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Auschwitz was a large complex of camps in and around O ś wi ę cim and Brzezinka, Poland. From 1942 to 1944, gassings took place in the best known of the three main sites, Birkenau. During this time, over 1.1 million people, mainly European Jews, were killed in the gas chambers, shootings, hangings, and from starvation, disease, and exhaustion.
Memorial timeline. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum was created by an act of the Polish parliament on July 2, 1947, and includes the grounds of two extant parts of the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camps.
- Auschwitz: Genesis of Death Camps
- Auschwitz: The Largest of The Death Camps
- Auschwitz and Its Subdivisions
- Life and Death in Auschwitz
- Liberation of Auschwitz: 1945
- Auschwitz Today
After the start of World War II, Adolf Hitler(1889-1945), the chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, implemented a policy that came to be known as the “Final Solution.” Hitler was determined not just to isolate Jews in Germany and countries annexed by the Nazis, subjecting them to dehumanizing regulations and random acts of violence. Instead, he ...
Auschwitz, the largest and arguably the most notorious of all the Nazi death camps, opened in the spring of 1940. Its first commandant was Rudolf Höss (1900-47), who previously had helped run the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany. Auschwitz was located on a former military base outside Oswiecim, a town in southern Poland situ...
At its peak of operation, Auschwitz consisted of several divisions. The original camp, known as Auschwitz I, housed between 15,000 and 20,000 political prisoners. Those entering its main gate were greeted with an infamous and ironic inscription: “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “Work Makes You Free.” Auschwitz II, located in the village of Birkenau, or Brze...
By mid-1942, the majority of those being sent by the Nazis to Auschwitz were Jews. Upon arriving at the camp, detainees were examined by Nazi doctors. Those detainees considered unfit for work, including young children, the elderly, pregnant women and the infirm, were immediately ordered to take showers. However, the bathhouses to which they marche...
As 1944 came to a close and the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allied forces seemed certain, the Auschwitz commandants began destroying evidence of the horror that had taken place there. Buildings were torn down, blown up or set on fire, and records were destroyed. In January 1945, as the Soviet army entered Krakow, the Germans ordered that Auschwit...
Today, Auschwitz is open to the public as the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. It tells the story of the largest mass murder site in historyand acts as a reminder of the horrors of genocide.
The grounds and most of the buildings at the sites of the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau sites are open to visitors. Some buildings are not accessible to visitors (including the blocks reserved for the Museum administration and its departments).
The ceremonial opening of the Museum took place on June 14, 1947, attended by tens of thousands of people—mostly former prisoners, their relatives, and delegations from many Polish and Jewish community and political organizations.
On 27 January 1945, Auschwitz —a Nazi concentration camp and extermination camp in occupied Poland where more than a million people were murdered as part of the Nazis' "Final Solution" to the Jewish question —was liberated by the Soviet Red Army during the Vistula–Oder Offensive.
Learn about the work of the Ohio Holocaust and Genocide Memorial and Education Commission.
