Auschwitz: the largest mass murder site in human history

On arrival at concentration camps prisoners had their clothing taken away, often to be replaced by a striped uniform (now known as striped pyjamas). Prisoners were identified by a number printed on their clothing and also an inverted triangle with lettering to signify the reason for imprisonment.

Picture of a young woman in Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland.

Between February 1942 and the end of April 1944, when the railroad tracks were extended inside the Birkenau camp, there were approximately 500,000 Jews who arrived at this ramp. According to the Auschwitz Museum, at least 75% of them were immediately exterminated.

Tourist watching the Judenrampe and original cattle box car used to bring Jews to the gas chambers at Birkenau.

Young people watching  the “Wall of Death” or “Black Wall” which was specially painted black, built of wood, sand and insulating board. At the foot of the wall, sand was sprinkled to soak up the blood of the victims. The SS man responsible for a significant number of deaths at the “Wall of Death” was Rapportfuhrer Gerhard Palitzsch.

Personal items of victims of Nazi death camp in Auschwitz.

The exact number of victims at Auschwitz is difficult to fix with certainty, because many prisoners were never registered and much evidence was destroyed by the SS in the final days of the war.As early as 1942, Himmler visited the camp and ordered that "all mass graves were to be opened and the corpses burned. In addition the ashes were to be disposed of in such a way that it would be impossible at some future time to calculate the number of corpses burned."

Auschwitz was considered a comfortable posting by many SS members, due to its many amenities and the abundance of slave labor.

In mid-1944, about 130,000 prisoners were present in Auschwitz when the SS started to move about half of them to other concentration camps.

Human hair in display case at Auschwitz.During liberation Soviet Army found about 7,000 kilograms of human hair, packed in paper bags, when they liberated the camp.

Woman shoes in display case at Auschwitz.

German doctors performed a wide variety of experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. (In)famous BAYER company,then a subsidiary of IG Farben, bought prisoners to use as "research material" for testing new drugs.Enjoy your aspirine C...

"Arbeit Macht Frei" - the expression comes from the title of a novel by German philologist Lorenz Diefenbach Arbeit macht frei: Erzählung von Lorenz Diefenbach (1873), in which gamblers and fraudsters find the path to virtue through labour.

"The chimneys spewed fire… the smell of burning human flesh was unbelievable": Auschwitz survivors recalls horrors of the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz in their memoirs and interviews.

In the decades since its liberation, Auschwitz has become a primary symbol of the Holocaust.