Auschwitz Concentration Camps

The great tragedy of what we know as World War two brought great danger to lots of people, but to not forget of what people themselves feared most, concentration camps. To be more specific in this case, the Auschwitz camps. In its time, it was the most effective camp of the Nazi regime. In this place, it consisted of three camps, each with their very own deadly purposes. The reasons this camp over all was the most effective was, history of its building, the day of a prisoner in the camps as well as ways inmates were killed off, and the main man in charge of the camp.

Production of the center started in May of 1940 under the command of Heinrich Himmler, a German SS officer(ushmm.org). Located in army barracks previously used by the polish
army, in the city of Oswiecim. This place had three sections, each named Auschwitz with an additional name, Monowitz and Birkenau.
Not only that, but an extra 45 sub camps were built near the site over time. Another edition to this would be the sign advertised in the front stating “Arbeit mach frei”, translates to “Work sets you free”, also known as giving the prisoners false hopes (Auschwitz). This camp had to be the most convenient for hitler, as it was near railroad tracks so they could get more detainees, it was in the center of all Nazi controlled European countries, and most important of all, it was the biggest concentration camp during the war. This camp even held 20,000 or more.

The average prisoner life was of course, terrible. They awoke every morning with freezing, diseased ridden beds every day. Even when standing in line for roll call, they sometimes died when in line. A punishment at roll call would be such as standing outside all day, freezing to death. Their lunches consisted of a quart of water as well as rotten rutabagas and carrots. Breakfast was black, tasteless coffee and 12 ounces of bread. They had a ten second monitored
bathroom break a day. Afterwards was when they went to the barracks, made from old horse stables, where they shared ten people to a bed. Not only did prisoners share beds, but tons of diseased insects. Most of the time, inmates woke up to a dead body next to them, in which they were used to seeing(holocaust-trc.org).The barracks even had fireplaces, with of course no fuel included. What was interesting was that the Germans intended the barracks to hold 40 prisoners at a time, but instead there were 700 prisoners crammed inside. They of course were sorted by ethnicity, the Jews, the Gypsies, the polish, czech, the list could go on forever. The sanitation looked like it came from the ancient romans. By that I mean, a large cement block with holes in it, was their toilets. The gas chambers were made from a shower rooms. A block was dedicated to experimenting on prisoners. It was located in the men’s section, even though they tested on women more often. They X-rayed men and women to test them(Auschwitz.org). They gathered Gypsy children with Noma and purposely killed them to study the disease. A man named prof. Dr. August Hirt gathered patients and studied them, then sent them to another camp's gas chambers, and then recollected their corpses skeletons for anthropological reasons (study of humans past and present) for he wanted to prove that the nordic race was far superior, in which the nordic was the vast population of Hitler's army.

The people to control the camps were ss officers, or as the German said it, Schutzstaffel which meant protection.
As saying that, they started just Hitler's bodyguards, but then later became an organization. The head of this operation was Heinrich Himmler also, and the club included 250,000 other members(the Schutzstaffel). One important member was a man named Rudolf Hoess, who was the commandant of Auschwitz himself. His main personal goal was that every person submitted to the camp be exterminated. When he was in control, he said that the Auschwitz could exterminate 10,000 people in 24 hours or less. Auschwitz wasn’t an extermination camp when it was built, but Rudolf converted Auschwitz to what it was hated for. He was the one to put in a crematoria, and gas chambers. The Germans liked his work very much, that he was promoted several times, once to an inspector, in which he checked on the camp and steadily improvised on new ways to exterminate the jewish. After the war, he went into hiding under the name “Franz Lang”, but was eventually found by Allied military police in 1946. When he was sentenced to death, he spoke of how when they gassed people, they did children first, so they could not avenge their parents(Rudolf hoss). In the final moments he wrote a letter to his family, and was hanged outside of the entrance of a gas chamber at
Auschwitz.

There were many camps in the times of world war two. Each different or same as each other. But the most deadly, largest, and well known camp in the Nazi regime with a large amount of people killed, an estimated 960,000 jewish, 75,000 polish, 20,000 roma, 15,000 soviet POWs, and 12 to 10,000 other miscellaneous(ushmm). The camps caused these deaths for these reasons, The architecture and features in the camps, harsh and terrible living conditions as well asways they killed people off, and the deadly