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AUSCHWITZ PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Laurence Rees | 400 pages | 01 Sep 2005 | Ebury Publishing | 9780563522966 | English | London, United Kingdom News / Museum / Auschwitz-Birkenau After a brief delay, the SS transported around 3, Blechhammer prisoners from Gross-Rosen to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. On January 27, , the Soviet army entered Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz and liberated more than six thousand prisoners, most of whom were ill and dying. Berenbaum, Michael, and Yisrael Gutman, editors. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Auschwitz from A to Z. An Illustrated History of the Camp. Oswiecim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Dlugoborski, Waclaw et al. Auschwitz, — Central Issues in the History of the Camp. Langbein, Hermann. People in Auschwitz. Levi, Primo. New York: Collier Books, Swiebocka, Teresa, editor. Auschwitz: A History in Photographs. We would like to thank The Crown and Goodman Family and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors. You are searching in English. How did postwar trials shape approaches to international justice? Sobibor Uprising. Tags Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics. Browse A-Z Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically. For Teachers Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust. About This Site. Glossary : Full Glossary. Auschwitz The largest of its kind, the Auschwitz camp complex was essential to carrying out the Nazi plan for the "Final Solution. Key Facts. More information about this image. Number of Victims It is estimated that the SS and police deported at least 1. Auschwitz I Auschwitz I, the main camp, was the first camp established near Oswiecim. Like most German concentration camps, Auschwitz I was constructed for three purposes: To incarcerate real and perceived enemies of the Nazi regime and the German occupation authorities in Poland for an indefinite period of time To provide a supply of forced laborers for deployment in SS-owned construction-related enterprises and, later, armaments and other war-related production To serve as a site to kill small, targeted groups of the population whose death was determined by the SS and police authorities to be essential to the security of Nazi Germany. Deportations to Auschwitz Trains arrived at Auschwitz frequently with transports of Jews from virtually every country in Europe occupied by or allied to Germany. The approximate breakdown of deportations from individual countries: Hungary: , Poland: , France: 69, Netherlands: 60, Greece: 55, Bohemia and Moravia: 46, Slovakia: 27, Belgium: 25, Yugoslavia: 10, Italy: 7, Norway: Other including concentration camps : 34, With the deportations from Hungary , the role of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the German plan to murder the Jews of Europe achieved its highest effectiveness. The Prisoner Revolt at Auschwitz On October 7, , several hundred prisoners assigned to Crematorium IV at Auschwitz-Birkenau rebelled after learning that they were going to be killed. Evacuation of Auschwitz and its Subcamps In mid-January , as Soviet forces approached the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps. The Liberation of Auschwitz On January 27, , the Soviet army entered Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz and liberated more than six thousand prisoners, most of whom were ill and dying. Glossary Terms. Series: Auschwitz. Series: Auschwitz Subcamps. Series: Killing Centers. Besides the SS, what organizations or professions were involved in the design, construction, and operation of the camp? Were the German and Polish populations aware of Auschwitz, its purposes, and the conditions within? How would you begin to research this question? Rees, Laurence. Kapos were responsible for the prisoners' behavior while they worked, as was an SS escort. Much of the work took place outdoors at construction sites, gravel pits, and lumber yards. No rest periods were allowed. One prisoner was assigned to the latrines to measure the time the workers took to empty their bladders and bowels. Lunch was three quarters of a liter of watery soup at midday, reportedly foul-tasting, with meat in the soup four times a week and vegetables mostly potatoes and rutabaga three times. The evening meal was grams of bread, often moldy, part of which the inmates were expected to keep for breakfast the next day, with a tablespoon of cheese or marmalade, or 25 grams of margarine or sausage. Prisoners engaged in hard labor were given extra rations. A second roll call took place at seven in the evening, in the course of which prisoners might be hanged or flogged. If a prisoner was missing, the others had to remain standing until the absentee was found or the reason for the absence discovered, even if it took hours. On 6 July , roll call lasted 19 hours because a Polish prisoner, Tadeusz Wiejowski , had escaped; following an escape in , a group of prisoners was picked out from the escapee's workmates or barracks and sent to block 11 to be starved to death. Then they had some free time to use the washrooms and receive their mail, unless they were Jews: Jews were not allowed to receive mail. Curfew "nighttime quiet" was marked by a gong at nine o'clock. Eight hundred to a thousand people were crammed into the superimposed compartments of each barracks. Unable to stretch out completely, they slept there both lengthwise and crosswise, with one man's feet on another's head, neck, or chest. Stripped of all human dignity, they pushed and shoved and bit and kicked each other in an effort to get a few more inches' space on which to sleep a little more comfortably. For they did not have long to sleep. Sunday was not a work day, but prisoners had to clean the barracks and take their weekly shower, [] and were allowed to write in German to their families, although the SS censored the mail. Inmates who did not speak German would trade bread for help. No watches, calendars, or clocks were permitted in the camp. Only two Jewish calendars made in Auschwitz survived to the end of the war. Prisoners kept track of the days in other ways, such as obtaining information from newcomers. About 30 percent of the registered inmates were female. Classified as criminal, asocial and political, they were brought to Auschwitz as founder functionaries of the women's camp. Spiritual suffering was completely alien to them. Women were at first held in blocks 1—10 of Auschwitz I, [] but from 6 August , [] 13, inmates were transferred to a new women's camp Frauenkonzentrationslager or FKL in Auschwitz II. This consisted at first of 15 brick and 15 wooden barracks in sector Bauabschnitt BIa; it was later extended into BIb, [] and by October it held 32, women. Conditions in the women's camp were so poor that when a group of male prisoners arrived to set up an infirmary in October , their first task, according to researchers from the Auschwitz museum, was to distinguish the corpses from the women who were still alive. There was one latrine for thirty to thirty-two thousand women and we were permitted to use it only at certain hours of the day. We stood in line to get in to this tiny building, knee-deep in human excrement. As we all suffered from dysentry, we could barely wait until our turn came, and soiled our ragged clothes, which never came off our bodies, thus adding to the horror of our existence by the terrible smell that surrounded us like a cloud. The latrine consisted of a deep ditch with planks thrown across it at certain intervals. We squatted on those planks like birds perched on a telegraph wire, so close together that we could not help soiling one another. Sterilization experiments were carried out in barracks 30 by a German gynecologist, Carl Clauberg , and another German doctor, Horst Schumann. German doctors performed a variety of experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. SS doctors tested the efficacy of X-rays as a sterilization device by administering large doses to female prisoners. Carl Clauberg injected chemicals into women's uteruses in an effort to glue them shut. Prisoners were infected with spotted fever for vaccination research and exposed to toxic substances to study the effects. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price. In April , the children were killed by hanging to conceal the project. A Jewish skeleton collection was obtained from among a pool of Jewish inmates, chosen for their perceived stereotypical racial characteristics. The collection was sanctioned by Heinrich Himmler and under the direction of August Hirt. Ultimately 87 of the inmates were shipped to Natzweiler- Struthof and killed in August Prisoners could be beaten and killed by guards and kapos for the slightest infraction of the rules. Flogging during roll- call was common. A flogging table called "the goat" immobilized prisoners' feet in a box, while they stretched themselves across the table. Prisoners had to count out the lashes—"25 mit besten Dank habe ich erhalten" "25 received with many thanks" — and if they got the figure wrong, the flogging resumed from the beginning. If their shoulders were too damaged afterwards to work, they might be sent to the gas chamber. Prisoners were subjected to the post for helping a prisoner who had been beaten, and for picking up a cigarette butt. Known as block 13 until , block 11 of Auschwitz I was the prison within the prison, reserved for inmates suspected of resistance activities.