On the Sunday we headed out to Auschwitz concentration camp. This was an interesting feeling, it felt a little strange visiting something so serious as part of a rugby trip and it felt a little ghoulish visiting a site where so many people had died. I had debated whether I wanted to go, but I think it's something that needs to be seen and understood so it can never happen again.
This was a fairly difficult post to write and I have to give a warning that some of the content may be distressing.
Most people have heard of Auschwitz concentration camp, but here's some very basic background. Auschwitz was a series of three work and extermination camps in Poland built by Nazi Germany during World War II. Auschwitz was built in 1940 initially to hold polish political prisoners. It made use of an abandoned Polish military camp.
Part of the Nazi ideology was the promotion of the Aryan Race: white skin, blond hair, blue eyes and a eugenics process of creating a superior race by selective breeding and extermination. Certain races were seen as inferior - the Romani (gypsy people), dark skinned Germans and Jews. In 1935 laws were enacted to limit the rights of Jews - they were no longer able to marry Germans, employ German house servants and stripped them of their citizenship. The hatred of the Jews was based around several factors, but mostly around the belief that the Jews were manipulating money and businesses and also that the Jewish people were responsible for the terrible situation that Germany found itself in after World War I.
When Germany annexed Poland, they claimed Oświęcim as part of Germany. The area was renamed Auschwitz (the Germanisation of the name). The Polish prisons were filling to capacity with political prisoners, such as educated or influential Polish citizens as well as members of the resistance. The Germans needed to find a new place to hold prisoners, so they founded the concentration camp of Auschwitz I at a former Polish army barracks. Any local residents were evicted (about 1200 locals). In May 1940 the first prisoners arrived - Polish criminal prisoners from Sachsenhausen Camp. The second wave of prisoners were Catholics, members of the resistance and a small number of Jews.
Initially a majority of the prisoners were Poles.
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| Looking toward the entrance of Auschwitz I |
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| The famous gates |
The gates of the Auschwitz are well know, as is the motto "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work brings freedom). Unfortunately these word were a lie, no-one was freed from Auschwitz. One of the SS soldiers was quoted as saying "You only leave through the chimney."
By the end of 1940 the camp was surrounded by a double rung of electrified barbed wire fences:
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| Wire Fences |
The gravel inside the inner fence marked a 'neutral zone' Anyone stepping onto the gravel could (and would) be shot.
The camp was initially intended as a work camp rather than an extermination camp, however prisoners were not well fed, lived in poor conditions, were subjected to beatings, torturous punishments, arbitrary executions and back-breaking labour.
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| Between the fences |
The big building that served as an entrance to the museum outside the fences was being built to be a new administration building for the camp, but it wasn't completed before the camp was evacuated.
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| Entrance Building |
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| The wooden building just outside the gates. |
We walked with our guide to the wooden building just outside the gates. This consisted of a watch tower and a building were prisoners were registered. Initially photographs were taken and registration cards were filled out for each prisoner. By the time the extermination of the Jews began, too many people were passing through the camp to continue this, so in many cases few records were kept.
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| Bomb Shelter |
Several bomb shelters were constructed outside the camp, however the site was never bombed - despite London knowing about the camp and debating whether to bomb it. It has been discussed that the English had the capability, especially in the later years of the war, to bomb the camp or the railroads leading into it - in an effort to slow down the exterminations, but the decision was made to focus elsewhere, for multiple reasons - a focus on Germany to end the war as well, a concern that a bombing run could endanger the inmates rather than assist them and the fact that Germans would just rebuild the infrastructure or change their approach. The allies were made aware of the exterminations by means of some prisoner escapees who sent reports back to the allied forces.
When the Germans started Operation Barbarossa in 1941 against Russia, they initially had a series of victories and a large number of Russian prisoners of war. This caused a lot of congestion at the Auschwitz I camp and so the prisoners were sent to work constructing Auschwitz-Birkenau.
10,000 Russian prisoners arrived in October 1941 and by March 1942 only 945 of them were still alive to be transferred to Birkenau. By May most of the rest had died to disease and starvation.
Around this time the Germans created the policy to exterminate the Jewish people and so the camps were made to be a combination of labour camp and extermination camp. The first gas chambers because operational in March 1942.
A chemical plant to manufacture an artificial rubber (Buna) called IG Farben was constructed near Monowice (Germanized to Monowitz) and workers to build and work in the plant were drawn from Auschwitz. A third camp was constructed called Auschwitz-Monowitz.
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| Heading into the camp - The neutral zone |
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| Buildings inside the gates |
The main buildings just inside the gates (including Building 24 on the left) were used to keep records and documents. There was also the long grey building that served as the kitchen.
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| The kitchen |
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| Block 15 |
When extermination started, the arriving prisoners were sorted into two groups - those fit for work and those to be exterminated. Any women with young children, elderly or young were set in a line for extermination. We heard stories of a lady who helped a neighbor with 7 children by holding one of her babies, because of this she was sorted into the 'unfit for work' line and executed.
The Jews sent to Auschwitz were told that they were being relocated and would start a new life in a new area, while their homes were given to German citizens. They were allowed to bring luggage but their valuables and money were confiscated. They were then crammed into trains and taken to the camps. In many cases the train ride was several days and they were given no food and little water and the cars were very cramped and either dangerously hot in summer or cold in winter. When the prisoners arrived they were let out and would have been overwhelmed by the sudden light as well as the barbed wire, armed guards and barking guard dogs. Before they had a chance to get past their disorientation, they were sorted into two lines, men and healthy women in one and the elderly, young or sick in another. Those 'fit for work' (about 25%) were sent to be shaved, washed and given their uniforms, while the other line was told that they would be washed and deloused. They were led to a changing room and told to strip naked. They were given to numbered pegs to hang their clothes in order to reduce panic and keep up the pretense that they would be coming back to collect their belongings. They were then led into a shower room, but once the door was sealed, no water came out of the taps. Instead a cyanide based pesticide (Zyklon B) was dropped into the chamber. When the prisoners were dead, they were taken to the crematoriums and burnt, before the ashes were dumped into rivers and lakes.
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| Sign with details about the extermination |
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| The camp looked pretty in early autumn, making it hard to see the horrors that had occurred there. |
We first headed inside building 4, which housed an exhibition about the camp.
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| Building 4 |
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| The famous quote and main reason for preserving Auschwitz |
The first room provided some information on the camp itself. Between 1940 and 1945 the camps housed at least:
1,300,000 people, of these:
1,100,000 were Jews,
140,000 - 150,000 were Polish criminals or political prisoners,
23,000 were Roma (Gypsies),
15,000 were Soviet Prisoners of War, and
25,000 were from other ethnic groups.
Of these 1.3 million, 1.1 million died in the camp and approximately 90% of them were Jewish.
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| An urn holding ashes of some of the victims recovered on site |
The rooms held a number of recovered records, ranging from correspondence to prisoner record cards:
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| Documents |
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| Prisoner records |
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| More prisoner record cards |
The cards recorded details about the prisoners, such as hair and eye colour. These cards were used for the first prisoners, but by the time of the mass exterminations there were too many people arriving (and many were not alive for long enough) to record.
A further breakdown of the Jews deported to Auschwitz:
430,000 from Hungary,
300,000 from Poland,
69,000 from France,
60,000 from the Netherlands,
55,000 from Greece,
46,000 from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,
27,000 from Slovakia,
25,000 from Belgium,
23,000 from Austria and Germany,
10,000 from Yugoslavia,
7,500 from Italy, and
690 from Norway.
In addition 34,000 were transferred to Auschwitz from other concentration camps.
I had recently watched an Auschwitz series on Netflix that raised some interesting reasons for these numbers. One of the requirements the Germans had of their allies and captured countries was the exporting of the Jews. Norway managed to evacuate a large number of Jews to neutral Sweden (in fact some were housed in Malmö Hus here in Malmö), but countries like Hungary were unable (or in some cases unwilling) to protect their Jewish citizens and allowed them to deported to concentration camps. Some of the escapees tried to warn that the deportation was not for relocation, but instead of execution to prevent the Jews from going willingly, but in many cases there were no choices.
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| Photo of Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau |
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| Sorting and selection |
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| A touching photo showing prisoners selected to be gassed |
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| A photo of the trains after the prisoners were move on, showing the piles of luggage. |
Photos of the camp were not allowed, but an SS soldier found a camera in some of the belongings and took a series of photos which were found later. The luggage was taken to a set of warehouses (nicknamed Canada, after the belief that Canada was a rich and bountiful country) where the belongings were sorted by prisoners and then sent on to Germany for selling, charities or for new German families moving into the areas vacated by the Jewish families.
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| Canisters of Zyklon B found on site |
Below the building was an exhibit holding 2 tonnes of hair shaved from female prisoners - photos were not allowed out of respect for the victims, but it was a haunting sight.
A sign outside the building talked about the fates of female prisoners. Those who did not have young children and who seemed fit and strong were spared the gas chambers and were housed in blocks 1-10 between March and August 1942. There were 17,000 women held in the camp - several thousands of those were gassed or died of starvation, slave labour or disease. The others were transferred to Birkenau's new women's camp in August.
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| A display of eye glasses found in the Canada warehouses |
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| Luggage left behind by prisoners |
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| Luggage |
Since the Jews were told that they were being relocated they brought along household goods to start their new homes:
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| A collection of crockery taken from prisoners luggage |
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| A photo of shoes found in a 'Canada' warehouse |
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| An exhibition of shoes found on site |
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| Recovered shoes |
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| Shoes |
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| Brushes |
When the first prisoners arrived, their named were written down in a book and they were given a number. From that time on they were only ever referred to by that number. The guards only spoke German and so the numbers were read in German. For the Poles and other nationality prisoners, German was a foreign language and they were often beaten for not responding to their number being called in German. The number was initially stitched onto the uniforms, but these could be lost, swapped, changed or discarded in an escape. So from 1943 the numbers were tattooed onto the arms of prisoners.
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| Some photos of the initially prisoners |
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| Prisoner cards and photos |
The prisoners were also given a coloured triangle (called Winkel) showing the reason for imprisonment. A red triangle marked political prisoners. Purple was for Jehovah's Witnesses, Pink for homosexuals, green for criminals and red and yellow for Jews. The nationality was denoted by a letter sewn onto the winkel.
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| German poster of colours |
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| Details of the colours |
Prisoners were given a prison uniform ("The Stripes") and they were shaved.
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| The Stripes |
The next hall showed a set of photos of male and female prisoners who died in the early days of the camp. The walls were lined with photos, each with birth and death dates - all of the prisoners shown died in the camp, most within a year.
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| The hall of photos |
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| Photos |
Many of the prisoners died from starvation. The prisoners were given a daily food ration of 1,500 - 1,700 calories (the recommended intake for a man is 2,500 calories. Many diets state that people can lose 1.5kg a week eating 1,500 calories. Some of the prisoners survived on as low as 500 calories. However the prisoners were also subjected to hard physical labour for 11 hours a day and unhygienic conditions. In most cases the prisoners could survive on this for at most 3-6 months. In order to survive they were forced to find other food - some were given food by locals outside the camp (both risked being shot or hanged), trading with officers, working in 'Canada' where they could find food or trading favours for food (such as an artist painting a mural on the wall of an officer's quarters). The non-Jewish prisoners were sometimes allowed to receive food parcels from home, but this was unreliable.
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| A model of the daily ration |
The prisoners were recommended to keep some of their bread for breakfast, but few were able to do so due to hunger, and hence went without breakfast. Upon return from labour the prisoners were subjected to a roll call (taken outside in the elements) in which each prisoner was accounted for, these usually lasted around 1.5 hours. Bed was at 9pm when the prisoners were locked in their barracks and they rose at 4:30am in Summer and 5:30am in Winter for another roll call and then sent to work.
The next photo was one that hit me pretty hard - it was a collection of children's clothes found in the luggage. Some children were kept in the camp - the older ones could work and the Romani families were allowed to keep their family units together (at least initially):
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| Children's clothing |
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| Details |
The next area was the punishment cells Block 11- this was the area where Zyklon B was first tested - prisoners were locked in a room and the poison was introduced. When they were still alive the next day the concentration and dosage was increased until the correct amount was found. Ten inmates were also staved to death in a cell here in retaliation for the escape of others. Maximilian Kolbe (later Saint Maximilian) volunteered to take the place of a stranger in the death cell, sparing the other man.
Photos were not allowed in the lower levels, such as the standing cells which held four prisoners and were 1.5m^2. The prisoners were forced to spend the night standing only and were released only to attend work the next day. Prisoners sentenced to die for trying to escape were locked in dark cells and given no food or water until they died. The lower cells had little oxygen and the prisoners would suffocate after they used up the available oxygen.
In block 10, next door, hundreds of female prisoners were subjected to experimentation by gynecologist in attempts to determine ways to sterilize them.
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| Block 10 |
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| Layout of Block 10 |
Just outside block 10 was the familiar sight of the guard tower, fence and warning sign:
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| Guard tower and sign |
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| The room in Block 10 where the Gestapo court was held |
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| The small windows to the lower cells |
Between the two blocks was a courtyard housing the punishment posts and
the Death Wall, where thousands of prisoners were executed by firing
squad. The wall has been reconstructed and now serves as a memorial.
The windows of the buildings next to it were shuttered with heavy wooden
covers to prevent the people inside from knowing what was going on
outside.
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| Gates to the courtyard |
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| The Death Wall |
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| The torture posts - inmates had their hands tied behind their backs and were suspended by the wrists - pulling their arms up painfully. |
The next buildings were the infirmary. Initially some prisoners were happy to go to infirmary as it let them die in peace, but from 1941 onward any prisoner who wasn't expected to recover for work was executed by lethal injection to the heart.
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| Infirmary Buildings |
Next to the infirmary was the main square where the roll calls were taken. As I mentioned earlier, the roll calls were conducted morning and night in all weather and usually took 1.5hrs but could take much longer. The dead were also counted, so the inmates were required to bring out any cellmates who had died during the night. There were also gallows installed to allow for the public hanging of prisoners found guilty of aiding escape attempts. After 3 inmates escaped, 13 others were shot in retribution and another 12 random prisoners were hung at these gallows:
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| Gallows |
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| Shelter for SS officer taking roll call (recreated) |
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| Halt |
We then headed out of the camp through the double fence:
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| Between the fences |
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| Fences |
Just outside the fences was the gallows where Rudolf Höss, the commander of the camp, was tried and hanged. He had escaped the area and was pretending to be a farmer when he was captured. He was the only Nazi tried and executed at Auschwitz. He was hanged on 16 April 1947 at a gallows built between the crematorium and the house where he lived with his wife and five children. He had even built a playground for his children in sight of the chimneys of the crematoria.
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| Gallows |
In 1944 when the Germans realized that the Soviets were closing in on the camps, they tried to destroy the evidence of their crimes. Most of the remaining 130,000 prisoners were sent on a death march into Germany, only those too sick to leave were left behind. The 'Canada' warehouses were burned, along with crematoria and gas chambers.
Crematorium 1 at Auschwitz had stopped serving as a gas chamber and crematorium when it became too small to handle the required number of bodied and was turned into a bomb shelter. As such it was missed when the SS destroyed the others.
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| Chimney of Crematorium 1 |
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| Information |
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| Crematorium 1 |
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| The gas chamber where thousands of the original inmates were killed |
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| Recreated crematorium ovens |
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| Ovens |
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| The corner of the camp |
After finishing in Auschwitz 1, we took a bus out to Birkenau to see the second camp. This camp was built after the main camp became too crowded. It served as a labour camp and for extermination. The trains were driven through the iconic gates and then the prisoners were sorted. Those chosen to die were marched to one of the four crematoria at the rear of the camp and often killed within an hour of arrival. The left side of the camp housed the women's camp and the right was the men's camp and also the gypsy camp. The Romani were allowed to keep their families together but were still underfed and mistreated. 3000 prisoners were in the camp on August 2nd 1944, when the camp was 'liquidated' with all being murdered. In total 20,000 gypsies died in the 'Gypsy Family Camp'.
The barracks in Birkenau were based on horse stables to house 52 horses. They were repurposed to hold 744 each barrack (they were planned to hold 550) - three times as many as were standard in other concentration camp.
One of the hardest things to understand was that so almost all of the guards at the camp were aware of what was going on and yet all continued to serve as their part as a cog in what was essentially a machine of mass murder. There are some stories of guards helping vulnerable prisoners by getting them lighter duties or extra food, but the are many more of guards setting dogs on inmates, beating them or summary executions. The main work groups made up of prisoners were known as Sonderkommandos. They were expected to aid with the disposal of corpses and the cleaning and sorting of bodies and belongings under threat of death.
Birkenau is now mostly ruins, due to three main things: In 1944 the Sonderkommandos at Birkenau revolted and attacked the guards. Gunpowder was smuggled in by Jewish women forced to work at the munitions factory with a plan to destroy the gas chambers and crematoria. They were informed by resistance members in the camp that they were to be killed on the 7th of October 1944, so they attacked with two machine guns as well as axes, knives and grenades. 3 SS guards were killed and 12 were injured before the revolt was put down. The escaped Sonderkommandos were recaptured and 200 were forced to strip and lie on their stomachs before being shot in the back of the head. 451 Sonderkommando were killed. While some of the Sonderkommando groups did not participate in the revolt they were still punished by having every third member of their group executed to set an example. While the revolt did not succeed, one of the crematoria was badly damaged.
As the soviets closed in on the camp, the SS demolished the crematoria and many of the barracks to hide the evidence. The Birkenau camp is now mostly ruins, but it is possible to see some of the buildings and the remains of the crematoria have been strengthened internally so they stand as they were when they were demolished. After the war, some of the building materials were taken by the Poles to rebuild their houses and to aid in the rebuilding of cities, such as Warsaw, which were destroyed during the war.
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| Railway and gates of Birkenau (from the inside) |
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| The 'Death Gate' as it was known - the main entry into Auschwitz |
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| A guard tower stands watch over the ruins of the women's camp |
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| Looking back towards the gates |
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| Ruins of the barracks |
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| Watch tower looking over the former gypsy camp |
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| Main entry into the men's camp - this was the path taken both by those assigned to live in the camp and those to be gassed. To reach the gas chambers the prisoners were marched to the end of this road then turned left towards the crematoria |
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| Entry to the women\s camp |
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| Near the far end of the camp looking back towards the gate |
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| The end of the tracks - looking towards the gate |
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| The memorial - artistically depicting burial methods - with the gas chambers represented by the partially fallen figures on the right |
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| The English memorial plaque - there is a plaque for every language of the nationalities who suffered in Auschwitz |
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| The remains of Crematorium 4 |
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| Looking down the plaques at the memorial |
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| Remains of Crematorium 2 |
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| Gates to Crematoria 2 |
The gates in the picture above were quite poignant - once a prisoner entered through these gates, they would not be leaving alive. They led into the courtyard and then the changing rooms for the gas chamber and crematoria. As a memorial, the survivors of the camp symbolically walk through these gates each year.
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| The ruins of the changing room, where the prisoners would be forced to strip before entering the gas chambers |
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| The end of the changing rooms and the ruins of the gas chambers |
The four grey markers in the distance behind the ruins are plaques where human ashes and remains were found in large concentrations. The ashes of those cremated were piled here before either being poured into the lakes (the large hole just visible by the plaques) or loaded onto trucks for disposal or use as fertilizer. Initially the bodies were not cremated and simply buried beneath the chambers, ending up contaminating the underground water and making the water in the laundries unsafe to drink.
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| Ruins of crematorium 2 |
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| Ruins of the offices and crematorium attached to building 2 |
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| The remains of Joseph Mengele's building |
The chimney in the photo above marks the location of the building where Joseph Mengele (I refuse to use the honorific Dr for someone who so blatantly broke the Hippocratic oath). He was particulary interested in performing experiments on twins to compare the effects of diseases, injuries and illness. By using twins he made sure that he had a 'control' and would often kill the second twin if the first succumbed to illness so he could perform comparative autopsies. He is known to have repetitively broken bones to see if they stopped trying to heal after time, injecting children with diseases and chemicals and deliberately inducing Noma (a form of face gangrene).
His plans with experimenting with twins was to prove that genetics was more important that environment and hence to strengthen the arguements about the supremacy of the Aryan race.
Despite 'medical curiosity' in his experimentation twins, Mengele's worked to try to identify ways to improve the birthrates to assist with populating with the Aryan race, and sterilization of other races
Mengele was not not prosecuted after the war as he escaped and lived
in São Paulo until he died in 1979 by having a stroke and drowning at
the age of 67.
The prisoners were brought to Auschwitz by train, from their countries, trips that often could take several days or even weeks. Up to 67 people were loaded into each carriage and they were given no food and very little water (often a single bucket to share):
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| An example of the rail cars used to transport prisoners |
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| Back at the main gate |
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| Just inside the fence to the men's camp |
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| Heading into the barracks - Compound BIIa) |
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| Map of barracks |
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| Details of the barracks |
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| The washrooms - would house up to a thousand inmates at a time |
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| Latrines |
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| Bunkroom |
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| Inside the gates of Birkenau looking out |
We were able to climb the watch tower above the gates and look out over the whole camp:
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| Men's camp - to the right (looking into the camp) |
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| Women's camp - to the left (looking into the camp) |
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| The railway running through the center of the camp |
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| Map of the camp |
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| Legend for the map |
Overall Auschwitz was an amazing place to tour. It was hard to imagine the camp as it would have been in those days, and the sheer number of people who died there. It was possible to visualize the disorientation of the new arrivals and to see how the entire place was a machine designed to kill as efficiently as possibly. While some of the inmates were kept alive for work, they often still had very limited life expectancy due to hard labour, limited rations, disease and poor hygiene. The bunkrooms had no sanitation and were locked after 9pm, often some of the inhabitants would die during the night and be dragged to the backroom until the morning when they were dragged out for the roll call. The wooden barracks were constructed following a plan for stables and had large gaps at the tops and bottoms of the walls that would let in the cold, and were stiflingly hot in summer especially when so overcrowded.
Despite seeing how a race can be seen as subhuman and dehumanized during wartime (you just have to look at the anti-Japanese comics and propaganda in the USA during WW II and to some extent the tensions between the US and the Muslim world currently) it was still horrifying to think how the SS, quite often willingly, worked as part of the machine, killing 1.1 million. Most people these days have not seen a dead body, yet Auschwitz was a machine made for creating and disposing of corpses. The Sonderkommando were forced to work or die, but many of the SS took positions as it was much safer than the frontlines and gave them access to loot from the confiscated possessions.
Places like Auschwitz are very hard to visit, but I believe they need to be remembered to make sure that this sort of thing can never happen again.
RIP to all those who died as part of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz.
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