Story

Auschwitz-Birkenau

1940-1945 CE

Biblical Narrative

Auschwitz was not one camp but a complex of three principal camps and some forty-five sub-camps spread across roughly forty square kilometers of annexed Polish Upper Silesia, around the town the Germans renamed Auschwitz from the Polish Oświęcim. Auschwitz I, the original Stammlager, opened on 14 June 1940 in former Polish army barracks to hold Polish political prisoners; its first transport carried 728 men. Auschwitz II — Birkenau, three kilometers to the northwest — was begun in October 1941, originally as a camp for Soviet prisoners of war, of whom some 10,000 were killed in its construction. From spring 1942 it was converted into the principal extermination site of the Final Solution. Auschwitz III — Monowitz — was the slave-labor camp serving the IG Farben Buna synthetic-rubber works, where 35,000 prisoners worked and approximately 25,000 died.

The first experimental gassings with Zyklon B — a hydrocyanic-acid pesticide — took place in early September 1941, on Soviet prisoners of war and ill prisoners in Block 11 of Auschwitz I. The first transport of Jews murdered in gas chambers at Auschwitz arrived from Beuthen on 15 February 1942. From spring 1942 through November 1944, transports came from every corner of occupied Europe: Slovakia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Greece, Italy, Hungary, the Reich itself, and the General Government of Poland. The selection on the ramp was conducted, after May 1943, by SS doctors — Josef Mengele was the most infamous but by no means the only one — who pointed left, to the gas chambers, or right, to the labor barracks. Approximately seventy to eighty percent of each Jewish transport went directly to death.

The peak of the killing came in the spring and summer of 1944. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, in eight weeks, approximately 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported on 147 transports to Birkenau on the orders of Adolf Eichmann, then in Budapest. Of these, approximately 320,000 were murdered in the gas chambers within hours of arrival. The four crematoria of Birkenau — II, III, IV, V — operated continuously; pits were dug to burn bodies the crematoria could not handle. Photographs taken clandestinely by Sonderkommando member Alberto Errera in August 1944, smuggled out hidden in a toothpaste tube — four images, two showing burning pits and the burning of bodies in the open, two showing women being driven naked toward the gas chamber — are among the only photographs ever taken from inside the killing process by a victim.

On 7 October 1944, the Sonderkommando of Crematorium IV revolted; using gunpowder smuggled by Jewish women working at the Union munitions factory — Ester Wajcblum, Ala Gertner, Regina Safirsztain, and Rosa Robota, all later executed — they blew up Crematorium IV and attempted a mass breakout. All participants were killed. On 17 January 1945, with the Red Army approaching, the SS evacuated approximately 56,000 surviving prisoners on death marches westward; perhaps 15,000 died on those marches. The Red Army reached Auschwitz on 27 January 1945 and found 7,000 prisoners still alive in the camp, along with hundreds of thousands of items of clothing, seven tons of human hair, and the records the SS had not finished burning. The total number murdered at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945 is approximately 1,100,000, of whom approximately 960,000 were Jews — the largest single site of Jewish death in human history.

Here there is no why.Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz / If This Is a Man (1947), reporting an SS guard's words in the camp

Archaeology · History · Genetics

The foundational reconstruction of Auschwitz operations is the Auschwitz Chronicle 1939-1945 by Danuta Czech (Henry Holt 1990; original Polish Kalendarium wydarzeń w obozie koncentracyjnym Oświęcim-Brzezinka 1939-1945, 1989), a day-by-day record built on camp records, survivor testimony, German documents, and the post-war Kraków trials. Czech's day-by-day method establishes the chronology against which all subsequent scholarship is measured. The five-volume Auschwitz: 1940-1945, Central Issues in the History of the Camp (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum 2000), edited by Wacław Długoborski and Franciszek Piper, is the comprehensive institutional history. Piper's separate monograph The Number of Victims (1991, revised 1994) established the scholarly consensus figure of approximately 1.1 million dead, of whom 960,000 Jews, 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet POWs, and approximately 15,000 others — a downward revision from the Soviet 1945 figure of four million, but more rigorously documented.

The standard English-language reference is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume I (Indiana University Press 2009), which devotes some 200 pages to Auschwitz alone. Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews provides the bureaucratic and structural account. Friedländer's Years of Extermination (HarperCollins 2007), the second volume of his Nazi Germany and the Jews, integrates perpetrator records with surviving victim diaries and letters from across Nazi Europe. Gideon Greif's We Wept Without Tears (Yale 2005) collects extensive interviews with surviving Sonderkommando members, the Jewish prisoners forced to work in the crematoria.

Among primary sources, the so-called ״Sonderkommando manuscripts״ — buried in the grounds of Crematorium III by Jewish prisoners working there and recovered between 1945 and 1980 — are unique. The notebooks of Zalman Gradowski (recovered 1945 and 1962), Leib Langfus (1952), Zalman Lewental (1962), and several anonymous fragments, all written between 1942 and 1944 in Yiddish, Polish, French, and Greek, are among the most direct testimonies of mass killing ever recorded — written by men who knew they would not survive, and who buried the manuscripts in milk cans, jars, and field flasks under the ash of the dead. The fullest scholarly edition is Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams, Matters of Testimony (Berghahn 2016), and the Auschwitz Museum's volume Inmidst of that Horror (Among the Bystanders).

The four photographs taken by Alberto Errera and the Sonderkommando in August 1944 — known as ״the Sonderkommando photographs״ or, after Georges Didi-Huberman's 2003 essay, ״Images in Spite of All״ (Chicago 2008) — are held at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. They are the only known photographs taken from inside the killing process by victims; the Vrba-Wetzler Report (1944), Filip Müller's Eyewitness Auschwitz (1979), Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo (1947) and I sommersi e i salvati (1986), and Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et après (1965-71) constitute the canonical body of survivor testimony. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, established by Polish parliamentary act in July 1947 across the preserved grounds of both Auschwitz I and Birkenau, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 under the formal name ״Auschwitz Birkenau, German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp״ — UNESCO formally renamed it in 2007 to forestall the misnomer ״Polish death camp״.

Dear finder, search everywhere, in every inch of soil. Dozens of documents are buried under it, mine and those of other persons. They will give light upon what was happening here. Great quantities of teeth are also buried here. It was we, the Kommando workers, who deliberately scattered them all over the area, so that the world should find tangible traces of the millions of people murdered.Zalman Gradowski, manuscript buried in the grounds of Crematorium III, Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944, recovered 1945