Auschwitz-Birkenau was part of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, a complex of 40 concentration, forced labor and extermination sub-camps, and the largest of all the Nazi concentration camps. Located 30 miles west of Krakow, Poland, the camp took its name from the nearby town of Oswiecim, called Auschwitz in German.

Entrance to Auschwitz

Auschwitz was a state institution, founded in 1940 to house mainly Polish prisoners who were hired out to companies as slave labor. The camp expanded continually and became the center of mass destruction of European Jews. Auschwitz-Birkenau in March of 1942 and contained prisoner barracks, 30 warehouses for belongings confiscated from prisoners, gas chambers, and four crematoria for the disposal of corpses. As trains arrived at the camp, people considered unfit for work—70-75% of most transports—were sent to immediate death in the gas chambers. As these people were not entered into camp records, it is possible only to estimate the total number of victims. Historians estimate that 1,100,000 people died at Auschwitz; about 1,000,000 of them were Jews.

It is estimated that, in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, the Jewish population of Europe was approximately nine million. By the end of the war, the Germans and their collaborators had killed approximately six million, half of them through the camps. They were also responsible for the death of two to three million Soviet prisoners of war, 150,000-200,000 disabled and mentally ill people, 130,000 to 285,000 Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), 5,000-15,000 homosexual men, political prisoners and religious dissenters. Millions more were murdered or died of starvation, disease, incarceration, or maltreatment.

– Contributed by the CST Education Department