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.

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 ").

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.

Most Holocaust historians identify six German Nazi extermination camps, all in occupied Poland ; two of them, Chełmno and the Auschwitz II, in the western Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany ( October 1939 ), four in the General Government area.

# Auschwitz II ( Auschwitz-Birkenau )

U. S. aerial photograph of Auschwitz II ( Birkenau ) showing crematoria II and III

Whereas the Auschwitz II ( Auschwitz – Birkenau ) and Majdanek camps were parts of a labor camp complex, the Operation Reinhard camps and the Chełmno camp were exclusively for the quick extermination of many people ( primarily Jews ) within hours of their arrival.

* 1942 – World War II: the first selections for the gas chamber at Auschwitz take place on a train full of Jews from Paris.

* 1941 – World War II: The first gas chamber experiments are conducted at Auschwitz.

Perec's father, who enlisted in the French Army during World War II, died in 1940 from unattended gunfire or shrapnel wounds, and Perec's mother perished in the Nazi Holocaust, probably in Auschwitz after 1943.

Conv., ( Polish: Maksymilian Maria Kolbe ; 8 January 1894 – 14 August 1941 ) was a Polish Conventual Franciscan friar, who volunteered to die in place of a stranger in the Nazi German concentration camp of Auschwitz, located in German-occupied Poland during World War II.

She ponders about medical experiments conducted by Nazi physicians ; about the gas chambers in the death camps, implicitly comparing a crowded New York subway with a cattle wagon to Auschwitz ; the Nazis making soap with human fat ; Pope Pius XII and Roman Catholicism ; displaced Jews after World War II ; anti-Semitism in general ; Neo-Nazis in Germany and Austria ; the world population of Jews in 1939 and today and the fact that there were " no Jews left " in Poland after World War II ; business in the DP camps ( i. e. bartering with cigarettes ), coffee but also Nazi memorabilia ; and she considers with disgust a video game on CD-ROM entitled " How to Survive the Holocaust ".

During World War II the city was annexed by Nazi Germany and its Jewish population was sent to nearby Auschwitz extermination camp.

The main gate of Auschwitz II Birkenau.

Ostatni etap ) was a 1947 Polish feature film directed and co-written by Wanda Jakubowska, depicting her experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.

Henryk Mandelbaum and an interpreter talk on the ruins of crematoria at Auschwitz II.

He was a member of the Auschwitz II Sonderkommandos at the time of the revolt by the 12th generation of Sonderkommandos.

The Search is a 1948 Swiss-American film directed by Fred Zinnemann which tells the story of a young Auschwitz survivor and his mother who search for each other across post-World War II Europe.

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.

* 1942 – Holocaust: Porajmos – Heinrich Himmler orders that Roma candidates for extermination be deported to Auschwitz.

* 1942 – The Holocaust: Kazimierz Piechowski and three others, dressed as members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, steal an SS staff car and escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp.

* 1945 – The Nazis begin the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp as Soviet forces close in.

* 1942 – Holocaust: Vel'd ' Hiv Roundup ( Rafle du Vel'd ' Hiv ): the government of Vichy France orders the mass arrest of 13, 152 Jews who are held at the Winter Velodrome in Paris before deportation to Auschwitz.

* 1912 – Maria Mandel, Austrian Auschwitz prison guard ( d. 1948 )

* 1943 – Holocaust: Josef Mengele becomes chief medical officer of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

* 1942 – Holocaust: 1, 500 Jews are sent to gas chambers in Auschwitz.

* 1946 – Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, is captured by British troops.

* January 27 – The Holocaust: The Red Army liberates the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps.

In Ioannina 1, 860 out of 1, 950 Jews were deported to Auschwitz and Birkenau in April 1944.

Zyklon B was used by Nazi Germany to poison prisoners in the gas chambers of the extermination camps Auschwitz Birkenau and Majdanek, and in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Leuchter's book had been first published in Canada by Zündel's Samisdat Publishers in 1988 as The Leuchter Report: The End of a Myth: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdenek.

For months, young Jewish women, like Ester Wajcblum, Ella Gärtner, and Regina Safirsztain, had been smuggling small amounts of gunpowder from the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke, a munitions factory within the Auschwitz complex, to men and women in the camp ’ s resistance movement, like Róza Robota, a young Jewish woman who worked in the clothing detail at Birkenau.

Leuchter traveled to Auschwitz and Birkenau to examine the structures identified by guards, prisoners, and investigators, as gas chambers, and concluded that they could not have been used for mass murder.

Zündel's Samisdat Publications published his findings as The Leuchter Report: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek Poland ( published in England as Auschwitz: The End of the Line: The Leuchter Report-The First Forensic Examination of Auschwitz ) which the court accepted only as evidentiary display and not as direct evidence ; Leuchter was therefore required to explicate it and testify to the veracity of his findings under oath in the trial.

In 1979, the newly elected Polish Pope John Paul II said mass on the grounds of the Auschwitz II ( Birkenau ) extermination camp to some 500, 000 people.

Its first shipment of women came from Auschwitz Birkenau.

Tragic events took place in January 1945, when Nazis evacuated prisoners of Auschwitz Birkenau and in the event killed many of them, even at the streets of Pszczyna.

At its peak, Auschwitz was three separate facilities, Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II / Birkenau, and Auschwitz III / Monowitz, including many satellite sub-camps, and was built on about 8, 000 ha ( 20, 000 acres ) that had been cleared of all inhabitants.

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.

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.

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 I served as the administrative center, and was the site of the deaths of roughly 70, 000 people, mostly ethnic Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.

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.