Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish political
prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of
prisoners took place in September 1941, and Auschwitz II–Birkenau went on to
become a major site of the Nazi Final Solution to the Jewish Question. From
early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas
chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed with the
pesticide Zyklon B. At least 1.1 million prisoners died at Auschwitz, around 90
percent of them Jewish; approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died
at the camp.Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000
Romani and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 400 Jehovah's Witnesses, and
tens of thousands of others of diverse nationalities, including an unknown
number of homosexuals.Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of
starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and
medical experiments.
In the course of the war, the camp was staffed by 7,000
members of the German Schutzstaffel (SS), approximately 12 percent of whom were
later convicted of war crimes. Some, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss,
were executed. The Allied Powers refused to believe early reports of the
atrocities at the camp, and their failure to bomb the camp or its railways
remains controversial. One hundred forty-four prisoners are known to have
escaped from Auschwitz successfully, and on October 7, 1944, two Sonderkommando
units—prisoners assigned to staff the gas chambers—launched a brief,
unsuccessful uprising.
As Soviet troops approached Auschwitz in January 1945, most
of its population was evacuated and sent on a death march. The prisoners
remaining at the camp were liberated on January 27, 1945, a day now
commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the following
decades, survivors, such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, and Elie Wiesel, wrote
memoirs of their experiences in Auschwitz, and the camp became a dominant
symbol of the Holocaust. In 1947, Poland founded the Auschwitz-Birkenau State
Museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, and in 1979, it was named a UNESCO
World Heritage Site.
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