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.

Map showing the originating locations in Europe for deportations to Auschwitz concentration camp

After Kristallnacht in 1938, thousands of the city's Jews were imprisoned in the nearby Sachsenhausen concentration camp or, in early 1943, were shipped to death camps, such as Auschwitz.

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.

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.

* 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.

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 ).

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

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

* 1940 – Holocaust: The first prisoners arrive at a new concentration camp at Auschwitz.

* 1944 – Holocaust: 800 Gypsy children are murdered at Auschwitz concentration camp.

* 1944 – Anne Frank and sister Margot Frank are deported from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

But in other instances, Mary McAleese has been criticised for certain comments, such as a reference to the way in which Protestant children in Northern Ireland had been brought up to hate Catholics just as German children had been encouraged to hate Jews under the Nazi regime, on 27 January 2005, following her attendance at the ceremony commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp .< ref >

* 1941 – The Holocaust: Karl Fritzsch, deputy camp commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, experiments with the use of Zyklon B in the gassing of Soviet POWs.

* 1944 – Holocaust: diarist Anne Frank and her family are placed on the last transport train from the Westerbork transit camp to the Auschwitz concentration camp, arriving three days later.

* April 4 – WWII: An allied Surveillance aircraft photographs part of Auschwitz concentration camp.

* June 29 – The Holocaust – The deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps begins.

January 27: The Soviet Union liberates Auschwitz concentration camp | Auschwitz.

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

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.

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

As early as September 1942, Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, M. D., an SS physician, witnessed a gassing of prisoners, and in his diary wrote: " They don't call Auschwitz the camp of annihilation Lager der Vernichtung for nothing!

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.

On his orders, by spring 1942 the camp at Auschwitz had been greatly expanded, including the addition of gas chambers, where victims were killed using the pesticide Zyklon B.

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 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.

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.

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.

From October 1940, ZOW sent the first reports about the camp and its genocide to Home Army Headquarters in Warsaw through the resistance network organized in Auschwitz.