It was the largest of the German concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I ( the Stammlager or base camp ); Auschwitz II – Birkenau ( the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp ); Auschwitz III – Monowitz, also known as Buna – Monowitz ( a labor camp ); and 45 satellite camps.

In 1947, Poland founded a museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, which by 2010 had seen 29 million visitors — 1, 300, 000 annually — pass through the iron gates crowned with the infamous motto, Arbeit macht frei (" work makes free ").

The three main camps were Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and a work camp called Auschwitz III-Monowitz, or the Buna.

When the Roman Catholic Church protested, she responded vehemently, “ I can't understand all the tumult-five years after Auschwitz .”

In addition, killing facilities were developed in Auschwitz II-Birkenau within the already existing camp ( Auschwitz I ).

A can of Zyklon B with adsorbent granules and original signed documents detailing ordering of Zyklon B as " materials for Jewish resettlement " ( display at KL Auschwitz I museum )

On September 3, 1941, around 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick Polish prisoners were gassed with Zyklon B at Auschwitz camp I.

In response to the House of Commons motion, Irving in a press statement challenged the MPs who voted to condemn him that: " I will enter the ' gas chambers ' of Auschwitz and you and your friends may lob in Zyklon B in accordance with the well known procedures and conditions.

Interior of the gas chamber of Auschwitz I camp.

In a 1990 speech, Irving stated: " I say the following thing: there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz.

Irving claimed on the basis of what he called the index books that, " Because the experts can look at a tattoo and say ' Oh yes, 181, 219 that means you entered Auschwitz in March 1943 " and he warned Auschwitz survivors " If you want to go and have a tattoo put on your arm, as a lot of them do, I am afraid to say, and claim subsequently that you were in Auschwitz, you have to make sure a ) that it fits in with the month you said you went to Auschwitz and b ) it is not a number which anyone used before ".

The conflict over the Auschwitz cross near Auschwitz I typifies these controversies, as Auschwitz is also the site of the martyrdom ( according to the Catholic Church ) of saints such as Maximilian Kolbe.

At the trial, the world got its first view of Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, Juana Bormann, Fritz Klein, Josef Kramer, and the rest of the SS men and women who before served at Mittelbau Dora, Ravensbrück, Auschwitz I, II, III, and Neuengamme.

In 1985, Carmelite nuns opened a convent near the site of the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz I. WJC President Edgar Bronfman called for the removal of the convent.

Auschwitz III-Monowitz served as a labor camp for the Buna-Werke factory of the IG Farben concern.

Numerous future members and leaders of the Nazi Party had served in the Freikorps, including Ernst Röhm, future head of the Sturmabteilung, or SA, Heinrich Himmler, future head of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, and Rudolf Höß, the future Kommandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Robert Jan van Pelt, who appears in Mr. Death to specify some of Leuchter's scholarly failures ( e. g. not consulting the large documentation archive available at Auschwitz ), served as the primary expert witness against Irving at the libel trial of Deborah Lipstadt in 2000, relating to the court the strength of the physical and documentary evidence supporting the use of that camp for gassing.

Höss went to Auschwitz determined " to do things differently " and develop a more efficient killing center than those in which he had previously served.

Court records cite former SS member Hertha Ehlert, who served at Ravensbruck, Majdanek, Lublin, Auschwitz, and Bergen Belsen, as describing her training as " physically and emotionally demanding " when questioned at the Belsen Trial.

Between seven and twenty Aufseherinnen served in Vught, twenty-four SS women trained at Buchenwald ( three at a time ), thirty-four in Bergen Belsen, nineteen at Dachau, twenty in Mauthausen, three in Dora Mittelbau, seven at Natzweiler-Struthof, twenty at Majdanek, 200 at Auschwitz and its subcamps, 140 at Sachsenhausen, 158 at Neuengamme, forty-seven at Stutthof compared to 958 who served in Ravensbrück ( 2, 000 were trained there ), 561 in Flossenbürg, and 541 at Gross Rosen.

In 1943, Burger served at Auschwitz before becoming the Commandant of Concentration camp Theresienstadt from 1943 to 1944.

In Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, concentration camp survivor Dr. Miklós Nyiszli ( who served on Dr. Josef Mengele's medical kommando ) describes the " tooth-pulling kommando ".

In Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, concentration camp survivor Dr. Miklós Nyiszli ( who served on Dr. Josef Mengele's medical kommando ) describes the " tooth-pulling kommando ".

Ehlert later served as a guard at the Auschwitz subcamp in Rajsko, Poland, before she was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she became deputy wardress under Oberaufseherinnen Elisabeth Volkenrath and Irma Grese.

In Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, concentration camp survivor Dr. Miklós Nyiszli ( who served on Dr. Josef Mengele's medical kommando ) describes the " tooth-pulling kommando ".

In Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, concentration camp survivor Dr. Miklós Nyiszli ( who served on Dr. Josef Mengele's medical kommando ) describes the " tooth-pulling kommando ".

Auschwitz concentration camp survivor, Dr. Miklós Nyiszli, reports in Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account that the subaltern medical staff, who served Dr. Josef Mengele, subsisted on " bread made from wild chestnuts sprinkled with sawdust.

At the 1963 – 1965 Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt, Broszat together with other experts from the Institute of Contemporary History such as Helmut Krausnick, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen and Hans Buchheim served as expert witnesses for the prosecution.

Auschwitz I was the administrative center for the complex ; Auschwitz II Birkenau was the extermination camp, where most of the killing took place ; and Auschwitz III Monowitz the slave labour camp for I. G.

Similarly, by placing a non-Jewish character at the center of an Auschwitz story, Styron suggests the universality of the suffering under the Third Reich.

Auschwitz concentration camp ( ) was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Auschwitz had for a long time been a German name for Oświęcim, the town by and around which the camps were located ; the name " Auschwitz " was made the official name again by the Germans after they invaded Poland in September 1939.

Auschwitz II – Birkenau was designated by the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Germany's Minister of the Interior, as the place of the " final solution of the Jewish question in Europe ".

On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a day commemorated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The Auschwitz complex of camps was located administratively in Germany, Provinz Oberschlesien, Regierungsbezirk Kattowitz, Landkreis Bielitz, approximately 30 km south of Katowice and 50 km west of Kraków, encompassing a large industrial area rich in natural resources.

Auschwitz II was an extermination camp or Vernichtungslager, the site of the deaths of at least 960, 000 Jews, 75, 000 Poles, and some 19, 000 Roma.

Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss was overall commandant of the Auschwitz complex from May 1940 – November 1943 ; Obersturmbannführer Arthur Liebehenschel from November 1943 – May 1944 ; and Sturmbannführer Richard Baer from May 1944 – January 1945.

His father was sent via Drancy to Auschwitz where he died in 1942.

The company that would become Commodore Business Machines, Inc. was founded in 1954 in Toronto as the Commodore Portable Typewriter Company by Polish immigrant and Auschwitz survivor Jack Tramiel.

" The distinction was evident during the Nuremberg trials, when Dieter Wisliceny ( a deputy to Adolf Eichmann ) was asked to name the extermination camps, and he identified Auschwitz and Majdanek as such.

There he met Rudolf Höss, who was later commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, and Walther Darré, whose book, The Peasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race, caught Hitler's attention, leading to his later appointment as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture.

Members of Polgár's family perished in the Holocaust, and her grandmother was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The German court found in favour of Gladitz, agreeing that Riefenstahl had known the extras were from a concentration camp, and they agreed with Riefenstahl on only one count ( finding that Riefenstahl had not informed the Gypsies that they would be sent to the Auschwitz camp after filming was completed ).

Adorno ’ s 1949 dictum —" To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric "— posed the question of what German culture could mean after Auschwitz ; his own continual revision of this dictum — in Negative Dialectics, for example, he wrote that " Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream "; while in “ Commitment ,” he wrote in 1962 that the dictum " expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature "— was part of post-war Germany ’ s struggle with history and culture.

** The steamer Danae () carrying 350 Cretan Jews and 250 Cretans on the first leg of their way to Auschwitz was sunk without survivors off the shore of Santorini.

Infirmaries in extermination camps like Auschwitz where prisoners were gassed or experimented on were often separated from other areas by electrified wire and were often braided with branches to prevent outsiders from knowing what was concealed behind their walls.

This killing process differed significantly from the process at Auschwitz and Majdanek, where the poisonous gas Zyklon B was used.

Although she moved from Germany to the Netherlands to avoid Nazi persecution, in 1942 she was arrested and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she died in the gas chamber.