Auschwitz concentration camp

• 1. Introduction

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  At least 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, and at least 1.1 million of them died there. Auschwitz, known in Polish as Oświęcim, was a complex of more than 40 camps run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. It is the site of the largest mass murder in a single location in history. Yet it began with a set of army barracks near a Polish town. How did that compound grow into a place where freight trains arrived from across German-occupied Europe? Who ran it, who was forced to labour inside it, and who was killed on arrival? What did the outside world learn while it operated, and how do historians arrive at the numbers they use today?

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• 2. Building the Complex

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  On the 15th of September 1935, the Reichstag passed the Nuremberg Laws. One law reserved citizenship for people of "German or related blood." Another banned marriage and extramarital relations between such citizens and Jews. These laws followed the violence of 1933 and legislation that barred Jews from professions such as the civil service and the law.

  In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Hitler ordered that the Polish leadership and intelligentsia be destroyed. The territory around Auschwitz was annexed to the German Reich, first as part of Gau Silesia and from 1941 as part of Gau Upper Silesia.

  In February 1940, Arpad Wigand, an inspector of the security police, suggested a site 50 km southwest of Kraków as a quarantine camp for Polish prisoners. The grounds had served as a camp for transient workers in World War I and then as a Polish army barracks. Richard Glücks, head of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, sent Walter Eisfeld, a former commandant of Sachsenhausen, to inspect it. The compound ran about 1000 m long and 400 m wide and held 22 brick buildings, eight of them two stories high. Heinrich Himmler approved the site in April 1940 on the recommendation of Rudolf Höss, who then oversaw its development.

  The first 30 prisoners reached the camp on the 20th of May 1940 from Sachsenhausen. They were German career criminals, known as "greens" for the green triangles on their clothing. Placed in charge of other inmates as functionaries, they did much to give early camp life its reputation for sadism, which fell hardest on Polish prisoners. Bruno Brodniewicz, who received serial number 1, became the camp elder.

  On the 14th of June 1940, 728 Polish male political prisoners arrived from Tarnów, among them Catholic priests and Jews. They received serial numbers 31 to 758. In a letter of the 12th of July 1940, Höss told Glücks that the local population was "fanatically Polish, ready to undertake any sort of operation against the hated SS men." By the end of 1940, the SS had confiscated land to create a "zone of interest" of 40 square kilometers, patrolled by the SS, the Gestapo and local police. By March 1941-10,900 people were imprisoned in the camp, most of them Poles.

  On the 10th of January 1941, the Polish underground told the Polish government-in-exile in London that the camp could hold about 7,000 prisoners and was to be rebuilt for about 30,000. Construction of a second camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, began in October 1941 in Brzezinka, about three kilometers from the first. Blueprints called it a prisoner-of-war camp. The SS architect Karl Bischoff led construction on an initial budget of RM 8.9 million.

  Bischoff first planned for 550 prisoners per barracks, then raised the figure to 744. That change meant the camp could hold 125,000 people instead of 97,000. There were 174 barracks, each divided into 62 bays, and the bays were split into "roosts," first for three inmates and later for four. Robert-Jan van Pelt wrote that this deprived inmates "of the minimum space needed to exist." The plan called for four sectors. Only the first two were completed, work on the third stopped in April 1944, and the fourth was abandoned.

  The prisoners had to live in the barracks while they built them, and they also faced long roll calls at night. Most men in sector BIb died of hypothermia, starvation or exhaustion within a few weeks in those early months. Some 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived at Auschwitz I between the 7th and the 25th of October 1941. By the 1st of March 1942, only 945 were still registered. They were moved to Birkenau, where most of them had died by May.

  IG Farben, a German chemical conglomerate, needed a site for a plant making Buna-N, a synthetic rubber essential to the war effort. It chose land near the towns of Dwory and Monowice, about 7 km east of Auschwitz I. The Eastern Fiscal Assistance Law of December 1940 offered tax exemptions for building industry in the frontier regions. The site also offered good railway connections, access to raw materials, and a source of cheap labour in the nearby camp. In February 1941, Himmler ordered the Jewish population of Oświęcim expelled to make room for skilled workers. Poles able to work were to stay and build the factory, and Auschwitz prisoners were to join them.

  Inmates began work at the plant in April 1941, demolishing houses in Monowitz. By May, with too few trucks available, several hundred of them rose at 3 am to walk there twice a day. A long line of exhausted prisoners crossing Oświęcim might harm German-Polish relations, so they were told to shave daily, stay clean, and sing as they walked. From late July they rode in freight wagons. The journey was so difficult, especially in winter, that IG Farben decided to build a camp at the plant itself.

  The first inmates moved into the new camp on the 30th of October 1942. Known as Auschwitz III-Monowitz, it was the first concentration camp financed and built by private industry. It measured 270 by 490 m, larger than Auschwitz I, and by the end of 1944 it held 60 barracks. Each barracks had a day room and a sleeping room with 56 three-tiered wooden bunks. IG Farben paid the SS three or four Reichsmark for each worker's shift of nine to eleven hours.

  About 35,000 inmates worked at the plant in 1943-44. Of them, 23,000 died of malnutrition, disease and the workload, an average of 32 a day. Peter Hayes writes that within three to four months, inmates were "reduced to walking skeletons." Deaths and transfers to the gas chambers at Auschwitz II cut the camp's population by nearly a fifth each month. Shortages of labour and raw materials kept postponing the start of production. The Allies bombed the plant on the 20th of August, the 13th of September, the 18th of December and the 26th of December 1944. On the 19th of January 1945, the SS ordered the site evacuated and sent 9,000 inmates, most of them Jews, on a death march to Gliwice. From there, open freight wagons took them to Buchenwald and Mauthausen. The 800 inmates left behind in the Monowitz hospital were freed by the Red Army's 1st Ukrainian Front.

  Krupp and Siemens-Schuckert also built factories with their own subcamps. Around 28 camps stood near industrial plants, each holding hundreds or thousands of prisoners. They lay at places such as Blechhammer, Jawiszowice, Jaworzno, Lagisze, Mysłowice and Trzebinia, and as far away as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Prisoners worked in coal mines, foundries, metal works and chemical plants, and also in forestry and farming. At Wirtschaftshof Budy, a farming subcamp near Brzeszcze, they worked 12-hour days in the fields and made compost by mixing human ashes from the crematoria with sod and manure. Some subcamps had living conditions so poor that they were regarded as punishment postings. Prisoners committed sabotage to slow production at Charlottengrube, Gleiwitz II and Rajsko.

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• 3. The SS and Its Prisoners

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  Rudolf Höss was born in Baden-Baden in 1901 and became commandant when Himmler ordered the camp established on the 27th of April 1940. He lived with his wife and children in a two-story stucco house near the administration building. Josef Kramer served as his deputy. On the 11th of November 1943, Höss left for a post in Oranienburg that made him deputy of the camps inspectorate, and Arthur Liebehenschel succeeded him. Höss came back between the 8th of May and the 29th of July 1944 as the local garrison commander, to oversee the arrival of Hungary's Jews. That made him the superior of every commandant in the complex. By then Richard Baer commanded Auschwitz I, Josef Kramer commanded Auschwitz II, and Heinrich Schwarz commanded Auschwitz III.

  According to Aleksander Lasik, about 6,335 people worked for the SS at Auschwitz over the camp's existence, and 6,161 of them were men. Officers made up 4.2 percent, non-commissioned officers 26.1 percent, and rank and file 69.7 percent. There were 700 SS guards in March 1941, 2,000 in June 1942 and 3,342 in August 1944. The peak came in January 1945, with 4,480 SS men and 71 SS women. The higher number is probably attributable to the logistics of evacuating the camp. Female guards were known as SS supervisors.

  Most of the staff came from Germany or Austria. As the war went on, more ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and the Baltic states joined, and guards were also recruited from Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. About three quarters of the SS personnel were camp guards in the Totenkopfverbände, the death's head units. Others worked in the medical or political departments, or in the economic administration that handled clothing and supplies, including the property of dead prisoners. The SS saw Auschwitz as a comfortable posting. It kept them away from the front and gave them access to the victims' belongings.

  Certain prisoners were made Funktionshäftlinge, or functionaries, which brought better housing and food. At first they were non-Jewish Germans, but later Jews and non-Jewish Poles filled these posts. The camp elite included barracks clerks, overseers called kapos, and barracks orderlies. Wielding great power over other prisoners, the functionaries developed a reputation for sadism. Very few were prosecuted after the war, because it was hard to tell which atrocities had been committed on SS orders.

  Auschwitz was unique in tattooing prisoners with a serial number. Soviet prisoners of war were tattooed on the left breast and civilians on the left arm. Cloth triangles sewn below the number marked each prisoner's category. Political prisoners, mostly Poles, wore red. Black marked "asocial" prisoners, a group that included vagrants, prostitutes and the Roma. Jehovah's Witnesses wore purple, and gay men, mostly German, wore pink. An estimated 5,000-15,000 gay men prosecuted under German Penal Code Section 175 were held in concentration camps, and an unknown number of them were sent to Auschwitz. Jews wore a yellow badge in the shape of the Star of David, with a second triangle overlaid if they also belonged to another category. A letter stitched on the cloth showed nationality. German prisoners stood at the top of a racial hierarchy, non-Jewish prisoners from other countries came next, and Jews were at the bottom.

  From 1942, the labour at each gas chamber was done by prisoners called the Sonderkommando, or special squad. They were mostly Jews, though Soviet prisoners of war were among them. In 1940-1941, when there was one gas chamber, the squad numbered 20. By late 1943 it numbered 400, and by 1944, during the Holocaust in Hungary, it reached 874. They emptied the incoming trains, guided victims to the dressing rooms and gas chambers, removed the bodies, took valuables, and burned the dead in the crematoria.

  Because they witnessed the killing, the Sonderkommando lived apart from other prisoners, although this rule was not applied to the non-Jews among them. They had access to the property of new arrivals, which they traded in the camp, even with the SS. Their life expectancy was still short, and they were regularly murdered and replaced. About 100 survived until the camp was liquidated. They were forced onto a death march and then a train to Mauthausen. Three days later they were asked to step forward at roll call. No one did, and because the SS did not have their records, several of them survived.

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• 4. Daily Life and Punishment

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  At 4:30 am, a block supervisor sounded a gong and began beating the men with sticks to make them wash and use the latrines quickly. In winter the day began an hour later, and for women it began earlier. There were few latrines and little clean water, and each washhouse served thousands of prisoners. Primo Levi described a 1944 washroom in Auschwitz III with a mud-covered floor and undrinkable water. Painted on its walls were cartoons of a clean prisoner and a dirty one with captions that read "So bist du rein," meaning like this you are clean, and "So gehst du ein," meaning like this you come to a bad end.

  Prisoners received half a litre of coffee substitute or herbal tea and no food. A second gong called them to roll call, where they stood in rows of ten to be counted, and counted again. They waited in any weather until the SS arrived, and the wait depended on the officers' mood. Guards might make them squat for an hour with their hands above their heads. A missing button or an improperly cleaned food bowl could bring a beating or detention.

  At the order "Arbeitskommandos formieren," meaning form work details, prisoners walked to work five abreast. A prison orchestra, such as the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, was forced to play cheerful music as they left the camp. The working day normally lasted 11 hours, longer in summer and shorter in winter, mostly at construction sites, gravel pits and lumber yards. No rest periods were allowed. One prisoner was assigned to the latrines to time how long the workers took to relieve themselves.

  Lunch was three-quarters of a litre of watery soup, with meat four times a week and vegetables, mostly potatoes and rutabaga, three times. The evening meal was 300 grams of bread, often moldy, with a tablespoon of cheese or marmalade, or 25 grams of margarine or sausage. Part of the bread had to be saved for the next morning. Prisoners doing hard labour received extra rations.

  A second roll call at seven in the evening could include hangings or floggings. If a prisoner was missing, everyone stood until the absentee was found or the reason discovered, even if it took hours. On the 6th of July 1940, roll call lasted 19 hours because a Polish prisoner, Tadeusz Wiejowski, had escaped. After a different escape in 1941, a group picked from the escapee's barracks was sent to block 11 to be starved to death.

  After roll call, prisoners received their bread and had some free time to use the washrooms and collect mail. Jews were not allowed to receive mail. A gong at nine o'clock marked curfew. Miklós Nyiszli wrote that eight hundred to a thousand people were crammed into the compartments of each barracks, "with one man's feet on another's head, neck, or chest." On Sundays prisoners cleaned the barracks and took a weekly shower. They could also write to their families in German, with the SS censoring the letters, and those who spoke no German traded bread for help.

  Watches, calendars and clocks were forbidden. Observant Jews still tried to keep track of the Hebrew calendar, Shabbat, holidays and the weekly Torah portion. Only two Jewish calendars made in Auschwitz survived to the end of the war. Other prisoners learned the date from newcomers.

  The Polish historian Irena Strzelecka writes that kapos earned nicknames that reflected their sadism, among them "Bloody," "Iron," "The Strangler" and "The Boxer." She drew on 275 surviving punishment reports in the camp archives. The listed infractions included returning a second time for food, removing one's gold teeth to buy bread, breaking into the pigsty to steal the pigs' food, and putting one's hands in one's pockets.

  A flogging table called "the goat" held a prisoner's feet in a box while he stretched across the table. Prisoners had to count the lashes aloud, saying "25 mit besten Dank habe ich erhalten," meaning 25 received with many thanks. If they miscounted, the flogging began again from the start. Punishment by "the post" meant tying hands behind the back with chains attached to hooks, then raising the chains so the prisoner hung by the wrists. Those whose shoulders were too damaged to work afterwards might be sent to the gas chamber. Prisoners were put on the post for helping a beaten prisoner or for picking up a cigarette butt.

  Block 11 of Auschwitz I, called block 13 until 1941, was the prison within the prison, reserved for inmates suspected of resistance. Cell 22 was a windowless standing cell. It was split into four sections, each smaller than one square meter and holding four prisoners, who crawled in through a hatch near the floor. A 5 by 5 cm vent supplied air. Wiesław Kielar spent four weeks in it for breaking a pipe.

  The courtyard between blocks 10 and 11 was known as the "death wall." The first executions there took place on the 11th of November 1941, Poland's National Independence Day. The 151 accused were led to the wall one at a time, stripped naked, 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 a narrow space between bunks.

  An estimated 4,500 Polish political prisoners were executed at the wall, including members of the camp resistance. Another 10,000 Poles were brought to the camp to be executed without being registered. About 1,000 Soviet prisoners of war died by execution, though that is a rough estimate. The SS officer Perry Broad recalled that many shouted "Long live Poland" or "Long live freedom" at the last moment. On the 25th of January 1943, Colonel Jan Karcz and Major Edward Gött-Getyński were executed with 51 others suspected of resistance. The Polish long-distance runner Józef Noji was executed on the 15th of February that year.

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• 5. Gas Chambers and Selection

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  Around August 1941, the Lagerführer Karl Fritzsch, acting on Höss's instructions, threw Zyklon B crystals into a basement cell in block 11 of Auschwitz I. His victims were Soviet prisoners of war. Between the 3rd and the 5th of September 1941, a second group of 600 Soviet prisoners of war and around 250 sick Polish prisoners was gassed in the old crematorium. They had been told they would march there naked to receive new clothing.

  Work on crematorium I had begun at the end of June or the beginning of July 1940. It was meant not for mass murder but for prisoners who were executed or died in the camp. It operated from August 1940 until July 1943, and by May 1942 it had three ovens able to burn 340 bodies in 24 hours. The morgue was converted into a gas chamber holding at least 700-800 people, with Zyklon B dropped through slits in the ceiling. Victims were told they faced disinfection and de-lousing, ordered to undress outside, and then locked in.

  Historians disagree about how many died there. Filip Müller, who served in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz I, believed tens of thousands of Jews were murdered there. Jean-Claude Pressac estimated up to 10,000. The last people gassed there, in December 1942, were around 400 members of the Auschwitz II Sonderkommando. They had been forced to dig up and burn the remains in that camp's mass graves, thought to hold over 100,000 corpses. The building later became a storage facility and then an SS air raid shelter. After the war it was reconstructed, with a recreated chimney, four roof openings marking where the Zyklon B entered, and two of its three furnaces rebuilt with original components.

  Historians also disagree about when transports of Jews arrived for the sole purpose of killing. Franciszek Piper notes that Höss gave inconsistent postwar accounts, placing the start of extermination in December 1941, in January 1942, or around the founding of the women's camp in March 1942. According to Danuta Czech, a transport from Beuthen reached Auschwitz I on the 15th of February 1942 and went straight to the gas chamber. Nikolaus Wachsmann contested the evidence for that transport in 2015. Czech also records that around the 20th of March 1942, Polish Jews from Silesia and Zagłębie Dąbrowskie were taken from the station straight to the Auschwitz II gas chamber, which had just come into operation.

  The process of "selection," in which new arrivals were chosen for work or the gas chamber, began in April 1942 and became regular from July. Piper writes that this reflected Germany's growing need for labour. Those judged unfit for work were gassed without being registered as prisoners.

  The first gas chamber at Auschwitz II was a brick cottage that prisoners called the "little red house," known to the SS as bunker 1. Its windows were bricked up and its four rooms were turned into two insulated rooms. The doors carried the words "Zur Desinfektion," meaning to disinfection. A second cottage, the "little white house" or bunker 2, was operating by June 1942. Himmler visited on the 17th and the 18th of July 1942, and was shown a selection of Dutch Jews and a gassing in bunker 2. The bunkers fell out of use in the spring of 1943, when new crematoria opened. Bunker 1 was demolished in 1943. Bunker 2 returned to service in May 1944 and was demolished in November 1944.

  Plans for crematoria II and III show an oven room of 30 by 11.24 m on the ground floor, plus an underground dressing room and a gas chamber of 30 by 7 m. Crematoria IV and V kept the dressing room and gas chamber on the ground floor, and crematorium II also had a dissection room. The dressing rooms had wooden benches and numbered pegs for clothing. A narrow corridor, five yards long, led from them toward the gas chamber door. The chambers were white inside, with nozzles fixed to the ceiling to look like showerheads. Signs read "Bade," meaning bath, or "Desinfektionsraum," meaning disinfection room. A former prisoner testified that the language of the signs changed depending on who was being killed. A chamber could hold up to 2,000 people.

  The Zyklon B came from a special SS bureau called the Hygiene Institute. After the doors were shut, SS men poured in the pellets through vents in the roof or holes in the side of the chamber. Victims were usually dead within 10 minutes, though Höss testified that it took up to 20. The daily burning capacity was 1,440 bodies in each of crematoria II and III and 768 in each of IV and V. By June 1943 all four were operating, giving a total of 4,416 a day. By loading three to five corpses at a time, the Sonderkommando could burn some 8,000 a day. The average between 1942 and 1944 was about 1,000 a day.

  From 1942 to 1944, the Altejudenrampe, part of the Oświęcim freight station, received Jewish transports. Deportees came crammed into goods or cattle wagons. Arriving at this ramp meant a 2.5 km journey to Auschwitz II. Most were forced to walk, accompanied by SS men and a car with a Red Cross symbol that carried the Zyklon B and an SS doctor in case officers were poisoned by mistake. Those who arrived at night or were too weak to walk went by truck.

  On the 29th of April 1944, the first 1,800 Jews from Hungary arrived. A rail spur to crematoria II and III was finished that May, along with a new ramp between sectors BI and BII that delivered victims close to the gas chambers. From the 14th of May until early July 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews, half the pre-war population, were deported to Auschwitz. For much of that time the rate was 12,000 a day. Crematoria II and III received new elevators from the stoves to the gas chambers and new grates. Cremation pits were dug behind crematorium V, and the Sonderkommando burned bodies in open air as well. In summer 1944, the crematoria and pits together could handle 20,000 bodies a day. A planned sixth facility, crematorium VI, was never built.

  Of 1,095,000 Jews deported to Auschwitz, Piper writes, around 205,000 were registered and given serial numbers. About 25,000 were sent to other camps, and 865,000 were murdered soon after arrival. On the arrival ramp, those deemed able to work went to the right and were registered, and the rest went to the left to be gassed. The group sent left included almost all children, women with small children, and the elderly. Practically any fault, such as scars, bandages, boils or emaciation, could be reason enough for an SS doctor to judge someone unfit. Children might be made to walk toward a stick held at a set height, and those who could walk under it were selected for the gas.

  The belongings of new arrivals were seized and sorted by inmates in the "Kanada" warehouses. This area in sector BIIg held 30 barracks full of plundered goods. It took its name from the inmates' view of Canada as a land of plenty.

  At Auschwitz, women's hair was cut after death, unlike at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, where it was cut before the victims entered the gas chamber. By the 6th of February 1943, the Reich Economic Ministry had received 3,000 kg of women's hair from Auschwitz and Majdanek. At a manufacturing plant in Bremen-Bluementhal, workers found tiny coins with Greek letters in some of the braids. They may have come from some of the 50,000 Greek Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1943. When the Red Army liberated the camp, it found 7,000 kg of human hair in bags ready to ship.

  Heinrich Himmler ordered gold removed from the teeth of dead prisoners from the 23rd of September 1940. Sonderkommando members who were dentists did the work, and anyone who overlooked dental work might be cremated alive. The gold went to the SS Health Service, whose dentists used it to treat the SS and their families. By the 8th of October 1942-50 kg had been collected, and by early 1944-10-12 kg was extracted each month. The ashes were buried, thrown into the Vistula river, or used as fertilizer.

  Leib Langfus, a member of the Sonderkommando, wrote a diary in Yiddish and buried it near crematorium III in Auschwitz II. It was found in 1952, signed "A.Y.R.A."

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• 6. Women, Families, Doctors

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  About 30 percent of the registered inmates at Auschwitz were female. On the 26th of March 1942, 999 non-Jewish German women arrived from the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Classified as criminal, asocial and political, they came as the founding functionaries of the women's camp and received serial numbers 1-999. Höss wrote that these "beasts would mistreat the women over whom they exercised power." Johanna Langefeld, their guard from Ravensbrück, became the first Lagerführerin of the women's camp.

  The same day, 999 Jews from Poprad, Slovakia, arrived. According to Czech, this was the first registered transport sent by the Jewish office of the Reich Security Head Office, led by Adolf Eichmann. A third transport of 798 Jewish women from Bratislava followed on the 28th. From the 6th of August 1942-13,000 inmates were transferred to a new women's camp in Auschwitz II. By October 1943 it held 32,066 women.

  In October 1942, a group of male prisoners arrived to set up an infirmary in the women's camp. According to researchers at the Auschwitz Museum, their first task was to tell the corpses from the women who were still alive. Gisella Perl, a Romanian-Jewish gynecologist who was an inmate there, wrote in 1948 that a single latrine served thirty to thirty-two thousand women, who could use it only at certain hours. Maria Mandl succeeded Langefeld in October 1942 and earned a reputation for cruelty. Franz Hössler later supervised the female guards. Mandl and Hössler were both executed after the war.

  In February 1943, the SS set up the Zigeunerfamilienlager, the "Gypsy family camp," in sector BIIe of Birkenau. For unknown reasons, the Roma were not subject to selection, and families were allowed to stay together. The first transport of German Roma arrived on the 26th of February 1943. The camp registry shows 20,946 Roma registered as prisoners, and another 3,000 are thought to have entered unregistered.

  On the 22nd of March 1943, a transport of 1,700 Polish Sinti and Roma was gassed on arrival because of illness. A second group of 1,035 was gassed on the 25th of May 1943. The SS tried to liquidate the camp on the 16th of May 1944, but the Roma fought back with knives and iron pipes, and the SS retreated. Soon afterward, the SS removed 2,908 people from the camp to work. On the 2nd of August 1944, it gassed the other 2,897. Ten thousand remain unaccounted for.

  Beginning on the 8th of September 1943, the SS deported around 18,000 Jews to Auschwitz from the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Terezín, Czechoslovakia. The first transport carried 2,293 men and 2,713 women. They were placed in sector BIIb as a "family camp," where they could keep their belongings, wear their own clothes and write letters to relatives. They were not shaved or subjected to selection. Correspondence between Eichmann's office and the International Red Cross suggests that the Germans set the camp up to cast doubt on reports of mass murder at Auschwitz, in time for a planned Red Cross visit.

  Barracks 31 became a school and kindergarten, and barracks 30 and 32 an infirmary. The somewhat better conditions were still inadequate, and 1,000 members of the family camp were dead within six months. On the 8th of March 1944, 3,791 of the prisoners, men, women and children, were sent to the gas chambers. Some groups were reported to have sung Hatikvah and the Czech national anthem on the way. Beforehand they had been asked to write postcards to relatives, postdated to 25-the 27th of March. Several twins were held back for medical experiments.

  The Czechoslovak government-in-exile began diplomatic efforts to save the remaining Czech Jews after its representative in Bern received the Vrba-Wetzler report. Two escaped prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, had written it, and it warned that the remaining family-camp inmates would soon be gassed. The BBC also learned of the report. Its German service broadcast news of the family-camp murders in its women's programme on the 16th of June 1944, warning: "All those responsible for such massacres from top downwards will be called to account." The Red Cross visited Theresienstadt in June 1944, and the SS persuaded its delegates that no one was being deported from there. The following month, about 2,000 women from the family camp were selected for transfer to other camps, and 80 boys were moved to the men's camp. The remaining 7,000 were gassed between the 10th and the 12th of July.

  German doctors performed a variety of experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. SS doctors tested X-rays as a sterilization method by giving large doses to female prisoners. In barracks 30, the gynecologist Carl Clauberg and another German doctor, Horst Schumann, carried out sterilization experiments. Clauberg injected chemicals into women's uteruses in an attempt to glue them shut. Prisoners were infected with spotted fever for vaccination research and exposed to toxic substances to study the effects.

  Bayer, then part of IG Farben, paid RM 150 each for 150 female inmates, although the camp had asked for RM 200 per woman. The women were transferred to a Bayer facility to test an anesthetic. A Bayer employee wrote to 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." Helmuth Vetter, who worked for Bayer and IG Farben and also served as an Auschwitz physician and SS captain, led the Bayer research at the camp. Auschwitz physicians Friedrich Entress and Eduard Wirths took part as well.

  The most infamous doctor at Auschwitz was Josef Mengele, called the "Angel of Death." He began work in Auschwitz II on the 30th of May 1943, at first in the Gypsy family camp. He wanted to research identical twins, dwarfs, and people with hereditary disease. He set up a kindergarten in barracks 29 and 31 for the children he was experimenting on and for all Romani children under six, who received better food rations. From May 1944, he picked twins and dwarfs from new arrivals during selection, reportedly calling out "Zwillinge heraus!" meaning twins step forward.

  He and other doctors, the latter prisoners, measured the twins' body parts, photographed them, and subjected them to dental, sight and hearing tests, x-rays, blood tests, surgery, and blood transfusions between them. Then he had them killed and dissected.

  Kurt Heissmeyer, another German doctor and SS officer, took 20 Polish Jewish children from Auschwitz to the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. He injected them with tuberculosis bacilli to test a cure. In April 1945, the children were hanged to conceal the project.

  A different project involved 115 Jewish inmates, chosen for their perceived stereotypical racial characteristics, to build a skeleton collection. The collection was sanctioned by Himmler and directed by August Hirt at the Anatomy Institute of the Reichsuniversität Straßburg. Rudolf Brandt and Wolfram Sievers, general manager of the Nazi research institute Ahnenerbe, delivered the skeletons. Of the inmates, 87 were shipped to Natzweiler-Struthof and murdered in August 1943. Brandt and Sievers were executed in 1948 after being convicted at the Doctors' trial, part of the Subsequent Nuremberg trials.

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• 7. Resistance and Reports

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  Captain Witold Pilecki of the Polish Home Army allowed himself to be arrested in Warsaw and taken to Auschwitz under the name Tomasz Serafiński, with serial number 4859. He was imprisoned there from the 22nd of September 1940 until his escape on the 27th of April 1943. Michael Fleming writes that he 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. Pilecki named his movement Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, meaning Union of Military Organization.

  The resistance sent out its first oral message about Auschwitz with Aleksander Wielkopolski, a Polish engineer released in October 1940. The next month, the Polish underground in Warsaw prepared a report from that information. Part of it was published in London in May 1941, in a booklet by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It said that of the Jews in the camp, "scarcely any of them came out alive." The booklet was widely circulated among British officials. The Scotsman ran a story on the 8th of January 1942, the only British news organization to do so.

  On the 24th of December 1941, resistance groups representing the various prisoner factions met in block 45 and agreed to cooperate. A report published on the 1st of July 1942 described Birkenau and recorded that prisoners called it "Paradisal," "presumably because there is only one road, leading to Paradise." Pilecki wrote two reports after his escape 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.

  The Allies' failure to act on early reports of mass murder, by bombing the camp or its railways, remains controversial. At least 802 prisoners tried to escape, and 144 succeeded. On the 7th of October 1944, two Sonderkommando units launched an uprising that failed. Later that month, 200 Sonderkommando were executed for their part in it.

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• 8. Counting and Remembering

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  Franciszek Piper's study of the late 1980s, published by Yad Vashem in 1991, used train timetables together with deportation records to calculate the camp's toll. He arrived at 1,082,000 deaths, which he regarded as a minimum and which was rounded up to 1.1 million. Overall, 400,207 prisoners were registered in the camp, 268,657 of them men and 131,560 women. His figure came to be widely accepted.

  Earlier estimates were much higher. On the 8th of May 1945, the Soviet government stated that four million people had been murdered on the site, a figure based on the capacity of the crematoria. At Nuremberg, Höss told prosecutors that at least 2,500,000 people had been gassed and another 500,000 had died of starvation and disease. In his memoirs, he wrote that Eichmann had passed the 2.5 million figure to Richard Glücks, based on records that were later destroyed. Höss thought it "far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive possibilities," he wrote.

  The Germans tried to conceal how many they had murdered. According to Höss's memoir, in July 1942 he received an order from Himmler, passed on through Eichmann's office and the SS commander Paul Blobel. All the mass graves were to be opened and the corpses burned, with the ashes disposed of so that no one could later calculate the number.

  Piper's breakdown counts 960,000 Jewish victims, 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 others. By nation, the largest number of Jewish victims came from Hungary at 430,000, followed by Poland at 300,000, France at 69,000, the Netherlands at 60,000 and Greece at 55,000. Around one in six Jews murdered in the Holocaust died at Auschwitz. Timothy Snyder writes that fewer than one percent of the million Soviet Jews murdered in the Holocaust died there. At least 387 Jehovah's Witnesses were imprisoned at Auschwitz, and 132 of them died in the camp.

  As the Soviet Red Army approached in January 1945, the SS sent most of the camp's population west on a death march to camps in Germany and Austria. Soviet troops liberated the camp on the 27th of January 1945. Since 2005, that day has been commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

  After the war, only 789 SS personnel, no more than 15 percent, ever stood trial. Several were executed, including the camp commandant Rudolf Höss. In the decades that followed, survivors including Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, Elie Wiesel and Edith Eger wrote memoirs of their experiences. Poland founded the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 1947 on the site of Auschwitz I and II, and UNESCO named the site a World Heritage Site in 1979. The prisoner reception center near the gate, where inmates were once tattooed, shaved and disinfected, became the museum's visitor reception center.

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