Bullfrog Photography
Auschwitz I: Arbeit macht frei
Posted by Ali-G (Ottawa, Canada) on 23 January 2007 in Miscellaneous.
Auschwitz (Konzentrationslager Auschwitz) was the largest of the Nazi German concentration camps. It is in Poland and was named after the nearby town of Oświęcim, situated about 50 kilometers west of Kraków, and 286 kilometers from Warsaw. Following the Nazi occupation of Poland in September 1939, Oświęcim was incorporated into Germany and renamed Auschwitz.
The camp complex consisted of three main camps: Auschwitz I, the administrative center; Auschwitz II (Birkenau), an extermination camp or Vernichtungslager; and Auschwitz III (Monowitz), a work camp. There were also around 40 satellite camps, some of them tens of kilometers from the main camps, with prisoner populations ranging from several dozen to several thousand.
The exact number killed in Auschwitz is not known. The camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, testifed at the Nuremberg Trials that three million had died there. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum revised this figure in 1990, and new calculations now place the figure at 1.1–1.6 million, about 90 percent of them Jews from almost every country in Europe.
