A can of Zyklon B, the main poison used by the Nazis to gas their victims in extermination camps. Following the Wannsee Conference, five additional extermination camps were adapted or established with the primary purpose of efficiently murdering the Jewish population of Europe. This brought the total number of Nazi extermination camps to six. These extermination camps were:. In extermination camps, victims were murdered by being poisoned by gas. The process of murder was developed and adapted as each camp was built.
Once they had arrived at the extermination camp, groups of Jews were typically separated into women and children, and then men. Some of the strongest were occasionally chosen for slave labour, but typically the majority were sent straight to the gas chambers where they were murdered. In camps such as Auschwitz, most of those sent immediately to the gas chambers were told to leave their luggage and get undressed ready for disinfection in a shower.
Approximately people were then shepherded into the false showers and an airtight door was closed. Carbon monoxide gas or Zyklon B was pumped into the room, and suffocated those inside. The bodies were then removed from the gas chamber and sent to the crematoria, and the lethal process began again. In total, approximately three million people were murdered in the extermination camps.
The deadliest extermination camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau, where approximately one million people were murdered. Before the war, he lived in Vienna with his wife, Serla left , and two daughters, Fanni and Charlotte. Following the Nazi occupation of Austria in , Emil lost his job as a result of Nazi persecution. Emil retrained as a hotel keeper in the hope of escaping to England.
Emil and Serla were unable to emigrate and remained in their flat in Clusiusgasse, Vienna, which they were forced to share with several other families. On 20 May they were deported to the Minsk, and from there to a pine forest a few kilometres from Maly Trostinec camp.
Here, they were executed by the Einsatzgruppen on 26 May In total, approximately one million people were murdered there during the Holocaust. This photograph was taken shortly after Auschwitz was liberated in At the front of the photograph, pots and pans used by the prisoners in the camp are strewn across the ground. Prior to murdering victims at extermination camps, the Nazis confiscated their luggage.
This photograph shows some of the shaving brushes seized by the Nazis at Auschwitz. On 4 June , having survived the first Einsatzgruppen sweep through the city, the family were deported to Ladijin Concentration Camp.
Throughout the next three years, the family endured horrific and unsanitary conditions in several ghettos and camps. Only Lotte survived the war. From the summer of onwards, the situation for Jews and others viewed as inferior by the Nazis continued to rapidly deteriorate.
In Poland, the invasion of the Soviet Union meant that many of those incarcerated in ghettos were put to work manufacturing a variety of items for the war effort. However, as soon as it became clear that the war would not be over quickly, the fate of the Jews trapped in the ghettos of Poland and eastern Europe was sealed. Almost all of them, except the Jews who formed the Sonderkommado , were gassed shortly after arrival. Genocide was unleashed as ghettos across Poland were emptied and Jews were sent to the extermination camps.
In Warsaw, between July and September , approximately , inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto were deported to Treblinka and murdered. Those incapable of carrying out hard labour were murdered. An example of this ruthlessness can be seen in the city of Kauna, Lithuania, where, on 4 October , Jews were killed by Einsatzgruppen and local Lithuanian collaborators.
Just under four weeks later, on 29 October , a further 9, Jews were murdered in the city. They were forced to strip naked, with their belongings and valuables taken away, pushed into large pre-prepared mass graves, and then shot with machine guns.
By , centuries of Jewish culture had been destroyed and thousands upon thousands of Jewish communities had been decimated. A clandestine photograph of prisoners on a death march from Nuremberg to Dachau on 26 April The ITS now known as Arolsen Archives was established to help the millions of people displaced and missing during the Second World War to trace, and be traced by, their families.
Following the war, the International Tracing Service ITS researched and created these maps, showing the routes that death marches took. This burial map was also created as part of a post-war research project by the ITS. Maps such as this helped to document death tolls and routes that the death marches took. From spring onwards, the Nazis ordered the forced evacuation of prisoners from camps across occupied Europe.
People living in barracks that were encrusted with excrement. Emaciated patients who became ill when they ate the food they offered. Eva Mozes Kor was 10 years old when she spotted the soldiers. She was one of a group of hundreds of children who had been left behind, and she had endured medical experiments during her imprisonment. We were not only starved for food but we were starved for human kindness. That human kindness characterized the liberation.
The shocked soldiers helped set up hospitals on site, and townspeople volunteered to help. For months, Polish Red Cross workers labored to save the dying and treat the living, working without adequate food or supplies and helping prisoners get in touch with their loved ones. About 7, survived. Though some journalists visited Auschwitz at liberation, the camp did not receive the same kind of international attention that had greeted the liberation of Majdanek , the first major Nazi extermination camp to be captured during the war.
But after Soviet investigators learned the true extent of the killing at Auschwitz, it soon became known as a symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust. With the help of the Polish government, a group of former prisoners turned the site into a memorial and museum.
Auschwitz had been the site of 1. The Germans had been forced to leave these prisoners behind in their hasty retreat from the camp. Also left behind were victims' belongings: , men's suits, , women's coats, and tens of thousands of pairs of shoes. British, Canadian, American, and French troops also freed prisoners from the camps. Although the Germans had attempted to empty the camps of surviving prisoners and hide all evidence of their crimes, the Allied soldiers came upon thousands of dead bodies "stacked up like cordwood," according to one American soldier.
The prisoners who were still alive were living skeletons. Bill Barrett, an American army journalist, described what he saw at Dachau: "There were about a dozen bodies in the dirty boxcar, men and women alike.
They had gone without food so long that their dead wrists were broomsticks tipped with claws. These were the victims of a deliberate starvation diet Allied troops, physicians, and relief workers tried to provide nourishment for the surviving prisoners, but many of them were too weak to digest food and could not be saved.
In spite of the liberators' efforts, many camp survivors died. Half of the prisoners discovered alive in Auschwitz died within a few days of being freed. But even during their imprisonments, they had decided Auschwitz should be preserved.
But for others, it was a place to continue the plunder. Despite a protective guard, which included former prisoners, looters stole artifacts and searched through ash pits for gold tooth fillings and other valuables. Huener says that there is no comprehensive answer to the question of how many of those early museum workers were Jews, or why they came back to Auschwitz. Other Jews who survived Auschwitz fled Poland after being liberated, living in displaced persons camps , scattering into a worldwide diaspora, or emigrating to British Palestine.
The museum staff lived in former SS offices and did everything from groundskeeping to rudimentary preservation work to exhibit design. They staved off looters, acted as impromptu tour guides to the hundreds of thousands of visitors who streamed toward the camp, and tried their best to preserve everything that remained of the camp.
Despite the lack of modern preservation technology and questions about how best to present evidence of years of mass murder, the former prisoners who fought to preserve Auschwitz succeeded. The most notorious of the over 40, sites of systematic Nazi atrocities would be passed on to future generations.
Other sites would fare differently, depending on the extent of their destruction by the Nazis and the deterioration of time. The exhibitions have changed over the years, but Auschwitz still inspires speechlessness.
Last year, 2. Now, Auschwitz has a state-of-the-art preservation laboratory, an extensive archive, and conducts education and outreach around the world. The end of Auschwitz was the beginning of a monumental task of preservation and commemoration that continues to this day. In a matter of a few short years, it transformed a sleepy Silesian town into the greatest site of mass killing the world has ever known.
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