History
Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Oswiecim and its surrounding region were incorporated into the domains of the Third Reich and the town's name changed to Auschwitz . The idea of setting up a concentration camp in the area was mooted a few months later by the Breslau (Wroclaw) division of the SS, the official explanation being the overcrowding in existing prisons in Silesia combined with the political desirability of a campaign of mass-arrests throughout German-occupied Poland to round up all potentially "troublesome" Poles. After surveying the region, the final choice of location fell on an abandoned Polish army barracks in Oswiecim, then an insignificant rural town well away from major urban settlements - and prying eyes - on the borders of Silesia and Malopolska. As Himmler himself was later to explain, Auschwitz was chosen on the clinically prosaic grounds that it was a "convenient location as regards communication, and because the area can be easily sealed off". Orders to begin work on the camp were finally given in April 1940, the fearsome Rudolf Hoss was appointed its commander, and in June of that year, the Gestapo sent the first contingent of around seven hundred prisoners, mainly Jews, to the new camp from nearby Tarnow. As the number of inmates swelled rapidly, so too did the physical size of the camp, as Auschwitz was gradually, but methodically, transformed from a detention centre into a full-scale death camp. The momentum of destruction was given its decisive twist by Himmler's decision in 1941 to make Auschwitz the centrepiece of Nazi plans for the Final Solution, the Nazis' attempt to effect the elimination of European Jewry by systematically rounding up, transporting and murdering all the Jews in Reich territories. To this end a second camp, Birkenau , was set up a couple of kilometres from the main site, with its own set of gas chambers, crematoria and eventually even its own railway terminal to permit the "efficient" dispatch of new arrivals to the waiting gas chambers. By the end of 1942, Jews were beginning to be transported to Auschwitz from all over Europe, many fully believing Nazi propaganda that they were on their way to a new life of work in German factories or farms - the main reason, it appears, that so many brought their personal valuables with them. The reality, of course, couldn't have been more different. After a train journey of anything up to ten days in sealed goods wagons and cattle trucks, the dazed survivors were herded up the station ramp, whereupon they were promptly lined up for inspection and divided into two categories by the SS: those deemed "fit" or "unfit" for work. People placed in the latter category, up to seventy-five percent of all new arrivals, according to Hoss's testimony at the Nuremberg trials, were told they would be permitted to have a bath. They were then ordered to undress, marched into the "shower room" and gassed with Zyklon B cyanide gas sprinkled through special ceiling attachments. In this way, up to two thousand people were killed at a time (the process took 15-20 minutes), a murderously efficient method of dispatching people that continued relentlessly throughout the rest of the war. The greatest massacres occurred from 1944 onwards, after the special railway terminal had been installed at Birkenau to permit speedier "processing" of the victims to the gas chambers and crematoria. Compounding the hideousness of the operation, SS guards removed gold fillings, earrings, finger rings and even hair - subsequently used, amongst other things, for mattresses - from the mass of bodies, before incinerating them. The cloth from their clothes was processed into material for army uniforms, their watches given to troops in recognition of special achievements or bravery. The precise numbers of people murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau between the camp's construction in 1940 and final liberation by Soviet forces in January 1945 has long been a subject of dispute, often for reasons less to do with a concern with factual accuracy than "revisionist" neo-Nazi attempts to deny the historical reality of the Holocaust. Though the exact figure will never be known, in reputable historical circles it's now generally believed that somewhere between one and a half and two million people died in the camp, the vast majority (85-90 percent) of whom were Jews, along with sizeable contingents of Romanies (Gypsies), Poles, Soviet POWs and a host of other European nationalities. The physical scale of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp is a shock in itself. Most visitors, though, see only the main Auschwitz section of the complex. This, however, was only one component of the hideous network of barracks, compounds, factories and extermination areas. It is only in visiting Birkenau, roughly 3km down the road from Auschwitz, that you begin to grasp the full enormity of the Nazi death machine
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