Come Fly With Me #auschwitz

On Tuesday we travelled over to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp, which operated from 1940-1945 in Poland. It was the epicentre of the Holocaust, where over 1.1 million men, wome and children - mostly Jews - were murdered. Today it functions as a UNESCO World Heritage site and memorial museum to honour the victims.

All over the world Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Holocaust. It was established by Germans in 1940 in the suburbs of Oswiecim, a Polish city that was annexed to the Third Reich by the Nazis. It's name was changed to Auschwitz, which also became the name Konzentrationslager Auschwitz.

The camp was initially established as the mass arrests of Poles was increasing beyond the capacity of existing 'local' prisons. The first transport of Poles reached Auschwitz from Tarnow prison on June 14, 1940. Initially, Auschwitze was to be one more concentration camp of the type that the Nazis had been setting up since the early 1930s. It functioned in this role throughout its existence, even when, beginning in 1942, it also became the largest extermination centre the "Endloesung der Judenfrage" (the final solution to the Jewish question - the Nazi plan to murder European Jews) was carried out.

The first and oldest of the camps was the so-called "main camp", later also known as Auschwitz I, which was established on the grounds and in the buildings of prewar Polich barracks. The numbers of prisoners in Auschwitz I fluctuated around 15,000, sometimes rising above 20,000. Auschwitz I was also where they carried out the first experiments at using Zyklon B to put people to death, where they murdered the first mass transports of Jews, where they conduced the first criminal experiments on prisoners, where they carried out most the executions by shooting, where the central jail for prisoners from all over the camp complex was located in Block No. 11, and where the camp commandant's office and most of the SS officers were located. From here, the camp administration directed the further expansion of the camp complex. 

"Work sets you free" - the gate that all prisoners had to
walk through every morning to go to their work detail, 
and return through each evening, usually to the sounds
of a band playing to keep them marching in time.

Main sites - ghettos, transit camps and prisons from where the
Jews and prisoners of other nationalities were deported to Auschwitz.

Two large rooms upstairs and a number of smaller rooms
downstairs in each block housed 700 prisoners, and
sometimes as many as 1,500.

Model of the extermination buildings in Auschwitz II.

Only about 10% of the items confiscated
and stored in Auschwitz were 'saved' and
not destroyed before liberation.

Registration documents used by the SS in 
Nazi concentration camps to record detailed
personal data of inmates upon arrival.

Priosners were given clogs to were, which meant they could
not run away.

Some of the stories of survivors.

Toilets were only introduced to each barrak in 1942.

Death Wall

The 'parade ground' where prisoners were counted each
morning and evening.

Before the war this building was a munitions bunker.
From 15 August 1940 the SS used it as a crematorium.
The largest rooms, originally designed by camp authorities
as a morgue, was adapted for use as an improvised gas
chamber, the first of its kind in Auschwitz.

Looking from a bus window into the camp.