Richard Glücks, based on records that had been destroyed. Höss regarded this figure as "far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive possibilities," he wrote.
Around one in six Jews murdered in the Holocaust died in Auschwitz. By nation, the greatest number of Auschwitz's Jewish victims originated from Hungary, accounting for 430,000 deaths, followed by Poland (300,000), France (69,000), Netherlands (60,000), Greece (55,000), Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (46,000), Slovakia (27,000), Belgium (25,000), Germany and Austria (23,000), Yugoslavia (10,000), Italy (7,500), Norway (690), and others (34,000).
Timothy Snyder writes that fewer than one percent of the million Soviet Jews murdered in the Holocaust were murdered in Auschwitz. Of the at least 387 Jehovah's Witnesses who were imprisoned at Auschwitz, 132 died in the camp.
Resistance, escapes, and liberation
Camp resistance, flow of information
File:Conspiratorial reportage about Auschwitz death camp 01.jpg, ''Camp of Death'' pamphlet (1942) by Natalia Zarembina
File:Krahelska Pamiętnik więźnia.jpg, Halina Krahelska report from Auschwitz s:pl:Oświęcim - pamiętnik więźnia, Oświęcim, pamiętnik więźnia ("Auschwitz: Diary of a prisoner"), 1942.
File:The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied.pdf, "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", a paper issued by the Polish government-in-exile
The Polish government-in-exile, officially known as the Government of the Republic of Poland in exile ( pl, Rząd Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej na uchodźstwie), was the government in exile of Poland formed in the aftermath of the Invasion of Pola ...
addressed to the Declaration by United Nations, United Nations, 1942
Information about Auschwitz became available to the Allies as a result of reports by Captain Witold Pilecki of the Polish Home Army who, as "Tomasz Serafiński" (serial number 4859), allowed himself to be arrested in Warsaw and taken to Auschwitz. He was imprisoned there from 22 September 1940 until his escape on 27 April 1943. Michael Fleming (historian), Michael Fleming writes that Pilecki was instructed to sustain morale, organize food, clothing and resistance, prepare to take over the camp if possible, and smuggle information out to the Polish military. Pilecki called his resistance movement Związek Organizacji Wojskowej (ZOW, "Union of Military Organization").
![Witold Pilecki in color](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Witold_Pilecki_in_color.jpg)
The resistance sent out the first oral message about Auschwitz with Dr. Aleksander Wielkopolski, a Polish engineer who was released in October 1940. The following month the Polish underground in Warsaw prepared a report on the basis of that information, ''The camp in Auschwitz'', part of which was published in London in May 1941 in a booklet, ''The German Occupation of Poland'', by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The report said of the Jews in the camp that "scarcely any of them came out alive". According to Fleming, the booklet was "widely circulated amongst British officials". The ''Polish Fortnightly Review'' based a story on it, writing that "three crematorium furnaces were insufficient to cope with the bodies being cremated", as did ''The Scotsman'' on 8 January 1942, the only British news organization to do so.
On 24 December 1941, the resistance groups representing the various prisoner factions met in block 45 and agreed to cooperate. Fleming writes that it has not been possible to track Pilecki's early intelligence from the camp. Pilecki compiled two reports after he escaped in April 1943; the second, Raport W, detailed his life in Auschwitz I and estimated that 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, had been murdered. On 1 July 1942, the ''Polish Fortnightly Review'' published a report describing Birkenau, writing that "prisoners call this supplementary camp 'Paradisal', presumably because there is only one road, leading to Paradise". Reporting that inmates were being killed "through excessive work, torture and medical means", it noted the gassing of the Soviet prisoners of war and Polish inmates in Auschwitz I in September 1941, the first gassing in the camp. It said: "It is estimated that the Oswiecim camp can accommodate fifteen thousand prisoners, but as they die on a mass scale there is always room for new arrivals."
![P Oboz](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/P_Oboz.jpg)
The
Polish government-in-exile
The Polish government-in-exile, officially known as the Government of the Republic of Poland in exile ( pl, Rząd Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej na uchodźstwie), was the government in exile of Poland formed in the aftermath of the Invasion of Pola ...
in London first reported the gassing of prisoners in Auschwitz on 21 July 1942, and reported the gassing of Soviet POWs and Jews on 4 September 1942. In 1943, the ''Kampfgruppe Auschwitz'' (Combat Group Auschwitz) was organized within the camp with the aim of sending out information about what was happening. The ''Sonderkommando'' buried notes in the ground, hoping they would be found by the camp's liberators. The group also smuggled out photographs; the Sonderkommando photographs, ''Sonderkommando'' photographs, of events around the gas chambers in Auschwitz II, were smuggled out of the camp in September 1944 in a toothpaste tube.
According to Fleming, the British press responded, in 1943 and the first half of 1944, either by not publishing reports about Auschwitz or by burying them on the inside pages. The exception was the ''Polish Jewish Observer'', a ''City and East London Observer'' supplement edited by Joel Cang, a former Warsaw correspondent for the ''Manchester Guardian''. The British reticence stemmed from a Foreign Office concern that the public might pressure the government to respond or provide refuge for the Jews, and that British actions on behalf of the Jews might affect its relationships in the Middle East. There was similar reticence in the United States, and indeed within the Polish government-in-exile and the Polish resistance. According to Fleming, the scholarship suggests that the Polish resistance distributed information about the Holocaust in Auschwitz without challenging the Allies' reluctance to highlight it.
Escapes, ''Auschwitz Protocols''
![Telegram, Vrba and Wetzler escape, Auschwitz, 8 April 1944](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Telegram%2C_Vrba_and_Wetzler_escape%2C_Auschwitz%2C_8_April_1944.jpg)
From the first escape on 6 July 1940 of Tadeusz Wiejowski, at least 802 prisoners (757 men and 45 women) tried to escape from the camp, according to Polish historian Henryk Świebocki. He writes that most escapes were attempted from work sites outside the camp's perimeter fence. Of the 802 escapes, 144 were successful, 327 were caught, and the fate of 331 is unknown.
Four Polish prisoners— (serial number 8502), Kazimierz Piechowski (no. 918), (no. 6438), and Józef Lempart (no. 3419)—escaped successfully on 20 June 1942. After breaking into a warehouse, three of them dressed as SS officers and stole rifles and an SS staff car, which they drove out of the camp with the fourth handcuffed as a prisoner. They wrote later to Rudolf Höss apologizing for the loss of the vehicle. On 21 July 1944, Polish inmate Jerzy Bielecki (Auschwitz survivor), Jerzy Bielecki dressed in an SS uniform and, using a faked pass, managed to cross the camp's gate with his Jewish girlfriend, Cyla Cybulska, pretending that she was wanted for questioning. Both survived the war. For having saved her, Bielecki was recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.
Jerzy Tabeau (no. 27273, registered as Jerzy Wesołowski) and Roman Cieliczko (no. 27089), both Polish prisoners, escaped on 19 November 1943; Tabeau made contact with the Polish underground and, between December 1943 and early 1944, wrote what became known as the ''Polish Major's report'' about the situation in the camp. On 27 April 1944, Rudolf Vrba (no. 44070) and Alfréd Wetzler (no. 29162) escaped to Slovakia, carrying detailed information to the Slovak Jewish Council about the gas chambers. The distribution of the Vrba-Wetzler report, and Rudolf Vrba#News coverage, publication of parts of it in June 1944, helped to halt the Holocaust in Hungary, deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. On 27 May 1944, Arnost Rosin (no. 29858) and Czesław Mordowicz (no. 84216) also escaped to Slovakia; the Rosin-Mordowicz report was added to the Vrba-Wetzler and Tabeau reports to become what is known as the ''Auschwitz Protocols''. The reports were first published in their entirety in November 1944 by the United States War Refugee Board as ''The Extermination Camps of Auschwitz (Oświęcim) and Birkenau in Upper Silesia''.
Bombing proposal
![Auschwitz aerial view RAF](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Auschwitz_aerial_view_RAF.jpg)
In January 1941 the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces, Polish Army and prime minister-in-exile, Władysław Sikorski, arranged for a report to be forwarded to Air Marshal Richard Pierse, head of RAF Bomber Command. Written by Auschwitz prisoners in or around December 1940, the report described the camp's atrocious living conditions and asked the
Polish government-in-exile
The Polish government-in-exile, officially known as the Government of the Republic of Poland in exile ( pl, Rząd Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej na uchodźstwie), was the government in exile of Poland formed in the aftermath of the Invasion of Pola ...
to bomb it:
Pierse replied that it was not technically feasible to bomb the camp without harming the prisoners. In May 1944 Slovak rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl suggested that the Allies bomb the rails leading to the camp. Historian David Wyman published an essay in ''Commentary (magazine), Commentary'' in 1978 entitled "Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed", arguing that the United States Army Air Forces could and should have attacked Auschwitz. In his book ''The Abandonment of the Jews, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945'' (1984), Wyman argued that, since the IG Farben plant at Auschwitz III had been bombed three times between August and December 1944 by the US Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, it would have been feasible for the other camps or railway lines to be bombed too. Bernard Wasserstein's ''Britain and the Jews of Europe'' (1979) and Martin Gilbert's ''Auschwitz and the Allies'' (1981) raised similar questions about British inaction. Since the 1990s, other historians have argued that Allied bombing accuracy was not sufficient for Wyman's proposed attack, and that counterfactual history is an inherently problematic endeavor.
''Sonderkommando'' revolt
![זלמן גרדובסקי](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/%D7%96%D7%9C%D7%9E%D7%9F_%D7%92%D7%A8%D7%93%D7%95%D7%91%D7%A1%D7%A7%D7%99.jpg)
The ''
Sonderkommando'' who worked in the crematoria were witnesses to the mass murder and were therefore regularly murdered themselves. On 7 October 1944, following an announcement that 300 of them were to be sent to a nearby town to clear away rubble—"transfers" were a common ruse for the murder of prisoners—the group, mostly Jews from Greece and Hungary, staged an uprising. They attacked the SS with stones and hammers, killing three of them, and set crematorium IV on fire with rags soaked in oil that they had hidden. Hearing the commotion, the ''Sonderkommando'' at crematorium II believed that a camp uprising had begun and threw their ''Oberkapo'' into a furnace. After escaping through a fence using wirecutters, they managed to reach Rajsko, Oświęcim County, Rajsko, where they hid in the granary of an Auschwitz satellite camp, but the SS pursued and killed them by setting the granary on fire.
By the time the rebellion at crematorium IV had been suppressed, 212 members of the ''Sonderkommando'' were still alive and 451 had been killed. The dead included Zalman Gradowski, Zalmen Gradowski, who kept notes of his time in Auschwitz and buried them near crematorium III; after the war, another ''Sonderkommando'' member showed the prosecutors where to dig. The notes were published in several formats, including in 2017 as ''From the Heart of Hell''.
Evacuation and death marches
![Auschwitz Birkenau Krematorium IV - 05](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Auschwitz_Birkenau_Krematorium_IV_-_05.jpg)
The last mass transports to arrive in Auschwitz were 60,000–70,000 Jews from the Łódź Ghetto, some 2,000 from Theresienstadt, and 8,000 from Slovak Republic (1939–1945), Slovakia. The last selection took place on 30 October 1944. On 1 or 2 November 1944, Heinrich Himmler ordered the SS to halt the mass murder by gas. On 25 November, he ordered that Auschwitz's gas chambers and crematoria be destroyed. The ''Sonderkommando'' and other prisoners began the job of dismantling the buildings and cleaning up the site. On 18 January 1945, Engelbert Marketsch, a German criminal transferred from Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex, Mauthausen, became the last prisoner to be assigned a serial number in Auschwitz, number 202499.
According to Polish historian Andrzej Strzelecki, the evacuation of the camp was one of its "most tragic chapters". Himmler ordered the evacuation of all camps in January 1945, telling camp commanders: "The Führer holds you personally responsible for ... making sure that not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy." The plundered goods from the "Kanada" barracks, together with building supplies, were transported to the German interior. Between 1 December 1944 and 15 January 1945, over one million items of clothing were packed to be shipped out of Auschwitz; 95,000 such parcels were sent to concentration camps in Germany.
Beginning on 17 January, some 58,000 Auschwitz detainees (about two-thirds Jews)—over 20,000 from Auschwitz I and II and over 30,000 from the subcamps—were evacuated under guard, at first heading west on foot, then by open-topped freight trains, to concentration camps in Germany and Austria: Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald concentration camp, Buchenwald, Dachau concentration camp, Dachau, Flossenbürg concentration camp, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen concentration camp, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex, Mauthausen, Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, Dora-Mittelbau, Ravensbrück concentration camp, Ravensbruck, and Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Sachsenhausen. Fewer than 9,000 remained in the camps, deemed too sick to move. During the marches, the SS shot or otherwise dispatched anyone unable to continue; "execution details" followed the marchers, killing prisoners who lagged behind. Peter Longerich estimated that a quarter of the detainees were thus killed. By December 1944 some 15,000 Jewish prisoners had made it from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated by the British on 15 April 1945.
On 20 January, crematoria II and III were blown up, and on 23 January the "Kanada" warehouses were set on fire; they apparently burned for five days. Crematorium IV had been partly demolished after the ''Sonderkommando'' revolt in October, and the rest of it was destroyed later. On 26 January, one day ahead of the Red Army's arrival, crematorium V was blown up.
Liberation
The first in the camp complex to be liberated was Auschwitz III, the IG Farben camp at Monowitz; a soldier from the 100th Infantry Division of the
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after ...
entered the camp around 9 am on Saturday, 27 January 1945. The 60th Army (Soviet Union), 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front (also part of the Red Army) arrived in Auschwitz I and II around 3 pm. They found 7,000 prisoners alive in the three main camps, 500 in the other subcamps, and over 600 corpses. Items found included 837,000 women's garments, 370,000 men's suits, 44,000 pairs of shoes, and 7,000 kg of human hair, estimated by the Soviet war crimes commission to have come from 140,000 people. Some of the hair was examined by the Forensic Science Institute in
Kraków
Kraków (), or Cracow, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city dates back to the seventh century. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 ...
, where it was found to contain traces of hydrogen cyanide, the main ingredient of
Zyklon B
Zyklon B (; translated Cyclone B) was the trade name of a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the early 1920s. It consisted of hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid), as well as a cautionary eye irritant and one of several adsorbents such ...
.
Primo Levi
Primo Michele Levi (; 31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works ...
described seeing the first four soldiers on horseback approach Auschwitz III, where he had been in the sick bay. They threw "strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive ...":
Georgii Elisavetskii, a Soviet soldier who entered one of the barracks, said in 1980 that he could hear other soldiers telling the inmates: "You are free, comrades!" But they did not respond, so he tried in Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian. Then he used some Yiddish: "They think that I am provoking them. They begin to hide. And only when I said to them: 'Do not be afraid, I am a colonel of Soviet Army and a Jew. We have come to liberate you' ... Finally, as if the barrier collapsed ... they rushed toward us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs."
The Soviet military medical service and Polish Red Cross (PCK) set up field hospitals that looked after 4,500 prisoners suffering from the effects of starvation (mostly diarrhea) and tuberculosis. Local volunteers helped until the Red Cross team arrived from Kraków in early February. In Auschwitz II, the layers of excrement on the barracks floors had to be scraped off with shovels. Water was obtained from snow and from fire-fighting wells. Before more help arrived, 2,200 patients there were looked after by a few doctors and 12 PCK nurses. All the patients were later moved to the brick buildings in Auschwitz I, where several blocks became a hospital, with medical personnel working 18-hour shifts.
The liberation of Auschwitz received little press attention at the time; the Red Army was focusing on its advance toward Germany and liberating the camp had not been one of its key aims. Boris Polevoy, Boris Polevoi reported on the liberation in ''Pravda'' on 2 February 1945 but made no mention of Jews; inmates were described collectively as "victims of Fascism". It was when the Western Allies arrived in Buchenwald concentration camp, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau concentration camp, Dachau in April 1945 that the liberation of the camps received extensive coverage.
After the war
Trials of war criminals
![AuschwitzGallows2006](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/AuschwitzGallows2006.JPG)
Only 789 Auschwitz staff, up to 15 percent, ever stood trial; most of the cases were pursued in Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany. According to Aleksander Lasik, female SS officers were treated more harshly than male; of the 17 women sentenced, four received the death penalty and the others longer prison terms than the men. He writes that this may have been because there were only 200 women overseers, and therefore they were more visible and memorable to the inmates.
Camp commandant
Rudolf Höss
Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss (also Höß, Hoeß, or Hoess; 25 November 1901 – 16 April 1947) was a German SS officer during the Nazi era who, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, was convicted for war crimes. Höss was the longest-serving comm ...
was arrested by the British on 11 March 1946 near Flensburg, northern Germany, where he had been working as a farmer under the pseudonym Franz Lang. He was imprisoned in Heide, then transferred to Minden for interrogation, part of the British occupation zone. From there he was taken to Nuremberg to testify for the defense in the trial of ''SS-Obergruppenführer'' Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Höss was straightforward about his own role in the mass murder and said he had followed the orders of
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (; 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was of the (Protection Squadron; SS), and a leading member of the Nazi Party of Germany. Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and a main architect of th ...
. Extradited to Poland on 25 May 1946, he wrote his memoirs in custody, first published in Polish in 1951 then in German in 1958 as ''Kommandant in Auschwitz''. His trial before the Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw opened on 11 March 1947; he was sentenced to death on 2 April and hanged in Auschwitz I on 16 April, near crematorium I.
On 25 November 1947, the Auschwitz trial began in
Kraków
Kraków (), or Cracow, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city dates back to the seventh century. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 ...
, when Poland's Supreme National Tribunal brought to court 40 former Auschwitz staff, including commandant Arthur Liebehenschel, women's camp leader Maria Mandel, and camp leader Hans Aumeier. The trials ended on 22 December 1947, with 23 death sentences, seven life sentences, and nine prison sentences ranging from three to 15 years. Hans Münch, an SS doctor who had several former prisoners testify on his behalf, was the only person to be acquitted.
Other former staff were hanged for war crimes in the Dachau Trials and the Belsen Trial, including camp leaders Josef Kramer, Franz Hössler, and Vinzenz Schöttl; doctor Friedrich Entress; and guards Irma Grese and Elisabeth Volkenrath. Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, the owner and chief executive officer of the firm Tesch & Stabenow, one of the suppliers of Zyklon B, were arrested by the British after the war and executed for knowingly supplying the chemical for use on humans. The 180-day Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, held in West Germany from 20 December 1963 to 20 August 1965, tried 22 defendants, including two dentists, a doctor, two camp adjudants and the camp's pharmacist. The 700-page indictment, presenting the testimony of 254 witnesses, was accompanied by a 300-page report about the camp, ''Nationalsozialistische Konzentrationslager'', written by historians from the ''Institute of Contemporary History (Munich), Institut für Zeitgeschichte'' in Germany, including Martin Broszat and Helmut Krausnick. The report became the basis of their book, ''Anatomy of the SS State'' (1968), the first comprehensive study of the camp and the SS. The court convicted 19 of the defendants, giving six of them life sentences and the others between three and ten years. East Germany also held trials against several former staff members of Auschwitz. One of the defendants they tried was Horst Fischer. Fischer, one of the highest ranking SS physicians in the camp, had personally selected at least 75,000 men, women, and children to be gassed. He was arrested in 1965. The following year, he was convicted of crimes against humanity, sentenced to death, and guillotined. Fischer was the highest-ranking SS physician from Auschwitz to ever be tried by a German court.
Legacy
In the decades since its liberation, Auschwitz has become a primary symbol of the Holocaust. Historian Timothy D. Snyder attributes this to the camp's high death toll and "unusual combination of an industrial camp complex and a killing facility", which left behind far more witnesses than single-purpose killing facilities such as
Chełmno
Chełmno (; older en, Culm; formerly ) is a town in northern Poland near the Vistula river with 18,915 inhabitants as of December 2021. It is the seat of the Chełmno County in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship.
Due to its regional impor ...
or
Treblinka
Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The cam ...
. In 2005 the United Nations General Assembly designated 27 January, the date of the camp's liberation, as
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, is an international memorial day on 27 January that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of on ...
. Helmut Schmidt visited the site in November 1977, the first West Germany, West German Chancellor of Germany (1949–present), chancellor to do so, followed by his successor, Helmut Kohl, in November 1989. In a statement on the 50th anniversary of the liberation, Kohl said that "[t]he darkest and most awful chapter in German history was written at Auschwitz." In January 2020, world leaders gathered at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to commemorate the 75th anniversary. It was the city's largest-ever political gathering, with over 45 heads of state and world leaders, including royalty. At Auschwitz itself, Reuven Rivlin and Andrzej Duda, the presidents of Israel and Poland, laid wreaths.
Notable memoirists of the camp include
Primo Levi
Primo Michele Levi (; 31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works ...
,
Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski. Levi's ''If This is a Man'', first published in Italy in 1947 as ''Se questo è un uomo'', became a classic of Holocaust literature, an "imperishable masterpiece". Wiesel wrote about his imprisonment at Auschwitz in ''Night (memoir), Night'' (1960) and other works, and became a prominent spokesman against ethnic violence; in 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Camp survivor Simone Veil was elected President of the European Parliament, serving from 1979 to 1982. Two Auschwitz victims—Maximilian Kolbe, a priest who volunteered to die by starvation in place of a stranger, and Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism—were named saints of the Catholic Church.
In 2017, a Körber Foundation survey found that 40 percent of 14-year-olds in Germany did not know what Auschwitz was. The following year a survey organized by the Claims Conference, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and others found that 41 percent of 1,350 American adults surveyed, and 66 percent of millennials, did not know what Auschwitz was, while 22 percent said they had never heard of the Holocaust. A CNN-ComRes poll in 2018 found a similar situation in Europe.
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
On 2 July 1947, the Polish government passed a law establishing a state memorial to remember "the martyrdom of the Polish nation and other nations in Oswiecim". The museum established its exhibits at Auschwitz I; after the war, the barracks in Auschwitz II-Birkenau had been mostly dismantled and moved to Warsaw to be used on building sites. Dwork and van Pelt write that, in addition, Auschwitz I played a more central role in the persecution of the Polish people, in opposition to the importance of Auschwitz II to the Jews, including Polish Jews. An exhibition opened in Auschwitz I in 1955, displaying prisoner mug shots; hair, suitcases, and shoes taken from murdered prisoners; canisters of Zyklon B pellets; and other objects related to the killings.
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...
added the camp to its list of
World Heritage Site
A World Heritage Site is a landmark or area with legal protection by an international convention administered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). World Heritage Sites are designated by UNESCO for h ...
s in 1979. All the museum's directors were, until 1990, former Auschwitz prisoners. Visitors to the site have increased from 492,500 in 2001, to over one million in 2009, to two million in 2016.
There have been protracted disputes over the perceived Christianization of the site. Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass (Roman Rite), mass over the train tracks leading to Auschwitz II-Birkenau on 7 June 1979 and called the camp "the Calvary, Golgotha of our age", referring to the crucifixion of Jesus. More controversy followed when Carmelite nuns founded a convent in 1984 in a former theater outside the camp's perimeter, near block 11 of Auschwitz I, after which a local priest and some survivors Auschwitz cross, erected a large cross—one that had been used during the pope's mass—behind block 11 to commemorate 152 Polish inmates shot by the Germans in 1941. After a long dispute, Pope John Paul II intervened and the nuns moved the convent elsewhere in 1993. The cross remained, triggering the "War of the Crosses", as more crosses were erected to commemorate Christian victims, despite international objections. The Polish government and Catholic Church eventually agreed to remove all but the original.
On 4 September 2003, despite a protest from the museum, three Israeli Air Force F-15 Eagles performed a fly-over of Auschwitz II-Birkenau during a ceremony at the camp below. All three pilots were descendants of Holocaust survivors, including the man who led the flight, Major-General Amir Eshel. On 27 January 2015, some 300 Auschwitz survivors gathered with world leaders under a giant tent at the entrance to Auschwitz II to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the camp's liberation.
Museum curators consider visitors who pick up items from the ground to be thieves, and local police will charge them as such; the maximum penalty is a 10-year prison sentence. In 2017 two British youths from the The Perse School, Perse School were fined in Poland after picking up buttons and shards of decorative glass in 2015 from the "Kanada" area of Auschwitz II, where camp victims' personal effects were stored. The ''Arbeit Macht Frei'' sign over the main camp's gate was stolen in December 2009 by a Swedish former neo-Nazi and two Polish men. The sign was later recovered.
In 2018 the Polish government passed an amendment to its Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, making it a criminal offence to violate the "good name" of Poland by accusing it of crimes committed by Germany in the
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...
, which would include referring to Auschwitz and other camps as "Polish death camp" controversy, "Polish death camps". Staff at the museum were accused by nationalist media in Poland of focusing too much on the fate of the Jews in Auschwitz at the expense of ethnic Poles. The brother of the museum's director, Piotr Cywiński, wrote that Cywiński had experienced "50 days of incessant hatred". After discussions with Israel's prime minister, amid international concern that the new law would stifle research, the Polish government adjusted the amendment so that anyone accusing Poland of complicity would be guilty only of a civil offence.
See also
* Auschwitz Album
* Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation
* Höcker Album
* List of Nazi concentration camps
* List of victims and survivors of Auschwitz
* "Polish death camp" controversy
Sources
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Further reading
* Borowski, Tadeusz (1992) [1976]. ''This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen''. Trans. from the Polish by Barbara Vedder. East Rutherford: Penguin Books.
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* Witold Pilecki, Pilecki, Witold (2012). ''The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery''. Trans. from the Polish by Jarek Garlinski. Los Angeles: Aquila Polonica.
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''Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal'' Nuremberg, 14 November 1945 – 1 October 1946.
External links
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Google EarthAuschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
"Auschwitz" United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
"The Auschwitz Album" Yad Vashem.
Auschwitz-Birkenau photographsby Bill Hunt.
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