FREE ESSAY ON AUSCHWITZ

AUSCHWITZ

Auschwitz
During the 1930's, the Nazis built concentration camps to imprison the parts of the
population that they desired. At first the camps were located in Germany, but as the Nazi
forces spread across Europe, so did the camps. Eventually the camps were created to
murder the European Jews. Every day thousands of prisoners were suffocated in the gas
chambers, after which their bodies were burned in the crematoriums. 
In Auschwitz, the most notorious death camp, approximately 1.5 million Jews were killed.
In total about 6 million Jews lost their lives, although not all of those victims died in
the death camps. Many died on their way to the camps or were shot for almost no reason at
all.
Some people still refuse to accept the fact that the Holocaust really happened. For many
the concept of Auschwitz is nothing more then a wildly exaggerated story. There are
always people who refuse to accept things no matter what others say even if it is a
proven fact. Extermination camps were reality in Nazi Germany. The truth about the death
camps far surpasses the average person's imagination. 
Auschwitz is the largest Nazi concentration and death camp. In Auschwitz II, also known
as Birkenau and one of forty-five sub-camps of Auschwitz I, five gas chambers and
crematoria were in operation at one point or another. They used poisonous cyanide gas
pellets called Zyklon-B which were manufactured by a pest control company in Germany.
Almost five to six thousand people died daily. The ones who were not poisoned and
cremated upon arrival, died from cruel labor and starvation.
The Auschwitz complex was the site of scientifically planned and efficiently executed
genocide during WWII. There are no accurate statistics that were kept, but the estimated
death toll at the camp ranges from 1.5 to 4 million. It was not only Jews killed in
Auschwitz, but also a large number of Poles, Russian POWs, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah
Witnesses, the physically and mentally handicapped, and other minority groups considered
to be a "threat" to the Nazi party. SS camp commander Rudolf Hoss admitted to a minimum
figure of 2.5 million deaths at Auschwitz. At his trial a few years after the war, just
before his own execution by hanging in April 1947, reflecting back on his part in the
genocide, referring to the experiment in the basement of Block 11 and to the initial use
of the gas chamber and crematorium 1, Hoss said:
" At the time I did not think about the problem of killing Soviet POWs. It was an order
and I had to execute it. However, I will say that killing that group of people by gas
relieved my anxieties. It would soon be necessary to start the mass extermination of the
Jew, and until that moment neither I nor Adolf Eichmann had known how to conduct a mass
killing. A sort of gas was to be used, but it was not known what kind of gas was meant
and how to use it. Now we had both the gas and the way of using it. I had always been
concerned at the thought of mass shootings, particularly of women and children. I was
already sick of all the executions. Now my mind was at ease."
The largest number of Holocaust victims was the Jews from Europe who lived in Nazi
Territory. Birkenau has become the prime symbol of what became known as the Holocaust.
About one-third of the estimated six million Jews killed in Nazi extermination camps
during World War II were killed at this place.
The Nazis established Auschwitz in April 1940 under the direction of Heinrich Himmler,
chief of two Nazi organizations, the SS and the Gestapo. The camp at Auschwitz originally
housed political prisoners from occupied Poland and from concentration camps within
Germany. Construction of nearby Birkenau began in October 1941 and after August 1942
included a women's section. Birkenau had five gas chambers, which were built to resemble
crude showers, and five crematoria used to incinerate the bodies of the, for the most
part, unsuspecting victims.
About 40 more surrounding camps were established around Auschwitz. These were forced
labor camps and were collectively known as Auschwitz III. The first was built at Monowitz
and help Polish political prisoners who had been forcibly evacuated from their hometowns
by the Nazis. Jews, deported by rail from all over Nazi occupied Europe, arrived it
Auschwitz in daily convoys. Arrivals at Birkenau were separated into three groups. The
first group was sent directly to the gas chambers. More then twenty thousand people could
be gassed and cremated every day. Prisoners of the second group were spared this initial
indignity and forced to perform slave labor in one of the surrounding camps belonging to
Auschwitz in industrial factories for companies such as I. G. Farben and Krupp until they
too were worked to death.
Between 1940 and 1945 four hundred and five thousand prisoners were recorded as laborers.
Of all of these about three hundred and forty thousand perished through executions,
beatings, starvation, and sickness. Some prisoners survived through the help of German
industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved about 1000 Polish Jews by diverting them from
Auschwitz to work for him. First he had them work in his factory near Krakow and later he
had them working in a factory in what is now the Czech Republic. A third group, mostly
twins and dwarfs underwent medical experiments at the hands of doctors of which Josef
Mengele was chief. The inmates knew him as the "Angel of Death." 
Some parts of the camp we staffed with prisoners, some of who were selected to be
orderlies and some were special workers at the crematoria. Most of the members of these
groups were killed periodically to maintain secrecy. Members of the SS supervised the
Orderlies and the workers at the crematorium. By the year 1943 resistance organizations
had developed in Auschwitz. These organizations managed to assist a few prisoners with
their escape plans. Those who escaped took with them news of exterminations, such as the
killing of hundreds of thousands Jews transported from Hungary between May and June 1944.
In October 1944 a group of crematory workers destroyed one of the gas chambers at
Birkenau. They and their Accomplices, a group of women from the Monowitz labor camp, were
all put to death. When the Soviet army marched into Auschwitz to liberate the camp on
January 27, 1945, they found about seven thousand six hundred survivors, barely alive,
abandoned there. More then fifty-eight thousand prisoners had already been forcefully
evacuated by the Nazis and sent to the West on a final death march to German
concentration camps. The government of Poland founded a museum at the site of the main
Auschwitz concentration camp in 1946 in remembrance of its victims. By 1994, about
twenty-two million visitors, or about half a million annually, had passed through the
wrought iron gate that to this days bears the cynical motto: Arbeit Macht Frei - Work
Liberates. 
Today, in Oswiecim, Poland, there is a controversial disco bar only one-mile from
Auschwitz and on the very site of an SS-run tannery in which hundreds of Jewish slave
laborers perished.