How many people were kept in auschwitz

Construction began in April in an abandoned Polish army barracks in a suburb of the city. SS authorities continuously used prisoners for forced labor to expand the camp. On May 20, , the first prisoners arrived at Auschwitz.

The transport consisted of some 30 German inmates, categorized as "professional criminals. Less than a month later, on June 14, German authorities in occupied Poland deported Polish prisoners from a prison in Tarnow to Auschwitz. This was the first of many transports of Poles to the Auschwitz camp. Like most German concentration camps, Auschwitz I was constructed for three purposes:. Like some concentration camps, Auschwitz I had a gas chamber and crematorium.

Initially, SS engineers constructed an improvised gas chamber in the basement of the prison block, Block Later a larger, permanent gas chamber was constructed as part of the original crematorium in a separate building outside the prisoner compound. They conducted pseudoscientific research on infants, twins, and dwarfs, and performed forced sterilizations and castrations of adults. The best-known of these physicians was SS Captain Dr. Josef Mengele. Rather, it was his participation in the killing process—indeed his supervision of Auschwitz mass murder from beginning to end.

Between the medical-experiments barrack and the prison block Block 11 stood the "Black Wall," where SS guards executed thousands of prisoners. Of the three camps established near Oswiecim, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp had the largest total prisoner population. It was divided into ten sections separated by electrified barbed-wire fences.

The camp included sections for women; men; a family camp for Roma Gypsies deported from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; and a family camp for Jewish families deported from the Theresienstadt ghetto. Auschwitz-Birkenau was also a killing center and played a central role in the German effort to kill the Jews of Europe. Bunker I began operating in spring , the larger Bunker II in mid-summer These gassing facilities soon proved inadequate for the task of murdering the large numbers of Jewish deportees being sent to Auschwitz.

Between March and June , four large crematoria were built within Auschwitz-Birkenau, each with a gas chamber, a disrobing area, and crematory ovens. Gassing of newly arrived transports ceased at Auschwitz by early November Jewish deportees arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau immediately underwent selection.

The SS staff chose some of the able-bodied for forced labor and sent the rest directly to the gas chambers, which were disguised as shower installations to mislead the victims. The belongings of all deportees were confiscated and sorted in the "Kanada" Canada warehouse for shipment back to Germany.

Canada symbolized wealth to the prisoners. Trains arrived at Auschwitz frequently with transports of Jews from virtually every country in Europe occupied by or allied to Germany. These transports arrived from early to early November The approximate breakdown of deportations from individual countries:. With the deportations from Hungary , the role of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the German plan to murder the Jews of Europe achieved its highest effectiveness.

Between late April and early July , approximately , Jews were deported from Hungary. Of the nearly , Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, approximately , of them were sent directly to the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau. They deployed approximately , at forced labor in the Auschwitz camp complex. The SS authorities transferred many of these Hungarian Jewish forced laborers within weeks of their arrival in Auschwitz to other concentration camps in Germany and Austria.

On October 7, , several hundred prisoners assigned to Crematorium IV at Auschwitz-Birkenau rebelled after learning that they were going to be killed. By the winter of , the Nazis had constructed gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Nazi leaders met in January at the Wannsee Conference to coordinate the industrial slaughter - what they called a "final solution to the Jewish question" - killing the entire European Jewish population, 11 million people, by extermination and forced labour. Auschwitz was originally a Polish army barracks in southern Poland. Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Poland in September , and by May turned the site into a jail for political prisoners.

This area - with the infamous lie Arbeit Macht Frei written above the entrance in German - meaning work sets you free - became known as Auschwitz I.

But as the war and the Holocaust progressed, the Nazi regime greatly developed the site. The first people to be gassed were a group of Polish and Soviet prisoners in September Work began on a new camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the following month.

This became the site of the huge gas chambers where hundreds of thousands were murdered prior to November , and the crematoria where their bodies were burned. Other private companies like Krupp and Siemens-Schuckert also ran factories nearby, to use the prisoners as slave labour. When Auschwitz was eventually liberated, it had more than 40 camps and subcamps.

How Auschwitz became centre of Nazi Holocaust. People from all over Europe were crammed into cattle wagons without windows, toilets, seats or food, and transported to Auschwitz. There they were sorted into those who could work and those who were to be immediately killed. The latter group were ordered to strip naked and sent to the showers for "delousing" - a euphemism used for the gas chambers.

Guards from the so-called "Hygienic Institute" would then drop powerful Zyklon-B gas pellets into the sealed chambers, and wait for people to die. It took about 20 minutes. Prisoner numbers in the system of German Nazi concentration camps. The prisoner numbers have become a synonym of dehumanization that struck the deportees of the concentration camp. These numbers were to serve efficient "management" of camps, performed by the SS teams. Within the whole system of "state concentration camps" of III Reich, there was no a single rule of ascribing the numbers to the prisoners.

Usually, there were subsequent numbers issued for the newly arrived prisoners as it was in KL Auschwitz. In some camps e. In such cases, one number could belong to one or even three persons. Prisoners transported from one camp to another obtained a new number every time. The number was used instead of last names on every day basis, as the spelling was often ambiguous, causing fuss in the documentation. While analyzing the records in the original documentation, one last name could be written in several manners, regarding which language was used by the camp writer, who filled in a particular form.

It principally refers to Russian, Polish or Hungarian names, especially difficult for German writers. Numbers ascribed by camp authorities to those deported to KL Auschwitz became their second name during their incarceration. Being awaken in the middle of the night, they needed to be able to provide their number in German. Those who survived were unable to forget them. Of this total, nearly 1. The other approximately , people were predominantly made up of non-Jewish Poles, the mentally challenged, Roma people, homosexuals and Soviet prisoners of war.

A total 1. Survivors of Auschwitz leaving the camp at the end of World War II, photographed by a Russian photographer during the making of a film about liberation of the camp.

Above them is the German slogan 'Arbeit macht frei' 'Work makes one free'. Among the 7, people liberated at the closure of the camps, most were very ill, or close to death. Weeks earlier, with Soviet forces approaching the camp system, nearly 60, prisoners had been evacuated and forced to march west toward Wodzislaw, away from the complex on what are today known as the death marches.

More than 15, people died on these marches, often succumbing to exposure, starvation, or cold weather. Those who could not keep up were shot by SS guards. The first of the three camps opened in