About 1. Jews from all across Nazi-controlled Europe made up the vast majority of the victims. Almost one million Jewish people were murdered at Auschwitz. One specific example was Hungary's Jewish population. In the space of just two months, between May and July , Hungary transported , of the , Jewish people it sent to Auschwitz.
Tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz every day. Three quarters of them were killed on arrival. Some 75, Polish civilians, 15, Soviet prisoners of war, 25, Roma and Sinti, as well as Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and political prisoners were also put to death by the German state at the Auschwitz complex.
German authorities ordered a halt to gassing and the destruction of the gas chambers and crematoria in late , as Soviet troops advanced westward.
The stockpile of stolen valuables in the Canada sector was shipped to Germany shortly afterwards. Determined to erase the evidence of their crimes, the Nazis ordered 56, remaining prisoners to march west to other concentration camps, such as Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Sachsenhausen.
Those too sick to walk were left behind; any who fell behind on the march itself were killed. Soviet forces found only a few thousand survivors when they entered the camp on 27 January , along with hundreds of thousands of clothes and several tonnes of human hair.
Soldiers later recalled having to convince some survivors that the Nazis had truly gone. Elie Wiesel later said in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation that the Nazi crimes at Auschwitz "produced a mutation on a cosmic scale, affecting man's dreams and endeavours".
After Auschwitz, nothing will ever be the same. Image source, Getty Images. A group of child survivors behind a barbed wire fence at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.
What was the Holocaust? This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What was Auschwitz? Auschwitz: Drone footage from Nazi concentration camp. How did Auschwitz work? Whip s Kapos—and especially German Kapos—were given great license in the way they treated Polish prisoners: they could beat them, whip them, choke them, and even kill them.
Collection of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Auschwitz female and male prisoners were forced to work at a frenzied pace during working days of more than 11 hours with barely no rest or tools. They performed a range of very diverse tasks , such as loading heavy materials, mining, producing chemicals, weapons and fuel or building infrastructures. Other forced chores very common at the camp were the sorting of the belongings robbed to prisoners or the incineration of bodies in the crematoria.
Later, the industries of the Third Reich made increasing use of cheap prisoner labor. The pace of the work, the starvation rations of food, and constant beatings and abuse exacerbated the death rate. The German IG Farbenindustrie cartel, which built the Buna-Werke synthetic rubber and fuel factory at Monowice near Oswiecim, had priority in obtaining prisoner labor.
The majority of the Auschwitz sub-camps were located near the mills, mines, and factories of Silesia. Prisoners dug coal, produced armaments and chemicals, and built and expanded industrial plants. Executions were one means of physically liquidating prisoners and people brought from outside the camp.
At first, people were shot to death in the pits near the camp from which gravel had been dug. From the autumn of until the autumn of , most of the executions by shooting took place in the courtyard of Block No. Most of the victims here were Poles, who received sentences of death by shooting from, for instance, the Gestapo summary court. Soviet prisoners of war were also executed at Auschwitz concentration camp. Beginning in September , executions were also carried out using poison gas.
At least 2, Soviet prisoners of war were put to death in this way. After the dismantling of the Death Wall in , larger groups of Poles sentenced to death by the police summary court were executed in the gas chambers. Executions by hanging were carried out sporadically in the camp. As opposed to shooting or killing in the gas chamber, hanging was public. It was carried out in front of other prisoners, usually during roll call.
The goal was to intimidate the witnesses, and the victims were most frequently prisoners caught trying to escape, or suspected of aiding escapers. Download our mobile app for on-the-go access to the Jewish Virtual Library.
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