“I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it”. These are the words of Charlotte Delbo, a survivor of Auschwitz. For many men and women Auschwitz was a time of great fear, death and despair. The Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II, and commanded by Rudolf Hoss (1900-1947). It included three main camps. All three camps used prisoners for forced labor. One of them also functioned for an extended period as a killing center.
These concentration camps were made up of mainly Jewish people. An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, and at least 1.1 million died. Around 90 percent of those were Jews. As a matter of fact, …show more content…
As the entered the gates, a sign reads “work sets you free”. Later the prisoners would find the irony in this statement. From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp from all over German-occupied Europe. Upon arriving at the camp, prisoners were examined by Nazi doctors. Those prisoners considered unfit for work, including young children, elderly, and pregnant women, were immediately ordered to take showers. However, the bathhouses to which they marched were disguised gas chambers. Once inside, the prisoners were exposed to Zyklon-B poison gas. Zyklon-B poison gas was originally designed as a pesticide. Those deemed fit to work were employed as slave labor in the production of munitions, synthetic rubber and other products considered essential to Germany’s efforts in World War II. Individuals marked as unfit for work were never officially registered as Auschwitz inmates. Because of this, it is impossible to calculate the number of lives lost in the camp. Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical …show more content…
That’s right, a German physician, named Mengele, began working at Auschwitz in 1943. Mengele came to be known as the “Angel of Death.” He performed a range of experiments on prisoners. For example, in an effort to study eye color, he injected serum into the eyeballs of dozens of children, causing them excruciating pain. He also injected chloroform into the hearts of twins, to determine if both siblings would die at the same time and in the same manner. On October 7, 1944, several hundred prisoners assigned to Crematorium four at rebelled after learning that they were going to be killed. During the uprising, the prisoners killed three guards and blew up the crematorium and a nearby gas chamber. The prisoners used explosives smuggled into the camp by Jewish women who had been assigned to forced labor in a nearby factory. The Germans killed almost all of the prisoners involved in the rebellion, and the jewish women who had smuggled the explosives into the camp were publicly hanged in early January 1945. As 1944 came around and the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allied forces seemed almost certain, the Auschwitz commandants began destroying evidence of the horror that had taken place at Auschwitz. Buildings were torn down, blown up or set on fire, and records were