Jewish books and the burning of Jews was eight years. Operation Barbarossa, German troops in Russia, 1941. Nazi German soldiers in action against the Red Army (Soviet Union) at an along the frontlines in the early days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941. World War II, WWII Britannica Quiz World War II: Fact or Fiction? Nazi-era passport of a German Jew Nazi-era passport of a German Jew As discrimination against Jews increased, German law required a legal definition of a Jew and an Aryan. Promulgated at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nürnberg on September 15, 1935, the Nürnberg Laws—the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Law of the Reich Citizen—became the centrepiece of anti-Jewish legislation and a precedent for defining and categorizing Jews in all German-controlled lands. Marriage and sexual relations between Jews and citizens of “German or kindred blood” were prohibited. Only “racial” Germans were entitled to civil and political rights. Jews were reduced to subjects of the state. The Nürnberg Laws formally divided Germans and Jews, yet neither the word German nor the word Jew was defined. That task was left to the bureaucracy. Two basic categories were established in November: Jews, those with at least three Jewish grandparents; and Mischlinge (“mongrels,” or “mixed breeds”), people with one or two Jewish grandparents. Thus, the definition of a Jew was primarily based not on the identity an individual affirmed or the religion he or she practiced but on his or her ancestry. Categorization was the first stage of destruction. Responding with alarm to Hitler’s rise, the Jewish community sought to defend their rights as Germans. For those Jews who felt themselves fully German and who had patriotically fought in World War I, the Nazification of German society was especially painful. Zionist activity intensified. “Wear it with pride,” journalist Robert Weltsch wrote in 1933 of the Jewish identity the Nazis had so stigmatized. Religious philosopher Martin Buber led an effort at Jewish adult education, preparing the community for the long journey ahead. Rabbi Leo Baeck circulated a prayer for Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) in 1935 that instructed Jews on how to behave: “We bow down before God; we stand erect before man.” Yet while few, if any, could foresee its eventual outcome, the Jewish condition was increasingly perilous and was expected to worsen. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. By the late 1930s there was a desperate search for countries of refuge. Those who could obtain visas and qualify under stringent quotas emigrated to the United States. Many went to Palestine, where the small Jewish community was willing to receive refugees. Still others sought refuge in neighbouring European countries. Most countries, however, were unwilling to receive large numbers of refugees. Responding to domestic pressures to act on behalf of Jewish refugees, U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt convened, but did not attend, the Évian Conference on resettlement, in Évian-les-Bains, France, in July 1938. In his invitation to government leaders, Roosevelt specified that they would not have to change laws or spend government funds; only philanthropic funds would be used for resettlement. Britain was assured that Palestine would not be on the agenda. The result was that little was attempted and less accomplished. From Kristallnacht to the “final solution” Kristallnacht Kristallnacht Learn about Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), November 9–10, 1938 propaganda Learn about Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), November 9–10, 1938 propaganda See all videos for this article On the evening of November 9, 1938, carefully orchestrated anti-Jewish violence “erupted” throughout the Reich, which since March had included Austria. Over the next 48 hours rioters burned or damaged more than 1,000 synagogues and ransacked and broke the windows of more than 7,500 businesses. Some 30,000 Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 60 were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Police stood by as the violence—often the action of neighbours, not strangers—occurred. Firemen were present not to protect the synagogues but to ensure that the flames did not spread to adjacent “Aryan” property. The pogrom was given a quaint name: Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night,” or “Night of Broken Glass”). In its aftermath, Jews lost the illusion that they had a future in Germany. SA troops SA troops On November 12, 1938, Field Marshal Hermann Göring convened a meeting of Nazi officials to discuss the damage to the German economy from pogroms. The Jewish community was fined one billion Reichsmarks. Moreover, Jews were made responsible for cleaning up the damage. German Jews, but not foreign Jews, were barred from collecting insurance. In addition, Jews were soon denied entry to theatres, forced to travel in separate compartments on trains, and excluded from German schools. These new restrictions were added to earlier prohibitions, such as those barring Jews from earning university degrees, from owning businesses, or from practicing law or medicine in the service of non-Jews. The Nazis would continue to confiscate Jewish property in a program called “Aryanization.” Göring concluded the November meeting with a note of irony: “I would not like to be a Jew in Germany!” Victims of Nazism Listen to holocaust survivors talking about their hesitation to speak about the painful past Listen to holocaust survivors talking about their hesitation to speak about the painful past See all videos for this article While Jews were the primary victims of Nazism as it evolved and were central to Nazi racial ideology, other groups were victimized as well—some for what they did, some for what they refused to do, and some for what they were. Roma prisoners Roma prisoners Political dissidents, trade unionists, and Social Democrats were among the first to be arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Under the Weimar government, centuries-old prohibitions against homosexuality had been overlooked, but this tolerance ended violently when the SA (Storm Troopers) began raiding gay bars in 1933. Homosexual intent became just cause for prosecution. The Nazis arrested German and Austrian male homosexuals—there was no systematic persecution of lesbians—and interned them in concentration camps, where they were forced to wear special yellow armbands and later pink triangles. The goal of persecuting male homosexuals was either for reeducation—what might now be called conversion therapy—or punishment. Jehovah’s Witnesses were a problem for the Nazis because they refused to swear allegiance to the state, register for the draft, or utter the words “Heil Hitler.” As a result, the Nazis imprisoned many of the roughly 20,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany. They could be released from concentration camps if they signed a document renouncing their faith and promising not to proselytize. Few availed themselves of that option, preferring martyrdom to apostasy. Germans of African descent—many of whom, called “Rhineland bastards” by the Nazis, were the offspring of German mothers and French colonial African troops who had occupied the Rhineland after World War I—were also persecuted by the Nazis. Although their victimization was less systematic, it included forced sterilization and, often, internment in concentration camps. The fear was that they would “further pollute” and thereby diminish the race. The Nazis also singled out the Roma and Sinti, pejoratively known as Gypsies. They were the only other group that the Nazis systematically killed in gas chambers alongside the Jews. For the Roma and Sinti, too, racial pollution and their depiction as asocials was the justification for their persecution and murder. World War II Events In 1939, shortly after the war began, the Germans initiated the T4 Program—framed euphemistically as a “euthanasia” program—for the murder of intellectually or physically disabled and emotionally disturbed Germans who by their very existence violated the Nazi ideal of Aryan supremacy. They were termed “life unworthy of life.” An economic justification was also employed as these Germans were considered “useless eaters.” The Nazis pioneered the use of gas chambers and mass crematoria under this program. The murder of the disabled was the training ground for key personnel who were to later staff the death camps of Aktion Reinhard. The German public protested these murders. The Roman Catholic bishop of Münster, Clemens August, Graf von Galen, preached against them, and the T4 program was formally halted. Nonetheless, the murder and sterilization of these German “Aryans” continued secretly throughout the war. execution during the Holocaust execution during the Holocaust Following the invasion of Poland, German occupation policy especially targeted the Jews but also brutalized non-Jewish Poles. In pursuit of Lebensraum, Germany sought systematically to destroy Polish society and nationhood. The Nazis killed Polish priests and politicians, decimated the Polish leadership, and kidnapped the children of the Polish elite, who were raised as “voluntary Aryans” by their new German “parents.” Many Poles were also forced to perform hard labour on survival diets, were deprived of property and uprooted, and were interned in concentration camps. German expansion and the formation of ghettos Paradoxically, at the same time that Germany tried to rid itself of its Jews via forced emigration, its territorial expansions kept bringing more Jews under its control. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 and the Sudetenland (now in the Czech Republic) in September 1938. It established control over the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic) in March 1939. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the “Jewish question” became urgent. When the division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union was complete, more than two million more Jews had come under German control. For a time, the Nazis considered shipping the Jews to the island of Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa, but discarded the plan as impractical; the Nazis had not prevailed in the Battle of Britain, the seas had become a war zone, and the resources required for such a massive deportation were scarce. Judenrat Judenrat On September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the establishment of the Judenräte (“Jewish Councils”), comprising up to 24 men—rabbis and Jewish leaders. Heydrich’s order made these councils personally responsible in “the literal sense of the term” for carrying out German orders. When the Nazis sealed the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of German-occupied Poland’s 400 ghettos, in the fall of 1940, the Jews—then 30 percent of Warsaw’s population—were forced into 2.4 percent of the city’s area. The ghetto’s population reached a density of more than 200,000 persons per square mile (77,000 per square km) and 9.2 per room. Disease, malnutrition, hunger, and poverty took their toll even before the first bullet was fired. For the German rulers, the ghetto was a temporary measure, a holding pen for the Jewish population until a policy on its fate could be established and implemented. For the Jews, ghetto life was the situation under which they thought they would be forced to live until the end of the war. They aimed to make life bearable, even under the most trying circumstances. When the Nazis prohibited schools, they opened clandestine schools. When the Nazis banned religious life, it persisted in hiding. The Jews used humour as a means of defiance, so too song. They resorted to arms only late in the Nazi assault. Historians differ on the date of the decision to murder Jews systematically, the so-called “final solution to the Jewish question.” There is debate about whether there was one central decision or a series of regional decisions in response to local conditions. In either case, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, its former ally, in June of 1941, the Nazis began the systematic killing of Jews. The Einsatzgruppen and their fellow mobile killers Einsatzgruppen Einsatzgruppen Entering conquered Soviet territories alongside the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) were 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen (“Deployment Groups”), special mobile killing units. Their task was to murder Jews, Soviet commissars, and Roma in the areas conquered by the army. Alone or with the help of local police, native anti-Semitic populations, and accompanying Axis troops, the Einsatzgruppen would enter a town, round up their victims, herd them to the outskirts of the town, and shoot them. They killed Jews in family units. Just outside Kiev, Ukraine, in the ravine of Babi Yar, an Einsatzgruppe killed 33,771 Jews on September 28–29, 1941. In the Rumbula Forest outside the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, 25,000–28,000 Jews were shot on November 30 and December 8–9. Beginning in the summer of 1941, Einsatzgruppen murdered more than 70,000 Jews at Ponary, outside Vilna (now Vilnius) in Lithuania. They slaughtered 9,000 Jews, half of them children, at the Ninth Fort, adjacent to Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania, on October 28. Babi Yar monument in Kyiv, Ukraine Babi Yar monument in Kyiv, Ukraine The mass shootings continued unabated, with a first wave and then a second. When the killing ended in the face of a Soviet counteroffensive, special units returned to dig up the dead and burn their bodies to destroy the evidence of the crimes. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen killed more than 1.4 million people, most of whom were Jews. Sometimes the mere presence of German troops in the vicinity was sufficient to spur a massacre. One example is what happened in the Polish village of Jedwabne, where neighbours murdered their Jewish neighbours. For years the massacre was blamed on the Germans, though many Poles likely knew that the local population had turned against its own Jews. In the Baltics, where the Germans were greeted as liberators by some segments of the population, the lure of political independence and the desire to erase any collaboration with the previous Soviet occupiers led nationalist bands to murder local Jews. Historians are divided about the motivations of the members of these mobile killing units. American historian Christopher Browning described one such unit, Police Battalion 101, as ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances in which conformity, peer pressure, careerism, obedience to orders, and group solidarity gradually overcame moral inhibitions. American writer Daniel Goldhagen viewed the very same unit as “willing executioners,” sharing Hitler’s vision of genocidal anti-Semitism and finding their tasks unpleasant but necessary. The diversity of the killers has challenged Goldhagen’s view that the motivation was a distinct form of German anti-Semitism. Yet both Browning and Goldhagen concurred that none of these killers faced punishment if he asked to be excused. Individuals had a choice whether to participate or not. Almost all chose to become killers. Operation Barbarossa, German troops in Russia, 1941. Nazi German soldiers in action against the Red Army (Soviet Union) at an along the frontlines in the early days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941. World War II, WWII Britannica Quiz World War II: Fact or Fiction? The extermination camps Jewish children being deported to Chelmno Jewish children being deported to Chelmno On January 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference at a lakeside villa in Berlin to organize the “final solution to the Jewish question.” Around the table were 15 men representing government agencies necessary to implement so bold and sweeping a policy. The language of the meeting was clear, but the meeting notes were circumspect:     Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e., the evacuation of the Jews to the east.…Practical experience is already being collected which is of the greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish question. Participants understood “evacuation to the east” to mean deportation to killing centres. In early 1942 the Nazis built killing centres at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec in occupied Poland. The death camps were to be the essential instrument of the “final solution.” The Einsatzgruppen had traveled to kill their victims. With the killing centres, the process was reversed. The victims were taken by train, often in cattle cars, to their killers. The extermination camps became factories producing corpses, effectively and efficiently, at minimal physical and psychological cost to German personnel. Assisted by Ukrainian and Latvian collaborators and prisoners of war, a few Germans could kill tens of thousands of prisoners each month. At Chelmno, the first of the extermination camps, the Nazis used mobile gas vans. Elsewhere they built permanent gas chambers linked to the crematoria where bodies were burned. Carbon monoxide was the gas of choice at most camps. Zyklon-B, an especially lethal killing agent, was employed primarily at Auschwitz and later at Majdanek. Auschwitz: prisoner barracks Auschwitz: prisoner barracks Hear about the Nazi use of forced labor at Krupp's weapon production and the Dora Central Works and the miseries and the poor working conditions of the laborers Hear about the Nazi use of forced labor at Krupp's weapon production and the Dora Central Works and the miseries and the poor working conditions of the laborers See all videos for this article Learn about the horrible suffering caused by Nazi Germany while it was using Auschwitz as a concentration camp to exterminate Jews and use them as slave labor Learn about the horrible suffering caused by Nazi Germany while it was using Auschwitz as a concentration camp to exterminate Jews and use them as slave labor See all videos for this article Auschwitz, perhaps the most notorious and lethal of the concentration camps, was actually three camps in one: a prison camp (Auschwitz I), an extermination camp (Auschwitz II–Birkenau), and a slave labour camp (Auschwitz III–Buna-Monowitz). Upon arrival, Jewish prisoners faced what was called a Selektion. A German doctor presided over the selection of pregnant women, young children, the elderly, handicapped, sick, and infirm for immediate death in the gas chambers. As necessary, the Germans selected able-bodied prisoners for forced labour in the factories adjacent to Auschwitz, where one German company, IG Farben, invested 700 million Reichsmarks in 1942 alone to take advantage of forced labour, a capital investment. The conglomerate presumed that slave labour would be a permanent part of the German economy. Deprived of adequate food, shelter, clothing, and medical care, these prisoners were literally worked to death. Periodically, they would face another Selektion. The Nazis would transfer those unable to work to the gas chambers of Birkenau. Majdanek: barracks Majdanek: barracks Belzec death camp execution victim Belzec death camp execution victim Chelmno death camp execution victims Chelmno death camp execution victims While the labour camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek used inmates for slave labour to support the German war effort, the extermination camps at Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor had one task alone: killing. At Treblinka a staff of 120, of whom only 30 were SS (the Nazi paramilitary corps), killed some 750,000 to 925,000 Jews during the camp’s 17 months of operation. At Belzec German records detail a staff of 104, including about 20 SS, who killed some 500,000 Jews in less than 10 months. At Sobibor they murdered between 200,000 and 250,000. These camps began operation during the spring and summer of 1942, when the ghettos of German-occupied Poland were filled with Jews. Once they had completed their missions—murder by gassing, or “resettlement in the east,” to use the language of the Wannsee protocols—the Nazis closed the camps. There were six extermination camps, all in German-occupied Poland, among the thousands of concentration and slave-labour camps throughout German-occupied Europe. concentration camp concentration camp The impact of the Holocaust varied from region to region and from year to year in the 21 countries that were directly affected. Nowhere was the Holocaust more intense and sudden than in Hungary. What took place over several years in Germany occurred over 16 weeks in Hungary. Entering the war as a German ally, Hungary had persecuted its Jews but not permitted the deportation of Hungarian citizens. In 1941 foreign Jewish refugees were deported from Hungary and were shot by Germans in Kam’yanets-Podilskyy, Ukraine. After Germany invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, the situation changed dramatically. By mid-April the Nazis had confined Jews to ghettos. On May 15, deportations began, and over the next 55 days the Nazis deported more than 437,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz on 147 trains. Policies differed widely among Germany’s Balkan allies. In Romania it was primarily the Romanians themselves who slaughtered the country’s Jews. Toward the end of the war, however, when the defeat of Germany was all but certain, the Romanian government found more value in living Jews who could be held for ransom or used as leverage with the West. Bulgaria deported Jews from neighbouring Thrace and Macedonia, which it occupied, but government leaders faced stiff opposition to the deportation of native Bulgarian Jews, who were regarded as fellow citizens. German-occupied Denmark rescued most of its own Jews by spiriting them to Sweden by sea in October 1943. This was possible partly because the German presence in Denmark was relatively small. Moreover, while anti-Semitism in the general population of many other countries led to collaboration with the Germans, Jews were an integrated part of Danish culture. Under these unique circumstances, Danish humanitarianism flourished. In France Jews under Fascist Italian occupation in the southeast fared better than the Jews of Vichy France, where collaborationist French authorities and police provided essential support to the understaffed German forces. The Jews in those parts of France under direct German occupation fared the worst. Although allied with Germany, the Italians did not participate in the Holocaust until Germany occupied northern Italy after the overthrow of Fascist leader Benito Mussolini in 1943. Throughout German-occupied territory the situation of the Jews was desperate. They had meagre resources and few allies and faced impossible choices. A few people came to their rescue, often at the risk of their own lives. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944, in an effort to save Hungary’s sole remaining Jewish community. Over the next six months, he worked with other neutral diplomats, the Vatican, and Jews themselves to prevent the deportation of these last Jews. Elsewhere, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a French Huguenot village, became a haven for 5,000 Jews. In German-occupied Poland, where it was illegal to aid Jews and where such action was punishable by death, the Zegota (Council for Aid to Jews) rescued a similar number of Jewish men, women, and children. Financed by the London-based Polish government in exile and involving a wide range of clandestine political organizations, Zegota provided hiding places and financial support and forged identity documents. Some Germans, even some Nazis, dissented from the murder of the Jews and came to their aid. The most famous was Oskar Schindler, a Nazi businessman, who had set up operations using involuntary labour in German-occupied Poland in order to profit from the war. Eventually, he moved to protect his Jewish workers from deportation to extermination camps. In all occupied countries, there were individuals who came to the rescue of Jews, offering a place to hide, some food, or shelter for days or weeks or even for the duration of the war. Most of the rescuers did not see their actions as heroic but felt bound to the Jews by a common sense of humanity. Israel later recognized rescuers with honorary citizenship and commemoration at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust. Jewish resistance to the Nazis Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Warsaw Ghetto Uprising It is often asked why Jews did not make greater attempts at resistance. Principally, they had no access to arms and were surrounded by native anti-Semitic populations who might collaborate with the Nazis or, even if they were opposed to German occupation, may have been willing to condone the elimination of the Jews and were reticent to put their own lives as risk. In essence, the Jews stood alone against a German war machine zealously determined to carry out the “final solution.” Moreover, the Nazis went to great lengths to disguise their ultimate plans. Because of the German policy of collective reprisal, Jews in the ghettos often hesitated to resist. This changed when the Germans ordered the final liquidation of the ghettos and residents recognized the imminence of their deaths. Willem Arondeus Willem Arondeus Jews resisted in the forests, in the ghettos, and even in the death camps. They fought alone and alongside resistance groups in France, Yugoslavia, and Russia. As a rule, full-scale uprisings occurred only at the end, when Jews realized the inevitability of impending death. On April 19, 1943, nine months after the massive deportations of Warsaw’s Jews to Treblinka had begun, the Jewish resistance, led by 24-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz, mounted the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Vilna partisan leader Abba Kovner, recognizing the full intent of Nazi policy toward the Jews, called for resistance in December 1941 and organized an armed force that fought the Germans in September 1943. In March of that year, a resistance group led by Willem Arondeus, a homosexual artist and author, bombed a population registry in Amsterdam to destroy the records of Jews and others sought by the Nazis. At Treblinka and Sobibor, uprisings occurred just as the extermination process was slowing down, and the remaining prisoners were fearful that they would soon be killed. This was also true at Auschwitz, where the Sonderkommando (“Special Commando”), the prisoner unit that worked in the vicinity of the gas chambers, destroyed a crematorium just as the killing was coming to an end in 1944. liberated Ebensee concentration camp prisoners liberated Ebensee concentration camp prisoners By the winter of 1944–45, with Allied armies closing in, desperate SS officials tried frantically to evacuate the camps and conceal what had taken place. They wanted no eyewitnesses remaining. Prisoners were moved westward, forced to march toward the heartland of Germany. There were more than 50 different marches from Nazi concentration and extermination camps during this final winter of Nazi domination, some covering hundreds of miles. The prisoners were given little or no food and water and almost no time to rest or take care of bodily needs. Those who paused or fell behind were shot. On January 16, 1945, just days before the Red Army arrived at Auschwitz, the Nazis marched some 60,000 prisoners to Wodzisław and put them on freight trains—many of them on open cars— to the camps at Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthausen. Nearly one in four died en route. Buchenwald concentration camp Buchenwald concentration camp Witness the plight of the Jews in the Buchenwald concentration camp after their liberation by the Allies in April 1945 Witness the plight of the Jews in the Buchenwald concentration camp after their liberation by the Allies in April 1945 See all videos for this article In April and May of 1945, American and British forces en route to military targets entered the concentration camps in the west and caught a glimpse of what had occurred. Even though tens of thousands of prisoners had died, these camps were far from the most deadly. Still, even for the battle-weary soldiers who thought they had already seen the worst, the sights and smells and the emaciated survivors they encountered left an indelible impression. At Dachau they came upon 28 railway cars stuffed with dead bodies. Conditions were so horrendous at Bergen-Belsen that some 28,000 inmates died after being freed, and the entire camp had to be burned to prevent the spread of typhus. Allied soldiers had to perform tasks for which they were ill-trained: to heal the sick, comfort the bereaved, and bury the dead. As for the victims, liberation was not a moment of exultation. Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz, recalled, “Everything was unreal. Unlikely as in a dream. Only later—and for some it was very much later or never—was liberation actually liberating.” Gustave Doré: illustration of the Wandering Jew More From Britannica anti-Semitism: Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust The Allies, who had early and accurate information on the murder of the Jews, made no special military efforts to rescue them or to bomb the camps or the railroad tracks leading to them. (See Sidebar: Why Wasn’t Auschwitz Bombed?) They felt that only after victory could something be done about the Jewish situation. Warnings were issued, condemnations were made, plans proceeded to try the guilty after the war, but no concrete action was undertaken specifically to halt the genocide. An internal memo to U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., from his general counsel in January 1944 characterized U.S. State Department policy as “acquiescence to the murder of the European Jews.” In response Morgenthau helped spur the creation of the War Refugee Board, which made a late and limited effort to rescue endangered Jews, mainly through diplomacy and subterfuge. The aftermath Cahana, Alice Lok Cahana, Alice Lok Although the Germans killed victims from several groups, the Holocaust is primarily associated with the murder of the Jews. Only the Jews were targeted for total annihilation, and their elimination was central to Hitler’s vision of the “New Germany.” The intensity of the Nazi campaign against the Jews continued unabated to the very end of the war and at points even took priority over German military efforts. When the war ended, Allied armies found between seven and nine million displaced persons living outside their own countries. More than six million people returned to their native lands, but more than one million refused repatriation. Some had collaborated with the Nazis and feared retaliation. Others feared persecution under the new communist regimes. For the Jews, the situation was different. They had no homes to return to. Their communities had been shattered, their homes destroyed or occupied by strangers, and their families decimated and dispersed. First came the often long and difficult physical recuperation from starvation and malnutrition, then the search for loved ones lost or missing, and finally the question of the future. Many Jews lived in displaced-persons camps. At first they were forced to dwell among their killers because the Allies did not differentiate on the basis of religion, merely by nationality. Their presence on European soil and the absence of a country willing to receive them increased the pressure on Britain to resolve the issue of a Jewish homeland in British-administered Palestine. Both well-publicized and clandestine efforts were made to bring Jews to Palestine. In fact, it was not until after the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 and the liberalization of American immigration laws in 1948 and 1949 (allowing the admission of refugees from Europe) that the problem of finding homes for the survivors was solved. Nürnberg trials Nürnberg trials Upon liberating the camps, many Allied units were so shocked by what they saw that they meted out spontaneous punishment to some of the remaining SS personnel. Others were arrested and held for trial. The most famous of the postwar trials occurred in 1945–46 at Nürnberg, the former site of Nazi Party rallies. There the International Military Tribunal tried 22 major Nazi officials for war crimes, crimes against the peace, and a new category of crimes—crimes against humanity. This new category encompassed     murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population…persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds…whether or not in violation of the domestic laws of the country where perpetrated. The murder of the Jews was not a centrepiece of the trials, though the use of film of the concentration camps was emotionally the most powerful moment. The prosecutors conducted “trials of documents” and, as a by-product of the trials, produced a massive documentation still used by historians. After the first trials, 185 defendants were divided into 12 groups, including physicians responsible for medical experimentation (but not so-called euthanasia), judges who preserved the facade of legality for Nazi crimes, Einsatzgruppe leaders, commandants of concentration camps, German generals, and business leaders who profited from slave labour. The defendants made up only a miniscule fraction of those who had perpetrated the crimes, however. In the eyes of many, their trials were a desperate, inadequate, but necessary effort to restore a semblance of justice in the aftermath of so great a crime. The trials have been termed imperfect justice, symbolic justice, and representational justice. Yet the Nürnberg trials established the precedent, later enshrined by international convention, that crimes against humanity are punishable by an international tribunal. Adolf Eichmann listening to an Israeli court's verdict Adolf Eichmann listening to an Israeli court's verdict Over the ensuing half-century, additional trials further documented the nature of the crimes and had a public as well as a judicial impact. The 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, who supervised the deportations of Jews to the death camps, not only brought him to justice but made a new generation of Israelis keenly aware of the Holocaust. Controversial from its inception—because Eichmann had been kidnapped from Argentina by Israeli intelligence agents rather than being formally extradited and because he was tried by the State of Israel, a state that did not exist when he perpetrated his deeds—the trial, broadcast on television internationally in the days before satellite television, also spurred an intellectual debate over the nature of evil and of the evildoer. The trial allowed victims to confront the perpetrator and bring him to justice. The Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, between 1963 and 1976 increased the German public’s knowledge of the killing and its pervasiveness. The trials in France of Klaus Barbie (1987) and Maurice Papon (1996–98) and the revelations of Franƈois Mitterrand in 1994 concerning his indifference toward Vichy France’s anti-Jewish policy called into question the notion of French resistance and forced the French to deal with the issue of collaboration. These trials also became precedents as world leaders considered responses to other crimes against humanity in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish émigré to the United States and an international lawyer, wrote compellingly of the need to name the crime and, once named, to outlaw it. The word he chose was genocide, which combined genus (gen) and murder (cide) to form the murder of a people. He pushed his agenda, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, through the United Nations, which approved it in December 1948. He believed that if the crime were named, defined, and outlawed, it would not be tolerated by the civilized world. The Genocide Convention prohibits the killing of persons belonging to a group (the “Final Solution”), causing grievous bodily or mental harm to members of a group, deliberately enforcing upon the group living conditions that could lead to complete or partial extermination (ghettoization and starvation), enforcing measures to prevent births among the group (sterilization), and forcibly removing children from the group and transferring them to another group (the “Germanization” of Polish children such as that which occurred in Zamość). In subsequent years many bystander governments have tried not to use the term “genocide” while such action was arguably occurring, so as to dampen the expectation of outside intervention. The defeat of Nazi Germany left a bitter legacy for the German leadership and the German people. Germans had committed crimes in the name of the German people. German culture and the German leadership—political, intellectual, social, and religious—had participated or been complicit in the Nazi crimes or had been ineffective in opposing them. In an effort to rehabilitate the good name of the German people, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) firmly established a democracy that protected the human rights of all its citizens and made financial reparations to the Jewish people in an agreement passed by parliament in 1953. West German democratic leaders made special efforts to achieve friendly relations with Israel. In the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the communist leaders attempted to absolve their population of responsibility for the crimes, portraying themselves as the victims of the Nazis and Nazism as a manifestation of capitalism. The first gesture of the postcommunist parliament of East Germany, however, was an apology to the Jewish people. At one of its first meetings in the newly renovated Reichstag building in 1999, the German parliament voted to erect a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. The first state visitor to Berlin after its reestablishment as capital of a united Germany was Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. At the beginning of the 21st century, the history of the Holocaust continued to be unsettling. The Swiss government and its bankers had to confront their role as bankers to the Nazis and in recycling gold and valuables taken from the victims. Under the leadership of German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder, German corporations and the German government established a fund to compensate Jews and non-Jews who had worked in German slave labour and forced labour programs during the war. Insurance companies were negotiating over claims from descendants of policyholders killed during the war—claims that the companies denied immediately after the war by imposing prohibitive conditions, such as the presentation of a death certificate specifying the time and place of death of the insured. In several eastern European countries, negotiations addressed Jewish property that the Nazis had confiscated during the war but that could not be returned under the region’s communist governments. Artworks stolen during the war and later sold on the basis of dubious records were the subject of legal struggles to secure their return to the original owners or their heirs. The German government continued to pay reparations—first awarded in 1953—to individual Jews and the Jewish people to acknowledge responsibility for the crimes committed in the name of the German people. Artistic responses to the Holocaust Samuel Bak: Elegy III Samuel Bak: Elegy III Artists the world over and camp survivors themselves have responded to the Holocaust through art. The very existence of Holocaust art can, however, create a sense of unease. Critic Irving Howe has asked, “Can imaginative literature represent in any profound or illuminating way the meanings of the Holocaust? Is ‘the debris of our misery’ (as one survivor described it) a proper or manageable subject for stories and novels? Are there not perhaps extreme situations beyond the reach of art?” Similarly, philosopher Theodor Adorno has commented that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Yet poetry has been written—moving poetry that seeks to come to terms with the tragedy even in the German language—in works by Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, among others. Gripping work dealing with the horror, pain, and loss of the Holocaust has appeared in every literary genre and in music, film, painting, and sculpture. Cahana, Alice Lok Cahana, Alice Lok Anne Frank Anne Frank Survivors of the Holocaust produced powerful works that record or reflect on their experiences. Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (originally in Dutch, 1947)—her diary survived while she did not—Elie Wiesel’s Night (originally in Yiddish, 1956), and works by Primo Levi are some of the most memorable in the field of literature. Paintings and drawings by survivors Samuel Bak, Alice Lok Cahana, and David Olère document the horrors that they experienced in ghettos and death camps. Holocaust survivors also composed a wide variety of music, including street songs, which gave voice to life in the ghetto; resistance songs, such as Hirsh Glik’s “Song of the Partisans” (composed and first performed 1943, published posthumously in 1953); and classical compositions, such as Quartet for the End of Time (first performed 1941) by prisoner of war Olivier Messiaen and the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis; oder, die Tod-Verweigerung (first performed 1943; “The Emperor of Atlantis; or, Death’s Refusal”) by Victor Ullmann, who did not survive. Budapest: Shoes on the Danube Bank memorial Budapest: Shoes on the Danube Bank memorial Artists of all kinds, regardless of any firsthand experience with the Holocaust, have sought to grapple with this tragedy. George Segal’s memorial sculpture, Holocaust, is but one notable example. Visual art in response to the Holocaust includes paintings by Holocaust refugees Marc Chagall and George Grosz and the illustrated story Maus (published in installments 1980–85) by Art Spiegelman, the son of a survivor. Notable musical responses to the Holocaust include Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (first performed 1947), Dmitry Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony (first performed 1962), which used the text of the poem “Baby Yar” (1961) by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and works by composers Charles Davidson, Michael Horvitz, and Oskar Morawetz. Film, too, was a prime medium for dealing with the Holocaust. Shortly after World War II, several eastern European filmmakers, including Aleksander Ford, Wanda Jakubowska, and Alfred Radok, attempted to capture the experience of Holocaust victims. Some of the most influential films since then include The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), directed by George Stevens; Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1970; The Garden of the Finzi Continis), directed by Vittorio De Sica; the nine-hour documentary Shoah (1985), directed by Claude Lanzmann; Au revoir les enfants (1987; Goodbye, Children), directed by Louis Malle; Schindler’s List (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg; La vita è bella (1997; Life Is Beautiful), directed by Roberto Benigni; Bent (1997), directed by Sean Mathias and based on Martin Sherman’s 1979 play about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals; The Pianist (2002), an adaptation of Władysław Szpilman’s autobiography, The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939–45 (1999); The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life (2013), a short documentary focusing on the world’s oldest living Holocaust survivor at the time of the film’s release; and Saul fia (2015; Son of Saul), about a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz who is forced to burn the corpses of fellow prisoners. Prisoners of Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany, April 16, 1945, liberated by American troops of the 80th Division. Elie Wiesel (7th from the left on the middle bunk next to the vertical post) World War II Holocaust More From Britannica What Is the Origin of the Term Holocaust? Conclusion Today the Holocaust is viewed as the emblematic manifestation of absolute evil. Its revelation of the depths of human nature and the power of malevolent social and governmental structures has made it an essential topic of ethical discourse in fields as diverse as law, medicine, religion, government, and the military. Learn about the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. Learn about the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. See all videos for this article Many survivors report that they heard a final plea from those who were killed: “Remember! Do not let the world forget.” To this responsibility to those they left behind, survivors have added a plea of their own: “Never again.” Never for the Jewish people. Never for any people. They hope that remembrance of the Holocaust can prevent its recurrence. In part because of their efforts, interest in the event has increased rather than diminished with the passage of time, and Holocaust remembrance days are observed each year in many countries. More than half a century after the Holocaust, institutions, memorials, and museums continue to be built and films and educational curricula created to document and teach the history of the Holocaust to future generations. Auschwitz concentration camp     Article     Talk     Read     View source     View history Tools This is a good article. Click here for more information. Page extended-protected From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Auschwitz" redirects here. For the city, see Oświęcim. For other uses, see Auschwitz (disambiguation). Auschwitz Konzentrationslager Auschwitz (German) Nazi concentration and extermination camp (1940–1945) Auschwitz I (22 May 2010).jpg Birkenau múzeum - panoramio (cropped).jpg Top: Gate to Auschwitz I with its Arbeit macht frei sign ("work sets you free") Bottom: Auschwitz II-Birkenau gatehouse; the train track, in operation May–October 1944, led directly to the gas chambers.[1] Coordinates    50°02′09″N 19°10′42″ECoordinates: 50°02′09″N 19°10′42″E Known for    The Holocaust Location    German-occupied Poland Built by    IG Farben Operated by    Nazi Germany and the Schutzstaffel Commandant    See list Original use    Army barracks Operational    May 1940 – January 1945 Inmates    Mainly Jews, Poles, Romani, Soviet prisoners of war Number of inmates    At least 1.3 million[2] Killed    At least 1.1 million[2] Liberated by    Soviet Union, 27 January 1945 Notable inmates    Auschwitz prisoners: Adolf Burger, Edith Eger, Anne Frank, Viktor Frankl, Imre Kertész, Maximilian Kolbe, Primo Levi, Fritz Löhner-Beda, Irène Némirovsky, Tadeusz Pietrzykowski, Witold Pilecki, Liliana Segre, Edith Stein, Simone Veil, Rudolf Vrba, Alfréd Wetzler, Elie Wiesel, Else Ury, Eddie Jaku, Władysław Bartoszewski Notable books         Man's Search for Meaning (1946) If This Is a Man (1947) Night (1960) Maus (1980–1991) Website    auschwitz.org/en/ UNESCO World Heritage Site Official name    Auschwitz Birkenau, German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940–1945) Type    Cultural Criteria    vi Designated    1979 (3rd session) Reference no.    31 Region    Europe and North America Auschwitz concentration camp (German: Konzentrationslager Auschwitz (pronounced [kɔntsɛntʁaˈtsi̯oːnsˌlaːɡɐ ˈʔaʊʃvɪts] (listen)); also KL Auschwitz or KZ Auschwitz) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939)[3] during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager) in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps.[4] The camps became a major site of the Nazis' final solution to the Jewish question. After Germany sparked World War II by invading Poland in September 1939, the Schutzstaffel (SS) converted Auschwitz I, an army barracks, into a prisoner-of-war camp.[5] The initial transport of political detainees to Auschwitz consisted almost solely of Poles for whom the camp was initially established. The bulk of inmates were Polish for the first two years.[6] In May 1940, German criminals brought to the camp as functionaries established the camp's reputation for sadism. Prisoners were beaten, tortured, and executed for the most trivial reasons. The first gassings—of Soviet and Polish prisoners—took place in block 11 of Auschwitz I around August 1941. Construction of Auschwitz II began the following month, and from 1942 until late 1944 freight trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to its gas chambers. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million were murdered. The number of victims includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 others.[7] Those not gassed were murdered via starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments. At least 802 prisoners tried to escape, 144 successfully, and on 7 October 1944, two Sonderkommando units, consisting of prisoners who operated the gas chambers, launched an unsuccessful uprising. Only 789 Schutzstaffel personnel (no more than 15 percent) ever stood trial after the Holocaust ended;[8] several were executed, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss. The Allies' failure to act on early reports of atrocities by bombing the camp or its railways remains controversial. 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. Soviet troops entered the camp on 27 January 1945, a day commemorated since 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 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 the Holocaust. In 1947, Poland founded the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, and in 1979 it was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Background Camps and ghettos in German-occupied Europe, 1944 Auschwitz I, II, and III The ideology of National Socialism (Nazism) combined elements of "racial hygiene", eugenics, antisemitism, pan-Germanism, and territorial expansionism, Richard J. Evans writes.[9] Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party became obsessed by the "Jewish question".[10] Both during and immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933, acts of violence against German Jews became ubiquitous,[11] and legislation was passed excluding them from certain professions, including the civil service and the law.[a] Harassment and economic pressure encouraged Jews to leave Germany; their businesses were denied access to markets, forbidden from advertising in newspapers, and deprived of government contracts.[13] On 15 September 1935, the Reichstag passed the Nuremberg Laws. One, the Reich Citizenship Law, defined as citizens those of "German or related blood who demonstrate by their behaviour that they are willing and suitable to serve the German People and Reich faithfully", and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited marriage and extramarital relations between those with "German or related blood" and Jews.[14] When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, Hitler ordered that the Polish leadership and intelligentsia be destroyed.[15] The area around Auschwitz was annexed to the German Reich, as part of first Gau Silesia and from 1941 Gau Upper Silesia.[16] The camp at Auschwitz was established in April 1940, at first as a quarantine camp for Polish political prisoners. On 22 June 1941, in an attempt to obtain new territory, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.[17] The first gassing at Auschwitz—of a group of Soviet prisoners of war—took place around August 1941.[18] By the end of that year, during what most historians regard as the first phase of the Holocaust, 500,000–800,000 Soviet Jews had been murdered in mass shootings by a combination of German Einsatzgruppen, ordinary German soldiers, and local collaborators.[19] At the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on 20 January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich outlined the Final Solution to the Jewish Question to senior Nazis,[20] and from early 1942 freight trains delivered Jews from all over occupied Europe to German extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Most prisoners were gassed on arrival.[21] Camps Auschwitz I Growth Auschwitz I, 2013 (50.0275°N 19.2050°E) Auschwitz I, 2009; the prisoner reception center of Auschwitz I became the visitor reception center of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.[22] Former prisoner reception center; the building on the far left with the row of chimneys was the camp kitchen. An aerial reconnaissance photograph of the Auschwitz concentration camp showing the Auschwitz I camp, 4 April 1944 A former World War I camp for transient workers and later a Polish army barracks, Auschwitz I was the main camp (Stammlager) and administrative headquarters of the camp complex. Fifty km southwest of Kraków, the site was first suggested in February 1940 as a quarantine camp for Polish prisoners by Arpad Wigand, the inspector of the Sicherheitspolizei (security police) and deputy of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the Higher SS and Police Leader for Silesia. Richard Glücks, head of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, sent Walter Eisfeld, former commandant of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, to inspect it.[23] Around 1,000 m long and 400 m wide,[24] Auschwitz consisted at the time of 22 brick buildings, eight of them two-story. A second story was added to the others in 1943 and eight new blocks were built.[25] Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, approved the site in April 1940 on the recommendation of SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss of the camps inspectorate. Höss oversaw the development of the camp and served as its first commandant. The first 30 prisoners arrived on 20 May 1940 from the Sachsenhausen camp. German "career criminals" (Berufsverbrecher), the men were known as "greens" (Grünen) after the green triangles on their prison clothing. Brought to the camp as functionaries, this group did much to establish the sadism of early camp life, which was directed particularly at Polish inmates, until the political prisoners took over their roles.[26] Bruno Brodniewicz, the first prisoner (who was given serial number 1), became Lagerälteste (camp elder). The others were given positions such as kapo and block supervisor.[27] First mass transport Further information: First mass transport to Auschwitz concentration camp The first mass transport—of 728 Polish male political prisoners, including Catholic priests and Jews—arrived on 14 June 1940 from Tarnów, Poland. They were given serial numbers 31 to 758.[b] In a letter on 12 July 1940, Höss told Glücks that the local population was "fanatically Polish, ready to undertake any sort of operation against the hated SS men".[29] By the end of 1940, the SS had confiscated land around the camp to create a 40-square-kilometer (15 sq mi) "zone of interest" (Interessengebiet) patrolled by the SS, Gestapo and local police.[30] By March 1941, 10,900 were imprisoned in the camp, most of them Poles.[24] An inmate's first encounter with Auschwitz, if they were registered and not sent straight to the gas chamber, was at the prisoner reception center near the gate with the Arbeit macht frei sign, where they were tattooed, shaved, disinfected, and given a striped prison uniform. Built between 1942 and 1944, the center contained a bathhouse, laundry, and 19 gas chambers for delousing clothes. The prisoner reception center of Auschwitz I became the visitor reception center of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.[22] Crematorium I, first gassings Further information: § Gas chambers Crematorium I, photographed in 2016, reconstructed after the war[31] Construction of crematorium I began at Auschwitz I at the end of June or beginning of July 1940.[32] Initially intended not for mass murder but for prisoners who had been executed or had otherwise died in the camp, the crematorium was in operation from August 1940 until July 1943, by which time the crematoria at Auschwitz II had taken over.[33] By May 1942 three ovens had been installed in crematorium I, which together could burn 340 bodies in 24 hours.[34] The first experimental gassing took place around August 1941, when Lagerführer Karl Fritzsch, at the instruction of Rudolf Höss, murdered a group of Soviet prisoners of war by throwing Zyklon B crystals into their basement cell in block 11 of Auschwitz I. A second group of 600 Soviet prisoners of war and around 250 sick Polish prisoners were gassed on 3–5 September.[35] The morgue was later converted to a gas chamber able to hold at least 700–800 people.[34][c] Zyklon B was dropped into the room through slits in the ceiling.[34] First mass transport of Jews Further information: Bytom Synagogue and Beuthen Jewish Community Historians have disagreed about the date the all-Jewish transports began arriving in Auschwitz. At the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on 20 January 1942, the Nazi leadership outlined, in euphemistic language, its plans for the Final Solution.[36] According to Franciszek Piper, the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss offered inconsistent accounts after the war, suggesting the extermination began in December 1941, January 1942, or before the establishment of the women's camp in March 1942.[37] In Kommandant in Auschwitz, he wrote: "In the spring of 1942 the first transports of Jews, all earmarked for extermination, arrived from Upper Silesia."[38] On 15 February 1942, according to Danuta Czech, a transport of Jews from Beuthen, Upper Silesia (Bytom, Poland), arrived at Auschwitz I and was sent straight to the gas chamber.[d][40] In 1998 an eyewitness said the train contained "the women of Beuthen".[e] Saul Friedländer wrote that the Beuthen Jews were from the Organization Schmelt labor camps and had been deemed unfit for work.[42] According to Christopher Browning, transports of Jews unfit for work were sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz from autumn 1941.[43] The evidence for this and the February 1942 transport was contested in 2015 by Nikolaus Wachsmann.[44] Around 20 March 1942, according to Danuta Czech, a transport of Polish Jews from Silesia and Zagłębie Dąbrowskie was taken straight from the station to the Auschwitz II gas chamber, which had just come into operation.[45] On 26 and 28 March, two transports of Slovakian Jews were registered as prisoners in the women's camp, where they were kept for slave labour; these were the first transports organized by Adolf Eichmann's department IV B4 (the Jewish office) in the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA).[f] On 30 March the first RHSA transport arrived from France.[46] "Selection", where new arrivals were chosen for work or the gas chamber, began in April 1942 and was conducted regularly from July. Piper writes that this reflected Germany's increasing need for labor. Those selected as unfit for work were gassed without being registered as prisoners.[47] There is also disagreement about how many were gassed in Auschwitz I. Perry Broad, an SS-Unterscharführer, wrote that "transport after transport vanished in the Auschwitz [I] crematorium."[48] In the view of Filip Müller, one of the Auschwitz I Sonderkommando, tens of thousands of Jews were murdered there from France, Holland, Slovakia, Upper Silesia, and Yugoslavia, and from the Theresienstadt, Ciechanow, and Grodno ghettos.[49] Against this, Jean-Claude Pressac estimated that up to 10,000 people had been murdered in Auschwitz I.[48] The last inmates gassed there, in December 1942, were around 400 members of the Auschwitz II Sonderkommando, who had been forced to dig up and burn the remains of that camp's mass graves, thought to hold over 100,000 corpses.[50] Auschwitz II-Birkenau "Birkenau" redirects here. For other uses, see Birkenau (disambiguation). Construction Auschwitz II-Birkenau gate from inside the camp, 2007 Same scene, May/June 1944, with the gate in the background. "Selection" of Hungarian Jews for work or the gas chamber. From the Auschwitz Album, taken by the camp's Erkennungsdienst. Gate with the camp remains in the background, 2009 After visiting Auschwitz I in March 1941, it appears that Himmler ordered that the camp be expanded,[51] although Peter Hayes notes that, on 10 January 1941, the Polish underground told the Polish government-in-exile in London: "the Auschwitz concentration camp ...can accommodate approximately 7,000 prisoners at present, and is to be rebuilt to hold approximately 30,000."[52] Construction of Auschwitz II-Birkenau—called a Kriegsgefangenenlager (prisoner-of-war camp) on blueprints—began in October 1941 in Brzezinka, about three kilometers from Auschwitz I.[53] The initial plan was that Auschwitz II would consist of four sectors (Bauabschnitte I–IV), each consisting of six subcamps (BIIa–BIIf) with their own gates and fences. The first two sectors were completed (sector BI was initially a quarantine camp), but the construction of BIII began in 1943 and stopped in April 1944, and the plan for BIV was abandoned.[54] SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Bischoff, an architect, was the chief of construction.[51] Based on an initial budget of RM 8.9 million, his plans called for each barracks to hold 550 prisoners, but he later changed this to 744 per barracks, which meant the camp could hold 125,000, rather than 97,000.[55] There were 174 barracks, each measuring 35.4 by 11.0 m (116 by 36 ft), divided into 62 bays of 4 m2 (43 sq ft). The bays were divided into "roosts", initially for three inmates and later for four. With personal space of 1 m2 (11 sq ft) to sleep and place whatever belongings they had, inmates were deprived, Robert-Jan van Pelt wrote, "of the minimum space needed to exist".[56] The prisoners were forced to live in the barracks as they were building them; in addition to working, they faced long roll calls at night. As a result, most prisoners in BIb (the men's camp) in the early months died of hypothermia, starvation or exhaustion within a few weeks.[57] Some 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived at Auschwitz I between 7 and 25 October 1941,[58] but by 1 March 1942 only 945 were still registered; they were transferred to Auschwitz II,[39] where most of them had died by May.[59] Crematoria II–V Further information: § Gas chambers The first gas chamber at Auschwitz II was operational by March 1942. On or around 20 March, a transport of Polish Jews sent by the Gestapo from Silesia and Zagłębie Dąbrowskie was taken straight from the Oświęcim freight station to the Auschwitz II gas chamber, then buried in a nearby meadow.[45] The gas chamber was located in what prisoners called the "little red house" (known as bunker 1 by the SS), a brick cottage that had been turned into a gassing facility; the windows had been bricked up and its four rooms converted into two insulated rooms, the doors of which said "Zur Desinfektion" ("to disinfection"). A second brick cottage, the "little white house" or bunker 2, was converted and operational by June 1942.[60] When Himmler visited the camp on 17 and 18 July 1942, he was given a demonstration of a selection of Dutch Jews, a mass-murder in a gas chamber in bunker 2, and a tour of the building site of Auschwitz III, the new IG Farben plant being constructed at Monowitz.[61] Use of bunkers I and 2 stopped in spring 1943 when the new crematoria were built, although bunker 2 became operational again in May 1944 for the murder of the Hungarian Jews. Bunker I was demolished in 1943 and bunker 2 in November 1944.[62] Plans for crematoria II and III show that both had an oven room 30 by 11.24 m (98.4 by 36.9 ft) on the ground floor, and an underground dressing room 49.43 by 7.93 m (162.2 by 26.0 ft) and gas chamber 30 by 7 m (98 by 23 ft). The dressing rooms had wooden benches along the walls and numbered pegs for clothing. Victims would be led from these rooms to a five-yard-long narrow corridor, which in turn led to a space from which the gas chamber door opened. The chambers were white inside, and nozzles were fixed to the ceiling to resemble showerheads.[63] The daily capacity of the crematoria (how many bodies could be burned in a 24-hour period) was 340 corpses in crematorium I; 1,440 each in crematoria II and III; and 768 each in IV and V.[64] By June 1943 all four crematoria were operational, but crematorium I was not used after July 1943. This made the total daily capacity 4,416, although by loading three to five corpses at a time, the Sonderkommando were able to burn some 8,000 bodies a day. This maximum capacity was rarely needed; the average between 1942 and 1944 was 1,000 bodies burned every day.[65] Auschwitz III-Monowitz Main article: Monowitz concentration camp Detailed map of Buna Werke, Monowitz, and nearby subcamps After examining several sites for a new plant to manufacture Buna-N, a type of synthetic rubber essential to the war effort, the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben chose a site near the towns of Dwory and Monowice (Monowitz in German), about 7 km (4.3 mi) east of Auschwitz I.[66] Tax exemptions were available to corporations prepared to develop industries in the frontier regions under the Eastern Fiscal Assistance Law, passed in December 1940. In addition to its proximity to the concentration camp, a source of cheap labor, the site had good railway connections and access to raw materials.[67] In February 1941, Himmler ordered that the Jewish population of Oświęcim be expelled to make way for skilled laborers; that all Poles able to work remain in the town and work on building the factory; and that Auschwitz prisoners be used in the construction work.[68] Auschwitz inmates began working at the plant, known as Buna Werke and IG-Auschwitz, in April 1941, demolishing houses in Monowitz to make way for it.[69] By May, because of a shortage of trucks, several hundred of them were rising at 3 am to walk there twice a day from Auschwitz I.[70] Because a long line of exhausted inmates walking through the town of Oświęcim might harm German-Polish relations, the inmates were told to shave daily, make sure they were clean, and sing as they walked. From late July they were taken to the factory by train on freight wagons.[71] Given the difficulty of moving them, including during the winter, IG Farben decided to build a camp at the plant. The first inmates moved there on 30 October 1942.[72] Known as KL Auschwitz III-Aussenlager (Auschwitz III subcamp), and later as the Monowitz concentration camp,[73] it was the first concentration camp to be financed and built by private industry.[74] Heinrich Himmler (second left) visits the IG Farben plant in Auschwitz III, July 1942. Measuring 270 m × 490 m (890 ft × 1,610 ft), the camp was larger than Auschwitz I. By the end of 1944, it housed 60 barracks measuring 17.5 m × 8 m (57 ft × 26 ft), each with a day room and a sleeping room containing 56 three-tiered wooden bunks.[75] IG Farben paid the SS three or four Reichsmark for nine- to eleven-hour shifts from each worker.[76] In 1943–1944, about 35,000 inmates worked at the plant; 23,000 (32 a day on average) were killed through malnutrition, disease, and the workload. Within three to four months at the camp, Peter Hayes writes, the inmates were "reduced to walking skeletons".[77] Deaths and transfers to the gas chambers at Auschwitz II reduced the population by nearly a fifth each month.[78] Site managers constantly threatened inmates with the gas chambers, and the smell from the crematoria at Auschwitz I and II hung heavy over the camp.[79] Although the factory had been expected to begin production in 1943, shortages of labor and raw materials meant start-up was postponed repeatedly.[80] The Allies bombed the plant in 1944 on 20 August, 13 September, 18 December, and 26 December. On 19 January 1945, the SS ordered that the site be evacuated, sending 9,000 inmates, most of them Jews, on a death march to another Auschwitz subcamp at Gliwice.[81] From Gliwice, prisoners were taken by rail in open freight wagons to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps. The 800 inmates who had been left behind in the Monowitz hospital were liberated along with the rest of the camp on 27 January 1945 by the 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army.[82] Subcamps Further information: List of subcamps of Auschwitz Several other German industrial enterprises, such as Krupp and Siemens-Schuckert, built factories with their own subcamps.[83] There were around 28 camps near industrial plants, each camp holding hundreds or thousands of prisoners.[84] Designated as Aussenlager (external camp), Nebenlager (extension camp), Arbeitslager (labor camp), or Aussenkommando (external work detail),[85] camps were built at Blechhammer, Jawiszowice, Jaworzno, Lagisze, Mysłowice, Trzebinia, and as far afield as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in Czechoslovakia.[86] Industries with satellite camps included coal mines, foundries and other metal works, and chemical plants. Prisoners were also made to work in forestry and farming.[87] For example, Wirtschaftshof Budy, in the Polish village of Budy near Brzeszcze, was a farming subcamp where prisoners worked 12-hour days in the fields, tending animals, and making compost by mixing human ashes from the crematoria with sod and manure.[88] Incidents of sabotage to decrease production took place in several subcamps, including Charlottengrube, Gleiwitz II, and Rajsko.[89] Living conditions in some of the camps were so poor that they were regarded as punishment subcamps.[90] Life in the camps SS garrison Main articles: SS command of Auschwitz concentration camp and SS-Totenkopfverbände From the Höcker Album (left to right): Richard Baer (Auschwitz commandant from May 1944), Josef Mengele (camp physician), and Rudolf Höss (first commandant) in Solahütte, an SS resort near Auschwitz, summer 1944.[91] The commandant's and administration building, Auschwitz I Rudolf Höss, born in Baden-Baden in 1900,[92] was named the first commandant of Auschwitz when Heinrich Himmler ordered on 27 April 1940 that the camp be established.[93] Living with his wife and children in a two-story stucco house near the commandant's and administration building,[94] he served as commandant until 11 November 1943,[93] with Josef Kramer as his deputy.[24] Succeeded as commandant by Arthur Liebehenschel,[93] Höss joined the SS Business and Administration Head Office in Oranienburg as director of Amt DI,[93] a post that made him deputy of the camps inspectorate.[95] Richard Baer became commandant of Auschwitz I on 11 May 1944 and Fritz Hartjenstein of Auschwitz II from 22 November 1943, followed by Josef Kramer from 15 May 1944 until the camp's liquidation in January 1945. Heinrich Schwarz was commandant of Auschwitz III from the point at which it became an autonomous camp in November 1943 until its liquidation.[96] Höss returned to Auschwitz between 8 May and 29 July 1944 as the local SS garrison commander (Standortältester) to oversee the arrival of Hungary's Jews, which made him the superior officer of all the commandants of the Auschwitz camps.[93] According to Aleksander Lasik, about 6,335 people (6,161 of them men) worked for the SS at Auschwitz over the course of the camp's existence;[97] 4.2 percent were officers, 26.1 percent non-commissioned officers, and 69.7 percent rank and file.[98] In March 1941, there were 700 SS guards; in June 1942, 2,000; and in August 1944, 3,342. At its peak in January 1945, 4,480 SS men and 71 SS women worked in Auschwitz; the higher number is probably attributable to the logistics of evacuating the camp.[99] Female guards were known as SS supervisors (SS-Aufseherinnen).[100] Most of the staff were from Germany or Austria, but as the war progressed, increasing numbers of Volksdeutsche from other countries, including Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic states, joined the SS at Auschwitz. Not all were ethnically German. Guards were also recruited from Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia.[101] Camp guards, around three quarters of the SS personnel, were members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände (death's head units).[102] Other SS staff worked in the medical or political departments, or in the economic administration, which was responsible for clothing and other supplies, including the property of dead prisoners.[103] The SS viewed Auschwitz as a comfortable posting; being there meant they had avoided the front and had access to the victims' property.[104] Functionaries and Sonderkommando Auschwitz I, 2009 Certain prisoners, at first non-Jewish Germans but later Jews and non-Jewish Poles,[105] were assigned positions of authority as Funktionshäftlinge (functionaries), which gave them access to better housing and food. The Lagerprominenz (camp elite) included Blockschreiber (barracks clerk), Kapo (overseer), Stubendienst (barracks orderly), and Kommandierte (trusties).[106] Wielding tremendous power over other prisoners, the functionaries developed a reputation as sadists.[105] Very few were prosecuted after the war, because of the difficulty of determining which atrocities had been performed by order of the SS.[107] Although the SS oversaw the murders at each gas chamber, the forced labor portion of the work was done by prisoners known from 1942 as the Sonderkommando (special squad).[108] These were mostly Jews but they included groups such as Soviet POWs. In 1940–1941 when there was one gas chamber, there were 20 such prisoners, in late 1943 there were 400, and by 1944 during the Holocaust in Hungary the number had risen to 874.[109] The Sonderkommando removed goods and corpses from the incoming trains, guided victims to the dressing rooms and gas chambers, removed their bodies afterwards, and took their jewelry, hair, dental work, and any precious metals from their teeth, all of which was sent to Germany. Once the bodies were stripped of anything valuable, the Sonderkommando burned them in the crematoria.[110] Because they were witnesses to the mass murder, the Sonderkommando lived separately from the other prisoners, although this rule was not applied to the non-Jews among them.[111] Their quality of life was further improved by their access to the property of new arrivals, which they traded within the camp, including with the SS.[112] Nevertheless, their life expectancy was short; they were regularly murdered and replaced.[113] About 100 survived to the camp's liquidation. They were forced on a death march and by train to the camp at Mauthausen, where three days later they were asked to step forward during roll call. No one did, and because the SS did not have their records, several of them survived.[114] Tattoos and triangles Further information: Nazi concentration camp badge Auschwitz clothing Uniquely at Auschwitz, prisoners were tattooed with a serial number, on their left breast for Soviet prisoners of war[115] and on the left arm for civilians.[116][117] Categories of prisoner were distinguishable by triangular pieces of cloth (German: Winkel) sewn onto on their jackets below their prisoner number. Political prisoners (Schutzhäftlinge or Sch), mostly Poles, had a red triangle, while criminals (Berufsverbrecher or BV) were mostly German and wore green. Asocial prisoners (Asoziale or Aso), which included vagrants, prostitutes and the Roma, wore black. Purple was for Jehovah's Witnesses (Internationale Bibelforscher-Vereinigung or IBV)'s and pink for gay men, who were mostly German.[118] An estimated 5,000–15,000 gay men prosecuted under German Penal Code Section 175 (proscribing sexual acts between men) were detained in concentration camps, of whom an unknown number were sent to Auschwitz.[119] Jews wore a yellow badge, the shape of the Star of David, overlaid by a second triangle if they also belonged to a second category. The nationality of the inmate was indicated by a letter stitched onto the cloth. A racial hierarchy existed, with German prisoners at the top. Next were non-Jewish prisoners from other countries. Jewish prisoners were at the bottom.[120] Transports Freight car inside Auschwitz II-Birkenau, near the gatehouse, used to transport deportees, 2014[121] Deportees were brought to Auschwitz crammed in wretched conditions into goods or cattle wagons, arriving near a railway station or at one of several dedicated trackside ramps, including one next to Auschwitz I. The Altejudenrampe (old Jewish ramp), part of the Oświęcim freight railway station, was used from 1942 to 1944 for Jewish transports.[121][122] Located between Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II, arriving at this ramp meant a 2.5 km journey to Auschwitz II and the gas chambers. Most deportees were forced to walk, accompanied by SS men and a car with a Red Cross symbol that carried the Zyklon B, as well as an SS doctor in case officers were poisoned by mistake. Inmates arriving at night, or who were too weak to walk, were taken by truck.[123] Work on a new railway line and ramp (right) between sectors BI and BII in Auschwitz II, was completed in May 1944 for the arrival of Hungarian Jews[122] between May and early July 1944.[124] The rails led directly to the area around the gas chambers.[121] Life for the inmates The day began at 4:30 am for the men (an hour later in winter), and earlier for the women, when the block supervisor sounded a gong and started beating inmates with sticks to make them wash and use the latrines quickly.[125] Sanitary arrangements were atrocious, with few latrines and a lack of clean water. Each washhouse had to service thousands of prisoners. In sectors BIa and BIb in Auschwitz II, two buildings containing latrines and washrooms were installed in 1943. These contained troughs for washing and 90 faucets; the toilet facilities were "sewage channels" covered by concrete with 58 holes for seating. There were three barracks with washing facilities or toilets to serve 16 residential barracks in BIIa, and six washrooms/latrines for 32 barracks in BIIb, BIIc, BIId, and BIIe.[126] Primo Levi described a 1944 Auschwitz III washroom: Latrine in the men's quarantine camp, sector BIIa, Auschwitz II, 2003     It is badly lighted, full of draughts, with the brick floor covered by a layer of mud. The water is not drinkable; it has a revolting smell and often fails for many hours. The walls are covered by curious didactic frescoes: for example, there is the good Häftling [prisoner], portrayed stripped to the waist, about to diligently soap his sheared and rosy cranium, and the bad Häftling, with a strong Semitic nose and a greenish colour, bundled up in his ostentatiously stained clothes with a beret on his head, who cautiously dips a finger into the water of the washbasin. Under the first is written: "So bist du rein" (like this you are clean), and under the second, "So gehst du ein" (like this you come to a bad end); and lower down, in doubtful French but in Gothic script: "La propreté, c'est la santé" [cleanliness is health].[127] Prisoners received half a liter of coffee substitute or a herbal tea in the morning, but no food.[128] A second gong heralded roll call, when inmates lined up outside in rows of ten to be counted. No matter the weather, they had to wait for the SS to arrive for the count; how long they stood there depended on the officers' mood, and whether there had been escapes or other events attracting punishment.[129] Guards might force the prisoners to squat for an hour with their hands above their heads or hand out beatings or detention for infractions such as having a missing button or an improperly cleaned food bowl. The inmates were counted and re-counted.[130] Auschwitz II brick barracks, sector BI, 2006; four prisoners slept in each partition, known as a buk.[131] Auschwitz II wooden barracks, 2008 After roll call, to the sound of "Arbeitskommandos formieren" ("form work details"), prisoners walked to their place of work, five abreast, to begin a working day that was normally 11 hours long—longer in summer and shorter in winter.[132] A prison orchestra, such as the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, was forced to play cheerful music as the workers left the camp. Kapos were responsible for the prisoners' behavior while they worked, as was an SS escort. Much of the work took place outdoors at construction sites, gravel pits, and lumber yards. No rest periods were allowed. One prisoner was assigned to the latrines to measure the time the workers took to empty their bladders and bowels.[133] Lunch was three-quarters of a liter of watery soup at midday, reportedly foul-tasting, with meat in the soup four times a week and vegetables (mostly potatoes and rutabaga) three times. The evening meal was 300 grams of bread, often moldy, part of which the inmates were expected to keep for breakfast the next day, with a tablespoon of cheese or marmalade, or 25 grams of margarine or sausage. Prisoners engaged in hard labor were given extra rations.[134] A second roll call took place at seven in the evening, in the course of which prisoners might be hanged or flogged. If a prisoner was missing, the others had to remain standing until the absentee was found or the reason for the absence discovered, even if it took hours. On 6 July 1940, roll call lasted 19 hours because a Polish prisoner, Tadeusz Wiejowski, had escaped; following an escape in 1941, a group of prisoners was picked out from the escapee's barracks and sent to block 11 to be starved to death.[135] After roll call, prisoners retired to their blocks for the night and received their bread rations. Then they had some free time to use the washrooms and receive their mail, unless they were Jews: Jews were not allowed to receive mail. Curfew ("nighttime quiet") was marked by a gong at nine o'clock.[136] Inmates slept in long rows of brick or wooden bunks, or on the floor, lying in and on their clothes and shoes to prevent them from being stolen.[137] The wooden bunks had blankets and paper mattresses filled with wood shavings; in the brick barracks, inmates lay on straw.[138] According to Miklós Nyiszli:     Eight hundred to a thousand people were crammed into the superimposed compartments of each barracks. Unable to stretch out completely, they slept there both lengthwise and crosswise, with one man's feet on another's head, neck, or chest. Stripped of all human dignity, they pushed and shoved and bit and kicked each other in an effort to get a few more inches' space on which to sleep a little more comfortably. For they did not have long to sleep.[139] Sunday was not a work day, but prisoners had to clean the barracks and take their weekly shower,[140] and were allowed to write (in German) to their families, although the SS censored the mail. Inmates who did not speak German would trade bread for help.[141] Observant Jews tried to keep track of the Hebrew calendar and Jewish holidays, including Shabbat, and the weekly Torah portion. No watches, calendars, or clocks were permitted in the camp. Only two Jewish calendars made in Auschwitz survived to the end of the war. Prisoners kept track of the days in other ways, such as obtaining information from newcomers.[142] Women's camp See also: Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz Women in Auschwitz II, May 1944 Roll call in front of the kitchen building, Auschwitz II About 30 percent of the registered inmates were female.[143] The first mass transport of women, 999 non-Jewish German women from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, arrived on 26 March 1942. Classified as criminal, asocial and political, they were brought to Auschwitz as founder functionaries of the women's camp.[144] Rudolf Höss wrote of them: "It was easy to predict that these beasts would mistreat the women over whom they exercised power ... Spiritual suffering was completely alien to them."[145] They were given serial numbers 1–999.[46][g] The women's guard from Ravensbrück, Johanna Langefeld, became the first Auschwitz women's camp Lagerführerin.[144] A second mass transport of women, 999 Jews from Poprad, Slovakia, arrived on the same day. According to Danuta Czech, this was the first registered transport sent to Auschwitz by the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA) office IV B4, known as the Jewish Office, led by SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann.[46] (Office IV was the Gestapo.)[146] A third transport of 798 Jewish women from Bratislava, Slovakia, followed on 28 March.[46] Women were at first held in blocks 1–10 of Auschwitz I,[147] but from 6 August 1942,[148] 13,000 inmates were transferred to a new women's camp (Frauenkonzentrationslager or FKL) in Auschwitz II. This consisted at first of 15 brick and 15 wooden barracks in sector (Bauabschnitt) BIa; it was later extended into BIb,[149] and by October 1943 it held 32,066 women.[150] In 1943–1944, about 11,000 women were also housed in the Gypsy family camp, as were several thousand in the Theresienstadt family camp.[151] Conditions in the women's camp were so poor that when a group of male prisoners arrived to set up an infirmary in October 1942, their first task, according to researchers from the Auschwitz museum, was to distinguish the corpses from the women who were still alive.[150] Gisella Perl, a Romanian-Jewish gynecologist and inmate of the women's camp, wrote in 1948:     There was one latrine for thirty to thirty-two thousand women and we were permitted to use it only at certain hours of the day. We stood in line to get in to this tiny building, knee-deep in human excrement. As we all suffered from dysentry, we could barely wait until our turn came, and soiled our ragged clothes, which never came off our bodies, thus adding to the horror of our existence by the terrible smell that surrounded us like a cloud. The latrine consisted of a deep ditch with planks thrown across it at certain intervals. We squatted on those planks like birds perched on a telegraph wire, so close together that we could not help soiling one another.[152] Langefeld was succeeded as Lagerführerin in October 1942 by SS Oberaufseherin Maria Mandl, who developed a reputation for cruelty. Höss hired men to oversee the female supervisors, first SS Obersturmführer Paul Müller, then SS Hauptsturmführer Franz Hössler.[153] Mandl and Hössler were executed after the war. Sterilization experiments were carried out in barracks 30 by a German gynecologist, Carl Clauberg, and another German doctor, Horst Schumann.[150] Medical experiments, block 10 Main articles: Block 10 and Nazi human experimentation Block 10, Auschwitz I, where medical experiments were performed on women German doctors performed a variety of experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. SS doctors tested the efficacy of X-rays as a sterilization device by administering large doses to female prisoners. Carl Clauberg injected chemicals into women's uteruses in an effort to glue them shut. Prisoners were infected with spotted fever for vaccination research and exposed to toxic substances to study the effects.[154] In one experiment, Bayer—then part of IG Farben—paid RM 150 each for 150 female inmates from Auschwitz (the camp had asked for RM 200 per woman), who were transferred to a Bayer facility to test an anesthetic. A Bayer employee wrote to Rudolf Höss: "The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price." The Bayer research was led at Auschwitz by Helmuth Vetter of Bayer/IG Farben, who was also an Auschwitz physician and SS captain, and by Auschwitz physicians Friedrich Entress and Eduard Wirths.[155] Defendants during the Doctors' trial, Nuremberg, 1946–1947 The most infamous doctor at Auschwitz was Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death", who worked in Auschwitz II from 30 May 1943, at first in the gypsy family camp.[156] Interested in performing research on identical twins, dwarfs, and those with hereditary disease, Mengele set up a kindergarten in barracks 29 and 31 for children he was experimenting on, and for all Romani children under six, where they were given better food rations.[157] From May 1944, he would select twins and dwarfs from among the new arrivals during "selection",[158] reportedly calling for twins with "Zwillinge heraus!" ("twins step forward!").[159] He and other doctors (the latter prisoners) would measure the twins' body parts, photograph them, and subject them to dental, sight and hearing tests, x-rays, blood tests, surgery, and blood transfusions between them.[160] Then he would have them killed and dissected.[158] Kurt Heissmeyer, another German doctor and SS officer, took 20 Polish Jewish children from Auschwitz to use in pseudoscientific experiments at the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, where he injected them with the tuberculosis bacilli to test a cure for tuberculosis. In April 1945, the children were murdered by hanging to conceal the project.[161] A Jewish skeleton collection was obtained from among a pool of 115 Jewish inmates, chosen for their perceived stereotypical racial characteristics. Rudolf Brandt and Wolfram Sievers, general manager of the Ahnenerbe (a Nazi research institute), delivered the skeletons to the collection of the Anatomy Institute at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg in Alsace-Lorraine. The collection was sanctioned by Heinrich Himmler and under the direction of August Hirt. Ultimately 87 of the inmates were shipped to Natzweiler-Struthof and murdered in August 1943.[162] Brandt and Sievers were executed in 1948 after being convicted during the Doctors' trial, part of the Subsequent Nuremberg trials.[163] Punishment, block 11 Main article: Block 11 Block 11 and (left) the "death wall", Auschwitz I, 2000 Prisoners could be beaten and killed by guards and kapos for the slightest infraction of the rules. Polish historian Irena Strzelecka writes that kapos were given nicknames that reflected their sadism: "Bloody", "Iron", "The Strangler", "The Boxer".[164] Based on the 275 extant reports of punishment in the Auschwitz archives, Strzelecka lists common infractions: returning a second time for food at mealtimes, removing your own gold teeth to buy bread, breaking into the pigsty to steal the pigs' food, putting your hands in your pockets.[165] Flogging during roll-call was common. A flogging table called "the goat" immobilized prisoners' feet in a box, while they stretched themselves across the table. Prisoners had to count out the lashes—"25 mit besten Dank habe ich erhalten" ("25 received with many thanks")— and if they got the figure wrong, the flogging resumed from the beginning.[165] Punishment by "the post" involved tying prisoners hands behind their backs with chains attached to hooks, then raising the chains so the prisoners were left dangling by the wrists. If their shoulders were too damaged afterwards to work, they might be sent to the gas chamber. Prisoners were subjected to the post for helping a prisoner who had been beaten, and for picking up a cigarette butt.[166] To extract information from inmates, guards would force their heads onto the stove, and hold them there, burning their faces and eyes.[167] Known as block 13 until 1941, block 11 of Auschwitz I was the prison within the prison, reserved for inmates suspected of resistance activities.[168] Cell 22 in block 11 was a windowless standing cell (Stehbunker). Split into four sections, each section measured less than 1.0 m2 (11 sq ft) and held four prisoners, who entered it through a hatch near the floor. There was a 5 cm x 5 cm vent for air, covered by a perforated sheet. Strzelecka writes that prisoners might have to spend several nights in cell 22; Wiesław Kielar spent four weeks in it for breaking a pipe.[169] Several rooms in block 11 were deemed the Polizei-Ersatz-Gefängnis Myslowitz in Auschwitz (Auschwitz branch of the police station at Mysłowice).[170] There were also Sonderbehandlung cases ("special treatment") for Poles and others regarded as dangerous to Nazi Germany.[171] Death wall The "death wall" showing the death-camp flag, the blue-and-white stripes with a red triangle signifying the Auschwitz uniform of political prisoners. The courtyard between blocks 10 and 11, known as the "death wall", served as an execution area, including for Poles in the General Government area who had been sentenced to death by a criminal court.[171] The first executions, by shooting inmates in the back of the head, took place at the death wall on 11 November 1941, Poland's National Independence Day. The 151 accused were led to the wall one at a time, stripped naked and with their hands tied behind their backs. Danuta Czech noted that a "clandestine Catholic mass" was said the following Sunday on the second floor of Block 4 in Auschwitz I, in a narrow space between bunks.[172] An estimated 4,500 Polish political prisoners were executed at the death wall, including members of the camp resistance. An additional 10,000 Poles were brought to the camp to be executed without being registered. About 1,000 Soviet prisoners of war died by execution, although this is a rough estimate. A Polish government-in-exile report stated that 11,274 prisoners and 6,314 prisoners of war had been executed.[173] Rudolf Höss wrote that "execution orders arrived in an unbroken stream".[170] According to SS officer Perry Broad, "[s]ome of these walking skeletons had spent months in the stinking cells, where not even animals would be kept, and they could barely manage to stand straight. And yet, at that last moment, many of them shouted 'Long live Poland', or 'Long live freedom'."[174] The dead included Colonel Jan Karcz and Major Edward Gött-Getyński, executed on 25 January 1943 with 51 others suspected of resistance activities. Józef Noji, the Polish long-distance runner, was executed on 15 February that year.[175] In October 1944, 200 Sonderkommando were executed for their part in the Sonderkommando revolt.[176] Family camps Gypsy family camp Main articles: Gypsy family camp (Auschwitz) and Romani genocide Romani children, Mulfingen, Germany, 1943; the children were studied by Eva Justin and later sent to Auschwitz.[177] A separate camp for the Roma, the Zigeunerfamilienlager ("Gypsy family camp"), was set up in the BIIe sector of Auschwitz II-Birkenau in February 1943. For unknown reasons, they were not subject to selection and families were allowed to stay together. The first transport of German Roma arrived on 26 February that year. There had been a small number of Romani inmates before that; two Czech Romani prisoners, Ignatz and Frank Denhel, tried to escape in December 1942, the latter successfully, and a Polish Romani woman, Stefania Ciuron, arrived on 12 February 1943 and escaped in April.[178] Josef Mengele, the Holocaust's most infamous physician, worked in the gypsy family camp from 30 May 1943 when he began his work in Auschwitz.[156] The Auschwitz registry (Hauptbücher) shows that 20,946 Roma were registered prisoners,[179] and another 3,000 are thought to have entered unregistered.[180] On 22 March 1943, one transport of 1,700 Polish Sinti and Roma was gassed on arrival because of illness, as was a second group of 1,035 on 25 May 1943.[179] The SS tried to liquidate the camp on 16 May 1944, but the Roma fought them, armed with knives and iron pipes, and the SS retreated. Shortly after this, the SS removed nearly 2,908 from the family camp to work, and on 2 August 1944 gassed the other 2,897. Ten thousand remain unaccounted for.[181] Theresienstadt family camp Main article: Theresienstadt family camp The SS deported around 18,000 Jews to Auschwitz from the Theresienstadt ghetto in Terezin, Czechoslovakia,[182] beginning on 8 September 1943 with a transport of 2,293 male and 2,713 female prisoners.[183] Placed in sector BIIb as a "family camp", they were allowed to keep their belongings, wear their own clothes, and write letters to family; they did not have their hair shaved and were not subjected to selection.[182] Correspondence between Adolf Eichmann's office and the International Red Cross suggests that the Germans set up the camp to cast doubt on reports, in time for a planned Red Cross visit to Auschwitz, that mass murder was taking place there.[184] The women and girls were placed in odd-numbered barracks and the men and boys in even-numbered. An infirmary was set up in barracks 30 and 32, and barracks 31 became a school and kindergarten.[182] The somewhat better living conditions were nevertheless inadequate; 1,000 members of the family camp were dead within six months.[185] Two other groups of 2,491 and 2,473 Jews arrived from Theresienstadt in the family camp on 16 and 20 December 1943.[186] On 8 March 1944, 3,791 of the prisoners (men, women and children) were sent to the gas chambers; the men were taken to crematorium III and the women later to crematorium II.[187] Some of the group were reported to have sung Hatikvah and the Czech national anthem on the way.[188] Before they were murdered, they had been asked to write postcards to relatives, postdated to 25–27 March. Several twins were held back for medical experiments.[189] The Czechoslovak government-in-exile initiated diplomatic manoeuvers to save the remaining Czech Jews after its representative in Bern received the Vrba-Wetzler report, written by two escaped prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, which warned that the remaining family-camp inmates would be gassed soon.[190] The BBC also became aware of the report; its German service broadcast news of the family-camp murders during its women's programme on 16 June 1944, warning: "All those responsible for such massacres from top downwards will be called to account."[191] The Red Cross visited Theresienstadt in June 1944 and were persuaded by the SS that no one was being deported from there.[184] The following month, about 2,000 women from the family camp were selected to be moved to other camps and 80 boys were moved to the men's camp; the remaining 7,000 were gassed between 10 and 12 July.[192] Selection and extermination process Gas chambers A reconstruction of crematorium I, Auschwitz I, 2014[193] The first gassings at Auschwitz took place in early September 1941, when around 850 inmates—Soviet prisoners of war and sick Polish inmates—were killed with Zyklon B in the basement of block 11 in Auschwitz I. The building proved unsuitable, so gassings were conducted instead in crematorium I, also in Auschwitz I, which operated until December 1942. There, more than 700 victims could be killed at once.[194] Tens of thousands were killed in crematorium I.[49] To keep the victims calm, they were told they were to undergo disinfection and de-lousing; they were ordered to undress outside, then were locked in the building and gassed. After its decommissioning as a gas chamber, the building was converted to a storage facility and later served as an SS air raid shelter.[195] The gas chamber and crematorium were reconstructed after the war. Dwork and van Pelt write that a chimney was recreated; four openings in the roof were installed to show where the Zyklon B had entered; and two of the three furnaces were rebuilt with the original components.[31] Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz II, May/June 1944 Crematoria II and III and their chimneys are visible in the background, left and right. Jewish women and children from Hungary walking toward the gas chamber, Auschwitz II, May/June 1944. The gate on the left leads to sector BI, the oldest part of the camp.[196] In early 1942, mass exterminations were moved to two provisional gas chambers (the "red house" and "white house", known as bunkers 1 and 2) in Auschwitz II, while the larger crematoria (II, III, IV, and V) were under construction. Bunker 2 was temporarily reactivated from May to November 1944, when large numbers of Hungarian Jews were gassed.[197] In summer 1944 the combined capacity of the crematoria and outdoor incineration pits was 20,000 bodies per day.[198] A planned sixth facility—crematorium VI—was never built.[199] From 1942, Jews were being transported to Auschwitz from all over German-occupied Europe by rail, arriving in daily convoys.[200] The gas chambers worked to their fullest capacity from May to July 1944, during the Holocaust in Hungary.[201] A rail spur leading to crematoria II and III in Auschwitz II was completed that May, and a new ramp was built between sectors BI and BII to deliver the victims closer to the gas chambers (images top right). On 29 April the first 1,800 Jews from Hungary arrived at the camp.[202] From 14 May until early July 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews, half the pre-war population, were deported to Auschwitz, at a rate of 12,000 a day for a considerable part of that period.[124] The crematoria had to be overhauled. Crematoria II and III were given new elevators leading from the stoves to the gas chambers, new grates were fitted, and several of the dressing rooms and gas chambers were painted. Cremation pits were dug behind crematorium V.[202] The incoming volume was so great that the Sonderkommando resorted to burning corpses in open-air pits as well as in the crematoria.[203] Selection According to Polish historian Franciszek Piper, of the 1,095,000 Jews deported to Auschwitz, around 205,000 were registered in the camp and given serial numbers; 25,000 were sent to other camps; and 865,000 were murdered soon after arrival.[204] Adding non-Jewish victims gives a figure of 900,000 who were murdered without being registered.[205] During "selection" on arrival, those deemed able to work were sent to the right and admitted into the camp (registered), and the rest were sent to the left to be gassed. The group selected to die included almost all children, women with small children, the elderly, and others who appeared on brief and superficial inspection by an SS doctor not to be fit for work.[206] Practically any fault—scars, bandages, boils and emaciation—might provide reason enough to be deemed unfit.[207] Children might be made to walk toward a stick held at a certain height; those who could walk under it were selected for the gas.[208] Inmates unable to walk or who arrived at night were taken to the crematoria on trucks; otherwise the new arrivals were marched there.[209] Their belongings were seized and sorted by inmates in the "Kanada" warehouses, an area of the camp in sector BIIg that housed 30 barracks used as storage facilities for plundered goods; it derived its name from the inmates' view of Canada as a land of plenty.[210] Inside the crematoria Entrance to crematorium III, Auschwitz II, 2008[211] The crematoria consisted of a dressing room, gas chamber, and furnace room. In crematoria II and III, the dressing room and gas chamber were underground; in IV and V, they were on the ground floor. The dressing room had numbered hooks on the wall to hang clothes. In crematorium II, there was also a dissection room (Sezierraum).[212] SS officers told the victims they had to take a shower and undergo delousing. The victims undressed in the dressing room and walked into the gas chamber; signs said "Bade" (bath) or "Desinfektionsraum" (disinfection room). A former prisoner testified that the language of the signs changed depending on who was being killed.[213] Some inmates were given soap and a towel.[214] A gas chamber could hold up to 2,000; one former prisoner said it was around 3,000.[215] The Zyklon B was delivered to the crematoria by a special SS bureau known as the Hygiene Institute.[216] After the doors were shut, SS men dumped in the Zyklon B pellets through vents in the roof or holes in the side of the chamber. The victims were usually dead within 10 minutes; Rudolf Höss testified that it took up to 20 minutes.[217] Leib Langfus, a member of the Sonderkommando, buried his diary (written in Yiddish) near crematorium III in Auschwitz II. It was found in 1952, signed "A.Y.R.A":[218]     It would be difficult to even imagine that so many people would fit in such a small [room]. Anyone who did not want to go inside was shot [...] or torn apart by the dogs. They would have suffocated from the lack of air within several hours. Then all the doors were sealed tight and the gas thrown in by way of a small hole in the ceiling. There was nothing more that the people inside could do. And so they only screamed in bitter, lamentable voices. Others complained in voices full of despair, and others still sobbed spasmodically and sent up a dire, heart-rending weeping. ... And in the meantime, their voices grew weaker and weaker ... Because of the great crowding, people fell one atop another as they died, until a heap arose consisting of five or six layers atop the other, reaching a height of one meter. Mothers froze in a seated position on the ground embracing their children in their arms, and husbands and wives died hugging each other. Some of the people made up a formless mass. Others stood in a leaning position, while the upper parts, from the stomach up, were in a lying position. Some of the people had turned completely blue under the influence of the gas, while others looks entirely fresh, as if they were asleep.[219] Use of corpses One of the Sonderkommando photographs: Women on their way to the gas chamber, Auschwitz II, August 1944 Sonderkommando wearing gas masks dragged the bodies from the chamber. They removed glasses and artificial limbs and shaved off the women's hair;[217] women's hair was removed before they entered the gas chamber at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, but at Auschwitz it was done after death.[220] By 6 February 1943, the Reich Economic Ministry had received 3,000 kg of women's hair from Auschwitz and Majdanek.[220] The hair was first cleaned in a solution of sal ammoniac, dried on the brick floor of the crematoria, combed, and placed in paper bags.[221] The hair was shipped to various companies, including one manufacturing plant in Bremen-Bluementhal, where workers found tiny coins with Greek letters on some of the braids, possibly from some of the 50,000 Greek Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1943.[222] When they liberated the camp in January 1945, the Red Army found 7,000 kg of human hair in bags ready to ship.[221] Just before cremation, jewelry was removed, along with dental work and teeth containing precious metals.[223] Gold was removed from the teeth of dead prisoners from 23 September 1940 onwards by order of Heinrich Himmler.[224] The work was carried out by members of the Sonderkommando who were dentists; anyone overlooking dental work might themselves be cremated alive.[223] The gold was sent to the SS Health Service and used by dentists to treat the SS and their families; 50 kg had been collected by 8 October 1942.[224] By early 1944, 10–12 kg of gold were being extracted monthly from victims' teeth.[225] The corpses were burned in the nearby incinerators, and the ashes were buried, thrown in the Vistula river, or used as fertilizer. Any bits of bone that had not burned properly were ground down in wooden mortars.[226] Death toll New arrivals, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, May/June 1944 At least 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, and at least 1.1 million died.[7] Overall 400,207 prisoners were registered in the camp: 268,657 male and 131,560 female.[143] A study in the late 1980s by Polish historian Franciszek Piper, published by Yad Vashem in 1991,[227] used timetables of train arrivals combined with deportation records to calculate that, of the 1.3 million sent to the camp, 1,082,000 had died there, a figure (rounded up to 1.1 million) that Piper regarded as a minimum.[7] That figure came to be widely accepted.[h] The Germans tried to conceal how many they had murdered. In July 1942, according to Rudolf Höss's post-war memoir, Höss received an order from Heinrich Himmler, via Adolf Eichmann's office and SS commander Paul Blobel, that "[a]ll mass graves were to be opened and the corpses burned. In addition the ashes were to be disposed of in such a way that it would be impossible at some future time to calculate the number of corpses burned."[231] Earlier estimates of the death toll were higher than Piper's. Following the camp's liberation, the Soviet government issued a statement, on 8 May 1945, that four million people had been murdered on the site, a figure based on the capacity of the crematoria.[232] Höss told prosecutors at Nuremberg that at least 2,500,000 people had been gassed there, and that another 500,000 had died of starvation and disease.[233] He testified that the figure of over two million had come from Eichmann.[234] In his memoirs, written in custody, Höss wrote that Eichmann had given the figure of 2.5 million to Höss's superior officer Richard Glücks, based on records that had been destroyed.[235] Höss regarded this figure as "far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive possibilities," he wrote.[236] Nationality/ethnicity (Source: Franciszek Piper)[2]     Registered deaths (Auschwitz)     Unregistered deaths (Auschwitz)     Total Jews     95,000     865,000     960,000 Ethnic Poles     64,000     10,000     74,000 (70,000–75,000) Roma and Sinti     19,000     2,000     21,000 Soviet prisoners of war     12,000     3,000     15,000 Other Europeans: Soviet citizens (Byelorussians, Russians, Ukrainians), Czechs, Yugoslavs, French, Germans, Austrians     10,000–15,000     n/a     10,000–15,000 Total deaths in Auschwitz, 1940–1945     200,000–205,000     880,000     1,080,000–1,085,000 Around one in six Jews murdered in the Holocaust died in Auschwitz.[237] By nation, the greatest number of Auschwitz's Jewish victims originated from Hungary, accounting for 430,000 deaths, followed by Poland (300,000), France (69,000), Netherlands (60,000), Greece (55,000), Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (46,000), Slovakia (27,000), Belgium (25,000), Germany and Austria (23,000), Yugoslavia (10,000), Italy (7,500), Norway (690), and others (34,000).[238] Timothy Snyder writes that fewer than one percent of the million Soviet Jews murdered in the Holocaust were murdered in Auschwitz.[239] Of the at least 387 Jehovah's Witnesses who were imprisoned at Auschwitz, 132 died in the camp.[240] Resistance, escapes, and liberation Camp resistance, flow of information See also: Resistance movement in Auschwitz, Witold Report, Responsibility for the Holocaust § Allied knowledge of the atrocities, and The Holocaust § Flow of information about the mass murder     Camp of Death pamphlet (1942) by Natalia Zarembina[241]     Camp of Death pamphlet (1942) by Natalia Zarembina[241]     Halina Krahelska report from Auschwitz Oświęcim, pamiętnik więźnia ("Auschwitz: Diary of a prisoner"), 1942.[242]     Halina Krahelska report from Auschwitz Oświęcim, pamiętnik więźnia ("Auschwitz: Diary of a prisoner"), 1942.[242]     "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", a paper issued by the Polish government-in-exile addressed to the United Nations, 1942     "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", a paper issued by the Polish government-in-exile addressed to the United Nations, 1942 Information about Auschwitz became available to the Allies as a result of reports by Captain Witold Pilecki of the Polish Home Army[243] who, as "Tomasz Serafiński" (serial number 4859),[244] allowed himself to be arrested in Warsaw and taken to Auschwitz.[243] He was imprisoned there from 22 September 1940[245] until his escape on 27 April 1943.[244] Michael Fleming writes that Pilecki was instructed to sustain morale, organize food, clothing and resistance, prepare to take over the camp if possible, and smuggle information out to the Polish military.[243] Pilecki called his resistance movement Związek Organizacji Wojskowej (ZOW, "Union of Military Organization").[245] Captain Witold Pilecki The resistance sent out the first oral message about Auschwitz with Dr. Aleksander Wielkopolski, a Polish engineer who was released in October 1940.[246] The following month the Polish underground in Warsaw prepared a report on the basis of that information, The camp in Auschwitz, part of which was published in London in May 1941 in a booklet, The German Occupation of Poland, by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The report said of the Jews in the camp that "scarcely any of them came out alive". According to Fleming, the booklet was "widely circulated amongst British officials". The Polish Fortnightly Review based a story on it, writing that "three crematorium furnaces were insufficient to cope with the bodies being cremated", as did The Scotsman on 8 January 1942, the only British news organization to do so.[247] On 24 December 1941, the resistance groups representing the various prisoner factions met in block 45 and agreed to cooperate. Fleming writes that it has not been possible to track Pilecki's early intelligence from the camp. Pilecki compiled two reports after he escaped in April 1943; the second, Raport W, detailed his life in Auschwitz I and estimated that 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, had been murdered.[248] On 1 July 1942, the Polish Fortnightly Review published a report describing Birkenau, writing that "prisoners call this supplementary camp 'Paradisal', presumably because there is only one road, leading to Paradise". Reporting that inmates were being killed "through excessive work, torture and medical means", it noted the gassing of the Soviet prisoners of war and Polish inmates in Auschwitz I in September 1941, the first gassing in the camp. It said: "It is estimated that the Oswiecim camp can accommodate fifteen thousand prisoners, but as they die on a mass scale there is always room for new arrivals."[249] The camp badge for non-Jewish Polish political prisoners The Polish government-in-exile in London first reported the gassing of prisoners in Auschwitz on 21 July 1942,[250] and reported the gassing of Soviet POWs and Jews on 4 September 1942.[251] In 1943, the Kampfgruppe Auschwitz (Combat Group Auschwitz) was organized within the camp with the aim of sending out information about what was happening.[252] The Sonderkommando buried notes in the ground, hoping they would be found by the camp's liberators.[253] The group also smuggled out photographs; the Sonderkommando photographs, of events around the gas chambers in Auschwitz II, were smuggled out of the camp in September 1944 in a toothpaste tube.[254] According to Fleming, the British press responded, in 1943 and the first half of 1944, either by not publishing reports about Auschwitz or by burying them on the inside pages. The exception was the Polish Jewish Observer, a City and East London Observer supplement edited by Joel Cang, a former Warsaw correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. The British reticence stemmed from a Foreign Office concern that the public might pressure the government to respond or provide refuge for the Jews, and that British actions on behalf of the Jews might affect its relationships in the Middle East. There was similar reticence in the United States, and indeed within the Polish government-in-exile and the Polish resistance. According to Fleming, the scholarship suggests that the Polish resistance distributed information about the Holocaust in Auschwitz without challenging the Allies' reluctance to highlight it.[255] Escapes, Auschwitz Protocols Further information: Vrba-Wetzler report and Auschwitz Protocols Telegram dated 8 April 1944 from KL Auschwitz reporting the escape of Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler From the first escape on 6 July 1940 of Tadeusz Wiejowski, at least 802 prisoners (757 men and 45 women) tried to escape from the camp, according to Polish historian Henryk Świebocki.[256][i] He writes that most escapes were attempted from work sites outside the camp's perimeter fence.[258] Of the 802 escapes, 144 were successful, 327 were caught, and the fate of 331 is unknown.[257] Four Polish prisoners—Eugeniusz Bendera [pl] (serial number 8502), Kazimierz Piechowski (no. 918), Stanisław Gustaw Jaster [pl] (no. 6438), and Józef Lempart (no. 3419)—escaped successfully on 20 June 1942. After breaking into a warehouse, three of them dressed as SS officers and stole rifles and an SS staff car, which they drove out of the camp with the fourth handcuffed as a prisoner. They wrote later to Rudolf Höss apologizing for the loss of the vehicle.[259] On 21 July 1944, Polish inmate Jerzy Bielecki dressed in an SS uniform and, using a faked pass, managed to cross the camp's gate with his Jewish girlfriend, Cyla Cybulska, pretending that she was wanted for questioning. Both survived the war. For having saved her, Bielecki was recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.[260] Jerzy Tabeau (no. 27273, registered as Jerzy Wesołowski) and Roman Cieliczko (no. 27089), both Polish prisoners, escaped on 19 November 1943; Tabeau made contact with the Polish underground and, between December 1943 and early 1944, wrote what became known as the Polish Major's report about the situation in the camp.[261] On 27 April 1944, Rudolf Vrba (no. 44070) and Alfréd Wetzler (no. 29162) escaped to Slovakia, carrying detailed information to the Slovak Jewish Council about the gas chambers. The distribution of the Vrba-Wetzler report, and publication of parts of it in June 1944, helped to halt the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. On 27 May 1944, Arnost Rosin (no. 29858) and Czesław Mordowicz (no. 84216) also escaped to Slovakia; the Rosin-Mordowicz report was added to the Vrba-Wetzler and Tabeau reports to become what is known as the Auschwitz Protocols.[262] The reports were first published in their entirety in November 1944 by the United States War Refugee Board as The Extermination Camps of Auschwitz (Oświęcim) and Birkenau in Upper Silesia.[263] Bombing proposal Main article: Auschwitz bombing debate Aerial view of Auschwitz II-Birkenau taken by the RAF on 23 August 1944 In January 1941 the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army and prime minister-in-exile, Władysław Sikorski, arranged for a report to be forwarded to Air Marshal Richard Pierse, head of RAF Bomber Command.[264] Written by Auschwitz prisoners in or around December 1940, the report described the camp's atrocious living conditions and asked the Polish government-in-exile to bomb it:     The prisoners implore the Polish Government to have the camp bombed. The destruction of the electrified barbed wire, the ensuing panic and darkness prevailing, the chances of escape would be great. The local population will hide them and help them to leave the neighbourhood. The prisoners are confidently awaiting the day when Polish planes from Great Britain will enable their escape. This is the prisoners unanimous demand to the Polish Government in London.[265] Pierse replied that it was not technically feasible to bomb the camp without harming the prisoners.[264] In May 1944 Slovak rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl suggested that the Allies bomb the rails leading to the camp.[266] Historian David Wyman published an essay in Commentary in 1978 entitled "Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed", arguing that the United States Army Air Forces could and should have attacked Auschwitz. In his book The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 (1984), Wyman argued that, since the IG Farben plant at Auschwitz III had been bombed three times between August and December 1944 by the US Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, it would have been feasible for the other camps or railway lines to be bombed too. Bernard Wasserstein's Britain and the Jews of Europe (1979) and Martin Gilbert's Auschwitz and the Allies (1981) raised similar questions about British inaction.[267] Since the 1990s, other historians have argued that Allied bombing accuracy was not sufficient for Wyman's proposed attack, and that counterfactual history is an inherently problematic endeavor.[268] Sonderkommando revolt Further information: Sonderkommando § Auschwitz Sonderkommando member Zalmen Gradowski, pictured with his wife, Sonia, buried his notebooks near crematorium III. Sonia Gradowski was gassed on 8 December 1942.[269] The Sonderkommando who worked in the crematoria were witnesses to the mass murder and were therefore regularly murdered themselves.[270] On 7 October 1944, following an announcement that 300 of them were to be sent to a nearby town to clear away rubble—"transfers" were a common ruse for the murder of prisoners—the group, mostly Jews from Greece and Hungary, staged an uprising.[271] They attacked the SS with stones and hammers, killing three of them, and set crematorium IV on fire with rags soaked in oil that they had hidden.[272] Hearing the commotion, the Sonderkommando at crematorium II believed that a camp uprising had begun and threw their Oberkapo into a furnace. After escaping through a fence using wirecutters, they managed to reach Rajsko, where they hid in the granary of an Auschwitz satellite camp, but the SS pursued and killed them by setting the granary on fire.[273] By the time the rebellion at crematorium IV had been suppressed, 212 members of the Sonderkommando were still alive and 451 had been killed.[274] The dead included Zalmen Gradowski, who kept notes of his time in Auschwitz and buried them near crematorium III; after the war, another Sonderkommando member showed the prosecutors where to dig.[275] The notes were published in several formats, including in 2017 as From the Heart of Hell.[276] Evacuation and death marches Further information: Death marches during the Holocaust Ruins of crematorium IV, Auschwitz II, blown up during the revolt The last mass transports to arrive in Auschwitz were 60,000–70,000 Jews from the Łódź Ghetto, some 2,000 from Theresienstadt, and 8,000 from Slovakia.[277] The last selection took place on 30 October 1944.[198] On 1 or 2 November 1944, Heinrich Himmler ordered the SS to halt the mass murder by gas.[278][why?] On 25 November, he ordered that Auschwitz's gas chambers and crematoria be destroyed. The Sonderkommando and other prisoners began the job of dismantling the buildings and cleaning up the site.[279] On 18 January 1945, Engelbert Marketsch, a German criminal transferred from Mauthausen, became the last prisoner to be assigned a serial number in Auschwitz, number 202499.[280] According to Polish historian Andrzej Strzelecki, the evacuation of the camp was one of its "most tragic chapters".[281] Himmler ordered the evacuation of all camps in January 1945, telling camp commanders: "The Führer holds you personally responsible for ... making sure that not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy."[282] The plundered goods from the "Kanada" barracks, together with building supplies, were transported to the German interior. Between 1 December 1944 and 15 January 1945, over one million items of clothing were packed to be shipped out of Auschwitz; 95,000 such parcels were sent to concentration camps in Germany.[283] Beginning on 17 January, some 58,000 Auschwitz detainees (about two-thirds Jews)—over 20,000 from Auschwitz I and II and over 30,000 from the subcamps—were evacuated under guard, at first heading west on foot, then by open-topped freight trains, to concentration camps in Germany and Austria: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Dora-Mittelbau, Ravensbruck, and Sachsenhausen.[284] Fewer than 9,000 remained in the camps, deemed too sick to move.[285] During the marches, the SS shot or otherwise dispatched anyone unable to continue; "execution details" followed the marchers, killing prisoners who lagged behind.[281] Peter Longerich estimated that a quarter of the detainees were thus killed.[286] By December 1944 some 15,000 Jewish prisoners had made it from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated by the British on 15 April 1945.[287] On 20 January, crematoria II and III were blown up, and on 23 January the "Kanada" warehouses were set on fire; they apparently burned for five days. Crematorium IV had been partly demolished after the Sonderkommando revolt in October, and the rest of it was destroyed later. On 26 January, one day ahead of the Red Army's arrival, crematorium V was blown up.[288] Liberation Main article: Liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp Young survivors at the camp, liberated by the Red Army in January 1945 Eyeglasses of victims, 1945 The first in the camp complex to be liberated was Auschwitz III, the IG Farben camp at Monowitz; a soldier from the 100th Infantry Division of the Red Army entered the camp around 9 am on Saturday, 27 January 1945.[289] The 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front (also part of the Red Army) arrived in Auschwitz I and II around 3 pm. They found 7,000 prisoners alive in the three main camps, 500 in the other subcamps, and over 600 corpses.[290] Items found included 837,000 women's garments, 370,000 men's suits, 44,000 pairs of shoes,[291] and 7,000 kg of human hair, estimated by the Soviet war crimes commission to have come from 140,000 people.[221] Some of the hair was examined by the Forensic Science Institute in Kraków, where it was found to contain traces of hydrogen cyanide, the main ingredient of Zyklon B.[292] Primo Levi described seeing the first four soldiers on horseback approach Auschwitz III, where he had been in the sick bay. They threw "strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive ...":[293]     They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man's crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.[294] Georgii Elisavetskii, a Soviet soldier who entered one of the barracks, said in 1980 that he could hear other soldiers telling the inmates: "You are free, comrades!" But they did not respond, so he tried in Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian. Then he used some Yiddish: "They think that I am provoking them. They begin to hide. And only when I said to them: 'Do not be afraid, I am a colonel of Soviet Army and a Jew. We have come to liberate you' ... Finally, as if the barrier collapsed ... they rushed toward us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs."[291] The Soviet military medical service and Polish Red Cross (PCK) set up field hospitals that looked after 4,500 prisoners suffering from the effects of starvation (mostly diarrhea) and tuberculosis. Local volunteers helped until the Red Cross team arrived from Kraków in early February.[295] In Auschwitz II, the layers of excrement on the barracks floors had to be scraped off with shovels. Water was obtained from snow and from fire-fighting wells. Before more help arrived, 2,200 patients there were looked after by a few doctors and 12 PCK nurses. All the patients were later moved to the brick buildings in Auschwitz I, where several blocks became a hospital, with medical personnel working 18-hour shifts.[296] The liberation of Auschwitz received little press attention at the time; the Red Army was focusing on its advance toward Germany and liberating the camp had not been one of its key aims. Boris Polevoi reported on the liberation in Pravda on 2 February 1945 but made no mention of Jews;[297] inmates were described collectively as "victims of Fascism".[298] It was when the Western Allies arrived in Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau in April 1945 that the liberation of the camps received extensive coverage.[299] After the war Trials of war criminals Further information: End of World War II in Europe, Auschwitz trial, and Frankfurt Auschwitz trials Gallows in Auschwitz I where Rudolf Höss was executed on 16 April 1947 Only 789 Auschwitz staff, up to 15 percent, ever stood trial;[8] most of the cases were pursued in Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany.[300] According to Aleksander Lasik, female SS officers were treated more harshly than male; of the 17 women sentenced, four received the death penalty and the others longer prison terms than the men. He writes that this may have been because there were only 200 women overseers, and therefore they were more visible and memorable to the inmates.[301] Camp commandant Rudolf Höss was arrested by the British on 11 March 1946 near Flensburg, northern Germany, where he had been working as a farmer under the pseudonym Franz Lang. He was imprisoned in Heide, then transferred to Minden for interrogation, part of the British occupation zone. From there he was taken to Nuremberg to testify for the defense in the trial of SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Höss was straightforward about his own role in the mass murder and said he had followed the orders of Heinrich Himmler.[302][j] Extradited to Poland on 25 May 1946,[303] he wrote his memoirs in custody, first published in Polish in 1951 then in German in 1958 as Kommandant in Auschwitz.[304] His trial before the Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw opened on 11 March 1947; he was sentenced to death on 2 April and hanged in Auschwitz I on 16 April, near crematorium I.[305] On 25 November 1947, the Auschwitz trial began in Kraków, when Poland's Supreme National Tribunal brought to court 40 former Auschwitz staff, including commandant Arthur Liebehenschel, women's camp leader Maria Mandel, and camp leader Hans Aumeier. The trials ended on 22 December 1947, with 23 death sentences, seven life sentences, and nine prison sentences ranging from three to 15 years. Hans Münch, an SS doctor who had several former prisoners testify on his behalf, was the only person to be acquitted.[306] Other former staff were hanged for war crimes in the Dachau Trials and the Belsen Trial, including camp leaders Josef Kramer, Franz Hössler, and Vinzenz Schöttl; doctor Friedrich Entress; and guards Irma Grese and Elisabeth Volkenrath.[307] Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, the owner and chief executive officer of the firm Tesch & Stabenow, one of the suppliers of Zyklon B, were arrested by the British after the war and executed for knowingly supplying the chemical for use on humans.[308] The 180-day Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, held in West Germany from 20 December 1963 to 20 August 1965, tried 22 defendants, including two dentists, a doctor, two camp adjudants and the camp's pharmacist. The 700-page indictment, presenting the testimony of 254 witnesses, was accompanied by a 300-page report about the camp, Nationalsozialistische Konzentrationslager, written by historians from the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Germany, including Martin Broszat and Helmut Krausnick. The report became the basis of their book, Anatomy of the SS State (1968), the first comprehensive study of the camp and the SS. The court convicted 19 of the defendants, giving six of them life sentences and the others between three and ten years.[309] East Germany also held trials against several former staff members of Auschwitz. One of the defendants they tried was Horst Fischer. Fischer, one of the highest ranking SS physicians in the camp, had personally selected at least 75,000 men, women, and children to be gassed. He was arrested in 1965. The following year, he was convicted of crimes against humanity, sentenced to death, and guillotined. Fischer was the highest-ranking SS physician from Auschwitz to ever be tried by a German court.[310] Legacy Barracks at Auschwitz II Auschwitz II gate in 1959 In the decades since its liberation, Auschwitz has become a primary symbol of the Holocaust. Historian Timothy D. Snyder attributes this to the camp's high death toll and "unusual combination of an industrial camp complex and a killing facility", which left behind far more witnesses than single-purpose killing facilities such as Chełmno or Treblinka.[311] In 2005 the United Nations General Assembly designated 27 January, the date of the camp's liberation, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.[312] Helmut Schmidt visited the site in November 1977, the first West German chancellor to do so, followed by his successor, Helmut Kohl, in November 1989.[313] In a statement on the 50th anniversary of the liberation, Kohl said that "[t]he darkest and most awful chapter in German history was written at Auschwitz."[314] In January 2020, world leaders gathered at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to commemorate the 75th anniversary.[315] It was the city's largest-ever political gathering, with over 45 heads of state and world leaders, including royalty.[316] At Auschwitz itself, Reuven Rivlin and Andrzej Duda, the presidents of Israel and Poland, laid wreaths.[317] Notable memoirists of the camp include Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.[237] Levi's If This is a Man, first published in Italy in 1947 as Se questo è un uomo, became a classic of Holocaust literature, an "imperishable masterpiece".[318][k] Wiesel wrote about his imprisonment at Auschwitz in Night (1960) and other works, and became a prominent spokesman against ethnic violence; in 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.[320] Camp survivor Simone Veil was elected President of the European Parliament, serving from 1979 to 1982.[321] Two Auschwitz victims—Maximilian Kolbe, a priest who volunteered to die by starvation in place of a stranger, and Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism—were named saints of the Catholic Church.[322] In 2017, a Körber Foundation survey found that 40 percent of 14-year-olds in Germany did not know what Auschwitz was.[323][324] The following year a survey organized by the Claims Conference, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and others found that 41 percent of 1,350 American adults surveyed, and 66 percent of millennials, did not know what Auschwitz was, while 22 percent said they had never heard of the Holocaust.[325] A CNN-ComRes poll in 2018 found a similar situation in Europe.[326] Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Main article: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Czesława Kwoka, photographed in Auschwitz by Wilhelm Brasse of the camp's Erkennungsdienst Museum exhibit, 2016 Israeli Air Force F-15 Eagles fly over Auschwitz II-Birkenau, 2003 End of the rail track inside Auschwitz II On 2 July 1947, the Polish government passed a law establishing a state memorial to remember "the martyrdom of the Polish nation and other nations in Oswiecim".[327] The museum established its exhibits at Auschwitz I; after the war, the barracks in Auschwitz II-Birkenau had been mostly dismantled and moved to Warsaw to be used on building sites. Dwork and van Pelt write that, in addition, Auschwitz I played a more central role in the persecution of the Polish people, in opposition to the importance of Auschwitz II to the Jews, including Polish Jews.[328] An exhibition opened in Auschwitz I in 1955, displaying prisoner mug shots; hair, suitcases, and shoes taken from murdered prisoners; canisters of Zyklon B pellets; and other objects related to the killings.[329] UNESCO added the camp to its list of World Heritage Sites in 1979.[330] All the museum's directors were, until 1990, former Auschwitz prisoners. Visitors to the site have increased from 492,500 in 2001, to over one million in 2009,[331] to two million in 2016.[332] There have been protracted disputes over the perceived Christianization of the site. Pope John Paul II celebrated mass over the train tracks leading to Auschwitz II-Birkenau on 7 June 1979[333] and called the camp "the Golgotha of our age", referring to the crucifixion of Jesus.[334] More controversy followed when Carmelite nuns founded a convent in 1984 in a former theater outside the camp's perimeter, near block 11 of Auschwitz I,[335] after which a local priest and some survivors erected a large cross—one that had been used during the pope's mass—behind block 11 to commemorate 152 Polish inmates shot by the Germans in 1941.[336][337] After a long dispute, Pope John Paul II intervened and the nuns moved the convent elsewhere in 1993.[338] The cross remained, triggering the "War of the Crosses", as more crosses were erected to commemorate Christian victims, despite international objections. The Polish government and Catholic Church eventually agreed to remove all but the original.[339] On 4 September 2003, despite a protest from the museum, three Israeli Air Force F-15 Eagles performed a fly-over of Auschwitz II-Birkenau during a ceremony at the camp below. All three pilots were descendants of Holocaust survivors, including the man who led the flight, Major-General Amir Eshel.[340] On 27 January 2015, some 300 Auschwitz survivors gathered with world leaders under a giant tent at the entrance to Auschwitz II to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the camp's liberation.[341][l] Museum curators consider visitors who pick up items from the ground to be thieves, and local police will charge them as such; the maximum penalty is a 10-year prison sentence.[343] In 2017 two British youths from the Perse School were fined in Poland after picking up buttons and shards of decorative glass in 2015 from the "Kanada" area of Auschwitz II, where camp victims' personal effects were stored.[344] The 16 ft (4.9 m) Arbeit Macht Frei sign over the main camp's gate was stolen in December 2009 by a Swedish former neo-Nazi and two Polish men. The sign was later recovered.[345] In 2018 the Polish government passed an amendment to its Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, making it a criminal offence to violate the "good name" of Poland by accusing it of crimes committed by Germany in the Holocaust, which would include referring to Auschwitz and other camps as "Polish death camps".[346] Staff at the museum were accused by nationalist media in Poland of focusing too much on the fate of the Jews in Auschwitz at the expense of ethnic Poles. The brother of the museum's director, Piotr Cywiński, wrote that Cywiński had experienced "50 days of incessant hatred".[347] After discussions with Israel's prime minister, amid international concern that the new law would stifle research, the Polish government adjusted the amendment so that anyone accusing Poland of complicity would be guilty only of a civil offence.[348] See also     Auschwitz Album     Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation     Höcker Album     List of Nazi concentration camps     List of victims and survivors of Auschwitz     "Polish death camp" controversy Sources Notes The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933, excluded most Jews from the legal profession and civil service. Similar legislation deprived Jewish members of other professions of the right to practise.[12] Danuta Czech (Auschwitz 1940–1945, Volume V, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000): "June 14 [1940]: The first transport of Polish political prisoners arrived from the Tarnów prison: 728 men sent to Auschwitz by the commander of the Sipo u. SD (Security Police and Security Service) in Cracow. These prisoners were given camp serial numbers 31 to 758. The transport included many healthy young men fit for military service, who had been caught trying to cross the Polish southern border in order to make their way to the Polish Armed Forces being formed in France. The organizers of this illegal emigration operation were also in this transport, along with resistance organizers, political and community activists, members of the Polish intelligentsia, Catholic priests, and Jews, arrested in the 'AB' (Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion) operation organized by Hans Frank in the spring of 1940. At the same time, a further 100 SS men—officers and SS enlisted men—were sent to reinforce the camp garrison."[28] Franciszek Piper writes that, according to post-war testimony from several inmates, as well as from Rudolf Höss (Auschwitz commandant from May 1940), the gas chamber at Auschwitz I could hold 1,000 people.[34] Danuta Czech (Auschwitz 1940–1945, Volume V, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000): "February 15, 1942: "The first transport of Jews arrested by the Stapo (State Police) in Katowice and fated to die at Auschwitz arrived from Beuthen. They were unloaded at the ramp on the camp railroad siding and ordered to leave their baggage there. The camp SS flying squad received the Jews from the Stapo and led the victims to the gas chamber in the camp crematorium. There, they were killed with the use of Zyklon B gas."[39] Mary Fulbrook (A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, Oxford University Press, 2012): "Gunter Faerber, for example, recalled the moment in February 1942 when the Jews of Beuthen (Bytom in Polish), where his grandmother lived, were brought through Bedzin on their way to Auschwitz. ... Two large army trucks of Jewish women from Beuthen were brought 'straight to the station, they were queuing at the station ... I was still given a chance to say goodbye because we knew already ... that the women of Beuthen are arriving' ... I went down to the station, I saw the long queue of women.' Faerber asked permission of a Gestapo guard to go up to his grandmother, who was with her sister, 'and I said goodbye, and that was the last I saw of them and the whole transport was moved out by train ...'"[41] Danuta Czech (Auschwitz 1940–1945, Volume V, 2000): "March 26, 1942: Nine hundred ninety-nine Jewish women from Poprad in Slovakia arrived, and were assigned numbers 1000–1998. This was the first registered transport sent to Auschwitz by RSHA IV B4 (the Jewish Office, directed by SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann)."[46] This was the third set of serial numbers started in the camp.[117] Robert Jan van Pelt (The Case for Auschwitz, 2002): "This figure [1.1 million] has been endorsed by all serious, professional historians who have studied the complex history of Auschwitz in some detail, by the Holocaust research institute at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C."[228] Earlier estimates included Raul Hilberg's 1961 work, The Destruction of the European Jews, which estimated that up to one million Jews had died in the camp.[229] In 1983 French scholar George Wellers was one of the first to use German data on deportations to calculate the death toll; he arrived at a figure of 1,471,595 deaths, including 1.35 million Jews and 86,675 non-Jewish Poles.[230] The escapees included 396 Polish men and 10 Polish women; 164 men from the Soviet Union (including 50 prisoners of war), and 15 women; 112 Jewish men and three Jewish women; 36 Romani/Sinti men and two women; 22 German men and nine women; 19 Czech men and four women; two Austrian men; one Yugoslav woman and one man; and 15 other men and one woman.[257] In his testimony, according to Polish historian Aleksander Lasik, "Höss neither protected anyone nor evaded his own responsibility. His stance came as a surprise to many, especially those who viewed him as a bloodthirsty beast. Instead, he viewed his crimes in terms of the technical obstacles and challenges with which he had to cope. Höss stated that he led the killings in Auschwitz on express orders of Reichsführer Himmler."[303] In The Drowned and the Saved (1986), Levi wrote that the concentration camps represented the epitome of the totalitarian system: "[N]ever has there existed a state that was really "totalitarian" ... Never has some form of reaction, a corrective of the total tyranny, been lacking, not even in the Third Reich or Stalin's Soviet Union: in both cases, public opinion, the magistrature, the foreign press, the churches, the feeling for justice and humanity that ten or twenty years of tyranny were not enough to eradicate, have to a greater or lesser extent acted as a brake. Only in the Lager [camp] was the restraint from below nonexistent, and the power of these small satraps absolute."[319]     Attendees included the president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, Polish president Bronisław Komorowski, French President François Hollande, German President Joachim Gauck, the film director Steven Spielberg, and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands.[341][342] Citations "The unloading ramps and selections". Auschwitz-Birkenau State. Archived from the original on 21 January 2019. Piper 2000b, p. 230. "Auschwitz". encyclopedia.ushmm.org. Archived from the original on 13 June 2018. Retrieved 2 July 2021. "Auschwitz is the German name for the Polish city Oświęcim. Oświęcim is located in Poland, approximately 40 miles (about 64 km) west of Kraków. Germany annexed this area of Poland in 1939." "Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Auschwitz III-Monowitz". Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Archived from the original on 22 January 2019. Dwork & van Pelt 2002, p. 166. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp - Memorial and Museum. "Poles in Auschwitz". auschwitz.org. Archived from the original on 12 August 2020. Retrieved 8 July 2021. "The first transport of political prisoners to Auschwitz consisted almost exclusively of Poles. It was for them that the camp was founded, and the majority of prisoners were Polish for the first two years. They died of starvation, brutal mistreatment, beating, and sickness, and were executed and killed in the gas chambers." Piper 2000b, pp. 230–231; also see Piper 1998b, pp. 71–72. Lasik 2000b, p. 116, n. 19. Evans 2005, p. 7. Browning 2004, p. 424. Longerich 2010, pp. 32–35, 41. Longerich 2010, pp. 38–39. Longerich 2010, pp. 41, 67–69. Longerich 2010, p. 60. Browning 2004, pp. 24–26; Longerich 2010, p. 144. Haar 2009, pp. 41–46. Cesarani 2016, p. xxxiii. Piper 2000b, p. 117. Matthäus 2004, p. 244. Gerlach 2016, pp. 84–85. "Killing Centers: An Overview". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 14 September 2017. Dwork & van Pelt 2002, p. 362. Piper 2000a, pp. 52–53; Dwork & van Pelt 2002, p. 166. Gutman 1998, p. 16. Piper 2000a, pp. 52–53; also see Iwaszko 2000b, p. 51; Dwork & van Pelt 2002, p. 166 Iwaszko 2000a, p. 15. Czech 2000, p. 121; for serial number 1, Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 65. Czech 2000, pp. 121–122. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 71. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, pp. 72–73. Dwork & van Pelt 2002, p. 364. Piper 2000b, p. 121. Piper 2000b, pp. 121, 133; Piper 1998c, pp. 158–159. Piper 2000b, p. 128. Dwork & van Pelt 2002, p. 292; Piper 1998c, pp. 157–158; Piper 2000b, p. 117. Czech 2000, p. 142; Świebocki 2002, pp. 126–127, n. 50. Piper 2000a, p. 61. Höss 2003, p. 148. Czech 2000, p. 142. van Pelt 1998, p. 145; Piper 2000a, p. 61; Steinbacher 2005, p. 107; "Anniversary of the First Transport of Polish Jews to Auschwitz" Archived 14 January 2020 at the Wayback Machine. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 13 February 2006. Fulbrook 2012, pp. 220–221, 396, n. 49. Friedländer 2007, p. 359. Browning 2004, p. 357. Wachsmann 2015, p. 707. Czech 2000, p. 143. Czech 2000, p. 144. Piper 2000a, p. 62. Piper 2000b, p. 133, n. 419. Müller 1999, p. 31; Piper 2000b, p. 133. Piper 2000b, p. 132, for more on the corpses, p. 140; for 400 prisoners and over 107,000 corpses, see Czech 2000, p. 165. Piper 2000b, p. 144. Hayes 2003, p. 335. Piper 2000b, pp. 144, 155 for Kriegsgefangenenlager. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, pp. 80–83. van Pelt 1998, pp. 118–119. van Pelt 1998, pp. 122–123. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 87. Czech 2000, pp. 138–139. Steinbacher 2005, p. 94. Piper 2000b, pp. 134–136; also see Piper 1998c, p. 161. Pressac & van Pelt 1998, pp. 214–215; also see Piper 2000b, p. 138. Piper 2000b, p. 143. Piper 2000b, pp. 165–166. Piper 2000b, p. 159. Piper 2000b, p. 164. Steinbacher 2005, p. 45. Hilberg 1998, pp. 81–82. Steinbacher 2005, p. 49. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 108; for "IG-Auschwitz", see Hayes 2001, p. xii. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 108. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, pp. 109–110. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, pp. 111–112. Lasik 2000a, pp. 151–152. Steinbacher 2005, p. 53. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 112. Hayes 2001, p. 353. Hayes 2001, p. 359. Krakowski 1998, p. 57. Hayes 2001, p. 364. Steinbacher 2005, pp. 52, 56. Hayes 2001, p. 367; Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 115; that when the camp was evacuated, 9,054 of the 9,792 inmates were Jews, see Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 113. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 115. Steinbacher 2005, p. 57. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, pp. 103–104. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, pp. 103, 119; Gutman 1998, p. 17. Gutman 1998, p. 18; Piper 1998a, p. 45; Steinbacher 2005, p. 58. Gutman 1998, pp. 17–18. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 106; Kubica 2009, pp. 233–234. Also see "The Budy Massacre—A grim anniversary" Archived 26 February 2020 at the Wayback Machine. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 10 October 2007. Dunin-Wasowicz 1984, p. 139. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 104. Wilkinson, Alec (17 March 2008). "Picturing Auschwitz". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 8 December 2012. Retrieved 3 January 2020. Lasik 1998b, p. 288; Lasik 2000b, p. 154. Lasik 2000a, p. 154. Harding 2013, p. 100. Lasik 1998b, pp. 294–295. Lasik 2000a, pp. 153–157. Lasik 2000b, p. 314. Lasik 1998a, p. 282. Lasik 2000b, p. 299. Lasik 1998a, p. 274. Lasik 2000b, pp. 323–324. Lasik 1998a, p. 273. Lasik 1998a, pp. 272–273. Lasik 1998a, p. 285. Strzelecka 2000a, p. 49. Steinbacher 2005, pp. 35–36. Wittmann 2003, pp. 519–520. Piper 2000b, p. 180. Piper 2000b, pp. 180–181, 184. Piper 2000b, pp. 170–171. Piper 2000b, p. 189. Piper 2000b, pp. 190–191. Piper 2000b, pp. 180–181. Piper 2000b, pp. 188–189. Steinbacher 2005, pp. 90–91. Gutman 1998, p. 20. "Tattoos and Numbers: The System of Identifying Prisoners at Auschwitz". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 13 June 2018. Retrieved 25 January 2019. "System of triangles". Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Archived from the original on 5 July 2018. "Persecution of Homosexuals in the Third Reich". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 11 September 2018. Retrieved 1 February 2019. Steinbacher 2005, pp. 31–32. "An Original German Train Car at the Birkenau Ramp". Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. 14 October 2009. Archived from the original on 25 January 2019. Iwaszko 2000a, p. 17. Piper 1998c, p. 162. Longerich 2010, p. 408. Strzelecka 2000b, pp. 65–66. Iwaszko 2000b, p. 56. Levi 2001, p. 45. Iwaszko 2000b, p. 60. Strzelecka 2000b, p. 66. Steinbacher 2005, p. 33. "Life in the camp: living conditions". Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Archived from the original on 19 March 2016. Retrieved 3 January 2020. Strzelecka 2000b, p. 67. Steinbacher 2005, p. 33; Gutman 1998, pp. 20–21. Iwaszko 2000b, pp. 60–61. Strzelecka 2000b, pp. 68–69. Strzelecka 2000b, p. 69. Gutman 1998, p. 21; Iwaszko 2000b, p. 55; for the floor, see Strzelecka 2000b, p. 70. Iwaszko 2000b, p. 55. Nyiszli 2011, p. 25. Gutman 1998, p. 21. Steinbacher 2005, p. 34. Rosen 2014, p. 18. Strzelecka 2000c, p. 171. Czech 2000, pp. 143–144. Strzelecka 2000c, p. 177. Stangneth 2014, p. 22. Strzelecka 2000c, p. 172. Czech 2000, p. 155. Strzelecka 2000c, pp. 172–173. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 88. Strzelecka 2000c, p. 174. Perl 1948, pp. 32–33; van Pelt 1998, p. 133. Strzelecka 2000c, p. 176. Steinbacher 2005, pp. 114–115. Strzelecka 2000d, p. 362. Kubica 1998, p. 319; Czech 2000, p. 178. Kubica 1998, pp. 320–323. Kubica 1998, p. 325. Friedländer 2007, p. 505. Kubica 1998, pp. 323–324. Kater 2000, pp. 124–125. Spitz 2005, pp. 232–234. Mehring 2015, pp. 161–163. Strzelecka 2000d, pp. 371–372. Strzelecka 2000e, pp. 373–376. Strzelecka 2000e, pp. 384–385. Strzelecka 2000e, p. 389. Strzelecka 2000e, p. 381. Strzelecka 2000e, pp. 382, 384. Piper 2000b, p. 77. Piper 2000b, p. 79. Czech 2000, p. 139. Piper 2000b, p. 102. Piper 2000b, p. 87. Piper 2000b, p. 89. Piper 2000b, pp. 89–90. "Romani children in an orphanage in Germany". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 1 February 2023. Retrieved 2 February 2019. Bauer 1998, pp. 447–448. Bauer 1998, p. 448. Piper 2000b, p. 55, note 145. Bauer 1998, pp. 449–450. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 96. Czech 2000, p. 185. Keren 1998, p. 429. Keren 1998, p. 428. Czech 2000, pp. 190–191. Czech 2000, p. 194. Keren 1998, p. 439. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, p. 97. Fleming 2014, pp. 231–232. Fleming 2014, p. 215. Czech 2000, p. 203. Dwork & van Pelt 2002, p. 363. Piper 1998c, pp. 157–159. Piper 1998c, pp. 159–160. "Jewish women and children who have been selected for death, walk in a line towards the gas chambers". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 2 March 2020. Retrieved 26 January 2019. Piper 1998c, pp. 161–162. Piper 1998c, p. 174. Piper 1998c, p. 175. Piper 2000b, pp. 12–13; Browning 2004, p. 421. Longerich 2010, p. 407. Dwork & van Pelt 2002, p. 338. Dwork & van Pelt 2002, pp. 341–343. Piper 2000b, p. 227. Piper 2000b, p. 229. Piper 2000b, p. 103ff. Piper 2000b, pp. 109–110. Piper 2000b, p. 111. Piper 1998c, pp. 162, 169. Strzelecka & Setkiewicz 2000, pp. 97–98. Baxter 2017, p. 241. Piper 1998c, pp. 166, 168. Piper 2000b, p. 169, n. 489. Piper 2000b, p. 169, n. 490. Piper 2000b, p. 169. Piper 1998c, p. 162; also see Piper 2000b, p. 170. Piper 2000b, p. 170. Cohen 1998, pp. 529, 531. Langfus 2000, p. 357. Strzelecki 2000b, p. 408. Strzelecki 2000b, p. 409. Strzelecki 2000b, p. 411. Piper 2000b, p. 171. Strzelecki 2000b, p. 400. Strzelecki 2000b, p. 406. Piper 1998c, p. 171. Piper 1991, pp. 49–103; van Pelt 2016, p. 109; also see Stets, Dan (7 May 1992). "Fixing the numbers at Auschwitz". Chicago Tribune. Archived from the original on 3 February 2019. Retrieved 2 February 2019. van Pelt 2016, p. 109. Hilberg 1961, p. 958; also see Piper 2000b, p. 214. Piper 1998b, p. 67; Piper 2000b, p. 214. Höss 2003, p. 188; also see Friedländer 2007, p. 404. Piper 2000b, pp. 210–213. The International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg 1946, p. 415. The International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg 1946, p. 397. Höss 2003, p. 193. Höss 2003, p. 194. Snyder 2010, p. 383. "Ethnic origins and number of victims of Auschwitz". Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Archived from the original on 2 February 2019. Snyder 2010, p. 275. "Jehovah's Witnesses" Archived 1 June 2019 at the Wayback Machine. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Fleming 2014, p. 194; Zarembina & Harriman 1944. Krahelska 1985. Fleming 2014, p. 131. Czech 2000, p. 177. 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German History. 21 (4): 505–532. doi:10.1191/0266355403gh294oa.     Wittmann, Rebecca (2005). Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674016941.     Zarembina, Natalia; Harriman, Florence Jaffray (1944). Oswiecim, Camp of Death (Underground Report). New York: Poland Fights. OCLC 3899327. Further reading     Borowski, Tadeusz (1992) [1976]. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Trans. from the Polish by Barbara Vedder. East Rutherford: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-018624-7     Glenday, James (23 February 2018). "Life next to the world's most notorious concentration camp". ABC News (Australia). Archived from the original on 15 February 2021. Retrieved 25 February 2018.     Huener, Jonathan (2003). Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979. Athens: Ohio University Press. ISBN 0-8214-1506-9.     Pilecki, Witold (2012). The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery. Trans. from the Polish by Jarek Garlinski. Los Angeles: Aquila Polonica. ISBN 978-1-60772-010-2     Polish Ministry of Information (1942). The Black Book of Poland. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. pp. 87–88. OCLC 489805.     Raczyński, Edward (1941). German Occupation of Poland, Extract of note addressed to the allied and neutral powers. London and New York: Republic of Poland Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Greystone Press.     Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal Archived 28 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine. Nuremberg, 14 November 1945 – 1 October 1946. External links Wikiquote has quotations related to Auschwitz concentration camp. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Auschwitz concentration camp. Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Auschwitz-Birkenau.     Drone footage, 2015 on YouTube     Google Earth     Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.     "Auschwitz". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.     "The Auschwitz Album". Yad Vashem.     Auschwitz-Birkenau photographs by Bill Hunt.     vte World Heritage Sites in Poland     vte Holocaust in German-occupied Poland     vte The Holocaust Portals:     flag Germany     flag Poland      World War II Authority control Edit this at Wikidata Categories:     Auschwitz concentration camp1940 establishments in GermanyBayerGerman extermination camps in PolandIG FarbenNazi concentration camps in PolandNazi war crimes in PolandRegistered museums in PolandThe HolocaustTourism in Eastern EuropeWorld Heritage Sites in PolandWorld War II sites in PolandWorld War II sites of Nazi Germany World War II Dates and Timeline Explore a timeline of key events before and during World War II. The mass murder of Europe’s Jews took place in the context of WWII. As German troops invaded and occupied more and more territory in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa, the regime’s racial and antisemitic policies became more radical, moving from persecution to genocide. More information about this image     Cite     Share     Print Tags     World War II key dates military campaigns Axis alliance Allied powers     Language     English     September 18, 1931 Japan invades Manchuria.     October 2, 1935–May 1936 Fascist Italy invades, conquers, and annexes Ethiopia.     October 25–November 1, 1936 Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sign a treaty of cooperation on October 25. On November 1, the Rome-Berlin Axis is announced.     November 25, 1936 Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan sign the Anti-Comintern Pact. The pact is directed against the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement.     July 7, 1937 Japan invades China.     November 26, 1937 Italy joins Germany and Japan in the Anti-Comintern Pact.     March 11–13, 1938 Germany incorporates Austria in the Anschluss. Adolf Hitler and entourage view a military parade following the annexation of Austria (the Anschluss). [LCID: 12314] Annexation of Austria Adolf Hitler and his entourage view a military parade following the annexation of Austria (the Anschluss). Vienna, Austria, March 1938.     Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes     September 29, 1938 Germany, Italy, Great Britain, and France sign the Munich agreement which forces the Czechoslovak Republic to cede the Sudetenland, including key Czechoslovak military defense positions, to Nazi Germany.     March 14–15, 1939 Under German pressure, the Slovaks declare their independence and form a Slovak Republic. The Germans occupy the dismantled Czech lands in violation of the Munich agreement and form the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.     March 31, 1939 France and Great Britain guarantee the integrity of the borders of the Polish state.     April 7–15, 1939 Fascist Italy invades and annexes Albania.     August 23, 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign a non-aggression agreement and a secret protocol dividing eastern Europe into spheres of influence.     September 1, 1939 Germany invades Poland, initiating World War II in Europe.     September 3, 1939 Honoring their guarantee of Poland’s borders, Great Britain and France declare war on Germany.     September 17, 1939 The Soviet Union invades Poland from the east. The Polish government flees into exile via Romania, first to France and then later to Great Britain.     September 27–29, 1939 Warsaw surrenders on September 27. Germany and the Soviet Union divide Poland between them.     November 30, 1939–March 12, 1940 The Soviet Union invades Finland, initiating the so-called Winter War. The Finns sue for an armistice and cede the northern shores of Lake Ladoga to the Soviet Union. They also cede the small Finnish coastline on the Arctic Sea.     April 9, 1940–June 9, 1940 Germany invades Denmark and Norway. Denmark surrenders on the day of the attack. Norway holds out until June 9.     May 10, 1940–June 22, 1940 Germany attacks western Europe, specifically France and the neutral Low Countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg). Luxembourg is occupied on May 10; the Netherlands surrenders on May 14; and Belgium surrenders on May 28. On June 22, France signs an armistice agreement by which the Germans occupy the northern half of the country and the entire Atlantic coastline. In southern France, a collaborationist regime with its capital in Vichy is established.     June 10, 1940 Italy enters the war. Italy invades southern France on June 21.     June 28, 1940 The Soviet Union forces Romania to cede the eastern province of Bessarabia and the northern half of Bukovina to Soviet Ukraine.     June 14, 1940–August 6, 1940 The Soviet Union occupies the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) on June 14–18. On July 14–15, it engineers Communist coup d’états in each of these countries and then annexes them as Soviet Republics on August 3–6.     July 10, 1940–October 31, 1940 The air war known as the Battle of Britain ends in defeat for Nazi Germany.     August 30, 1940 Second Vienna Award: Germany and Italy arbitrate a decision on the division of the disputed province of Transylvania between Romania and Hungary. The loss of northern Transylvania forces Romanian King Carol to abdicate in favor of his son, Michael, and brings to power a dictatorship under General Ion Antonescu.     September 13, 1940 The Italians invade British-controlled Egypt from Italian-controlled Libya.     September 27, 1940 Germany, Italy, and Japan sign the Tripartite Pact.     October 1940 Italy invades Greece from Albania on October 28.     November 1940 Hungary (November 20), Romania (November 23), and Slovakia (November 24) join the Axis.     February 1941 The Germans send the Afrika Korps to North Africa to reinforce the faltering Italians.     March 1, 1941 Bulgaria joins the Axis.     April 6, 1941–June 1941 Germany, Italy, and Hungary invade Yugoslavia and, together with Bulgaria, dismember it. Yugoslavia surrenders on April 17. Germany and Bulgaria invade Greece in support of the Italians. Resistance in Greece ceases in early June 1941.     April 10, 1941 The leaders of the terrorist Ustaša movement proclaim the so-called Independent State of Croatia. Recognized immediately by Germany and Italy, the new state includes the province of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Croatia joins the Axis powers formally on June 15, 1941.     June 22, 1941–November 1941 Nazi Germany and its Axis partners (except Bulgaria) invade the Soviet Union. Finland, seeking redress for the territorial losses in the armistice concluding the so-called Winter War, agrees to participate in the invasion. The Germans quickly overrun the Baltic states and, joined by the Finns, lay siege to Leningrad (St. Petersburg) by September. In the center, the Germans capture Smolensk in early August and drive on Moscow by October. In the south, German and Romanian troops capture Kiev (Kyiv) in September and capture Rostov on the Don River in November.     December 6, 1941 A Soviet counteroffensive drives the Germans from the Moscow suburbs in chaotic retreat.     December 7, 1941 Japan bombs Pearl Harbor.     December 8, 1941 The United States declares war on Japan, entering World War II. Japanese troops land in the Philippines, French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), and British Singapore. The Japanese occupy the Philippines, Indochina, and Singapore by April 1942 and take control of Burma in May.     December 11–13, 1941 Nazi Germany and its Axis partners declare war on the United States.     May 30, 1942–May 1945 The British bomb Köln (Cologne), in the start of a bombing campaign that brings the war home to Germany. Over the next three years Anglo-American bombing reduces urban Germany to rubble.     June 1942 The US Navy halts the Japanese naval advance in the central Pacific at Midway.     June 28, 1942–September 1942 Germany and its Axis partners launch a new offensive in the Soviet Union. German troops fight their way into Stalingrad (Volgograd) on the Volga River by mid-September and penetrate deep into the Caucasus after securing the Crimean Peninsula. With German forces in North Africa having penetrated Egypt, Germany was at the height of its military success in World War II. Panzer tanks of Erwin Rommel's Africa Corps during an advance against British armed forces. [LCID: tl121] Panzer tanks of Erwin Rommel's Africa Corps Panzer tanks of Erwin Rommel's Africa Corps during an advance against British armed forces. Libya, 1941-1942.     National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD     August 7, 1942–February 9, 1943 For the first time, Allied forces go on the offensive against Japanese forces by landing on and taking Tulagi, Florida, and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.     October 23–24, 1942 British troops defeat the Germans and Italians at El Alamein in Egypt, sending the Axis forces in chaotic retreat across Libya to the eastern border of Tunisia.     November 8, 1942 US and British troops land at several points on the beaches of Algeria and Morocco in French North Africa. The failure of the Vichy French troops to defend against the invasion enables the Allies to move swiftly to the western border of Tunisia and triggers the German occupation of southern France on November 11.     November 23, 1942–February 2, 1943 Soviet troops counterattack, breaking through the Hungarian and Romanian lines northwest and southwest of Stalingrad and trapping the German Sixth Army in the city. Forbidden by Hitler to retreat or try to break out of the Soviet ring, the survivors of the Sixth Army surrender on January 30 and February 2, 1943.     May 13, 1943 Axis forces in Tunisia surrender to the Allies, ending the North African campaign.     July 5, 1943 The Germans launch a massive tank offensive near Kursk in the Soviet Union. The Soviets blunt the attack within a week and begin an offensive initiative of their own.     July 10, 1943 US and British troops land on Sicily. By mid-August, the Allies control Sicily.     July 25, 1943 The Fascist Grand Council deposes Benito Mussolini, enabling Italian Marshall Pietro Badoglio to form a new government.     September 8, 1943 The Badoglio government surrenders unconditionally to the Allies. The Germans immediately seize control of Rome and northern Italy, establishing a puppet Fascist regime under Mussolini, who is freed from imprisonment by German commandos on September 12.     September 9, 1943 Allied troops land on the beaches of Salerno near Naples.     November 6, 1943 Soviet troops liberate Kiev.     January 22, 1944 Allied troops land successfully near Anzio, just south of Rome.     March 19, 1944 Fearing Hungary’s intention to desert the Axis partnership, the Germans occupy Hungary and compel the regent, Admiral Miklos Horthy, to appoint a pro-German minister president.     June 4, 1944 Allied troops liberate Rome. Within six weeks, Anglo-American bombers could hit targets in eastern Germany for the first time.     June 6, 1944 British, US, and Canadian troops successfully land on the Normandy beaches of France, opening a “Second Front” against the Germans.     June 22, 1944 The Soviets launch a massive offensive in eastern Belorussia (Belarus), destroying the German Army Group Center and driving westward to the Vistula River toward Warsaw in central Poland by August 1.     July 25, 1944 Allied forces break out of the Normandy beachhead and race eastward towards Paris.     August 1, 1944–October 5, 1944 The Home Army (the non-communist Polish resistance) rises up against the Germans in an effort to liberate Warsaw before the arrival of Soviet troops. The Soviet advance halts on the east bank of the Vistula. On October 5, the Germans accept the surrender of the remnants of the Home Army forces fighting in Warsaw.     August 15, 1944 Allied forces land in southern France near Nice and advance rapidly towards the Rhine River to the northeast.     August 20–25, 1944 Allied troops reach Paris. On August 25, Free French forces, supported by Allied troops, enter the French capital. By September, the Allies reach the German border. By December, virtually all of France, most of Belgium, and part of the southern Netherlands are liberated.     August 23, 1944 The appearance of Soviet troops on the Prut River induces the Romanian opposition to overthrow the Antonescu regime. The new government concludes an armistice and immediately switches sides in the war. The Romanian turnaround compels Bulgaria to surrender on September 8, and the Germans to evacuate Greece, Albania, and southern Yugoslavia in October.     August 29, 1944–October 28, 1944 Under the leadership of the Slovak National Council, consisting of both Communists and non-Communists, underground Slovak resistance units rise against the Germans and the indigenous fascist Slovak regime. In late October, the Germans capture Banská Bystrica, the headquarters of the uprising, and put an end to organized resistance.     September 4, 1944 Finland agrees to sign an armistice with the Soviet Union and to expel German forces.     October 15, 1944 The Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross movement carries out a coup d’état with German support to prevent the Hungarian government from pursuing negotiations for surrender to the Soviets.     October 20, 1944 US troops land in the Philippines.     December 16, 1944 The Germans launch a final offensive in the west, known as the Battle of the Bulge, in an attempt to re-conquer Belgium and split the Allied forces along the German border. By January 1, 1945, the Germans are in retreat.     January 12, 1945 The Soviets launch a new offensive, liberating Warsaw and Krakow in January. They capture Budapest after a two-month siege on February 13, driving the Germans and their Hungarian collaborators out of Hungary in early April.     March 7, 1945 US troops cross the Rhine River at Remagen.     April 4, 1945 The capture of Bratislava forces Slovakia to surrender.     April 13, 1945 Soviet forces capture Vienna.     April 16, 1945 The Soviets launch their final offensive, encircling Berlin.     April 1945 Partisan units, led by Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Tito, capture Zagreb and topple the Ustaša regime. The top Ustaša leaders flee to Italy and Austria.     April 30, 1945 Hitler commits suicide.     May 7–8, 1945 Germany signs an unconditional surrender at the headquarters of US General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander of Allied forces in northwest Europe, at Reims on May 7. The surrender takes effect on May 8 at 11:01 PM Central European time (CET).     May 8, 1945 Germany signs a second, very similar, document of surrender in Berlin. It also comes into effect on May 8 at 11:01 PM CET. In Moscow, this was already after midnight on May 9.     May 1945 Allied troops conquer Okinawa, the last island stop before the main Japanese islands.     August 6, 1945 The United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.     August 8, 1945 The Soviet Union declares war on Japan and invades Manchuria.     August 9, 1945 The United States drops an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.     September 2, 1945 Having agreed in principle to unconditional surrender on August 14, 1945, Japan formally surrenders, ending World War II. Defeat of Nazi Germany, 1942-1945 [LCID: eur86820] Defeat of Nazi Germany, 1942-1945     US Holocaust Memorial Museum Frequently Asked Questions about WWII How long did WWII last? World War II lasted for six years, from 1939 to 1945. When did WWII start? World War II began on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. When did WWII end in Europe? German armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies on May 7, 1945. The surrender went into effect the next day, May 8. World War II officially ended in most parts of Europe on May 8 (V-E Day). Because of the time difference, Soviet forces announced their “Victory Day” on May 9, 1945. When did WWII end in the Pacific Theater? World War II ended on September 2, 1945, in the Pacific theater with the official signing of surrender documents by Japan.
  • Condition: In Excellent Condition
  • Options: Commemorative
  • Modification Description: No
  • Collections/ Bulk Lots: No
  • Fineness: Unknown
  • Material: Various
  • Modified Item: No
  • Colour: Dark Silver
  • Year of Issue: 2020
  • Currency: Commerative
  • Features: Commemorative
  • Country/Region of Manufacture: United States
  • Variety: Missouri
  • Country of Origin: United States

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