Auschwitz-Birkenau

The largest single center of the mass murder of Jews was at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Starting the summer of 1942, the concentration camp at Auschwitz, which had until then been principally a place where Poles had been held - and killed - was turned by the SS into a killing place for Jews. Built across the railway from Auschwitz Main Camp, and known as Auschwitz II, the camp at Birkenau was established as part of the secretive Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all Polish Jews, a major part of the "Final Solution.” Birkenau had four gas chambers, where more than a million Jews were murdered. Oświęcim was chosen as the location for Auschwitz because it was a major railway hub, making it easy to transport people from across occupied Europe. The area was already under tight German control and had existing barracks that could be converted into a camp. Additionally, its relative isolation allowed the Nazis to carry out mass killings with limited outside scrutiny.

It was also a center of slave labor. In its huts, men and women with their identification numbers tattooed on their forearms, toiled and suffered, were murdered when they became too weak to toil, and watched the crematorium chimneys working night and day to consume the bodies of the murdered Jews - including in almost every case close family members, even parents and children. 

The killings at Auschwitz-Birkenau took place between the summer of 1942 and the last months of 1944. The four gas chambers, and the chimneys of the crematoria attached to them, have become the symbols of the Holocaust, as has the entrance gate through which, after March 1944, trains ran directly in the camp. 

Following is a diary entry from September 2nd 1942, by SS Doctor Johann Kremer, then newly arrived at Birkenau. Among those whom Dr. Kremer watched being gassed that night were seventy boys and seventy-eight girls under the age of sixteen, who had just been deported from France, many of them without their parents: