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Young Israelis walk under the sign at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp reading "Arbeit Macht Frei," ("Work makes you free") during a tour in April 1998. (AP Photo/Jockel Finck)
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INDEPTH: AUSCHWITZ
Auschwitz timeline
CBC News Online | January 25, 2005
By 1939, the Third Reich had ordered the arrest of so many Poles that existing local prisons could no longer handle the numbers. The Nazis decided they needed a prison in central Poland to deal with the huge numbers of arrested; Auschwitz was the result. It was originally meant to be a prison much like the other concentration camps the Nazis had set up through the 1930s.
A picture taken just after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Soviet army in January 1945, shows a group of children wearing concentration camp uniforms behind barbed wire fencing at the camp. (AP Photo/CAF)
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Its special place in infamy followed from the Reich's decision to give the prison camp an added role – that of extermination camp. Before the war was over, Auschwitz would become the largest of the Nazi death camps – a brutal symbol of the unspeakable atrocities that collectively came to be known as the Holocaust.
The timeline:
May 1940 - The Nazis, on orders from Heinrich Himmler, establish a concentration camp in abandoned Polish army buildings in the suburbs of Oswiecim, a Polish city annexed to the Third Reich. Later that year, its name is changed to Auschwitz. It serves as the main camp – also known as "Auschwitz I." Arriving prisoners see the infamous phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Shall Set You Free) written on the gate above the entrance.
1940-1941 - Poles and Jews living near Auschwitz are evicted, their homes demolished or taken over by SS guards.
September 1941 - First test of Zyklon B gas used to kill prisoners at Auschwitz.
October 1941 - The Nazis build a second camp three kilometres away from Oswiecim in the village of Brzezinka. This becomes known as the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp (or simply "Birkenau"). By 1944, it held more than 90,000 prisoners. The majority of the mass exterminations at Auschwitz take place here.
January 1942 - First gas chamber goes into operation at Auschwitz.
1942 - The first prisoners at Auschwitz are largely Poles – people the Third Reich rounds up for being dangerous or subversive. Its early residents are academics, political leaders, scientists and cultural leaders. But in early 1942, Auschwitz assumes a new role. Jews begin to be sent here by the thousands.
March 31, 1942 - An SS order establishes a minimum work day at all concentration camps of 11 hours.
March to June 1943 - Four large crematorium buildings are built to carry out mass gassings. Gas chambers remain in operation until November 1944. At their peak, the crematoria could burn 20,000 bodies a day. The highest single day toll was 24,000.
1942 - 1944 - Auschwitz becomes the centre of the Nazi's "Final Solution" – the extermination of all Jews living in the parts of Europe occupied by the Third Reich. Jews arriving in packed railcars are selected right at the arrival platform by SS doctors as being "fit" or "unfit" for labour.
As many as 75 per cent of Jewish arrivals are declared "unfit" and are immediately sent to the gas chambers. More than half of those declared "fit" subsequently die from starvation, disease, forced labour, execution, torture or medical experiments. Dr. Josef Mengele, the most notorious of the SS doctors at Auschwitz, specializes in the study of twins and dwarfs.
The living conditions are unimaginable. Prisoners are assigned 700 to each barrack with little heating. Sanitation is completely inadequate. The barracks are swarming with vermin. Diarrhea is rampant. There is never enough food to sustain the hard labour demanded.
1942 - 1944 - The Auschwitz death camp expands further with the construction of 40 "sub-camps" that use slave labour at various industrial plants and farms around Auschwitz. The largest of these camps, "Buna," has 10,000 prisoners.
Visitors look at the crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)
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Oct. 7, 1944 - Hundreds of prisoners assigned to one of the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau rebel, killing three guards and blowing up the crematorium and one of the gas chambers. The uprising fails and the prisoners are executed.
Late 1944 - The Soviet Red Army is closing in on Auschwitz. The SS begins destroying documents, demolishing buildings and planning for the evacuation of Auschwitz – all to try to eliminate evidence of war crimes.
Jan. 18, 1945 - The last serial number assigned in Auschwitz is tattooed on a German prisoner.
Jan. 18 to Jan. 21, 1945 - More than 50,000 prisoners are forced to evacuate Auschwitz and head west into Germany. Many thousands die from starvation or hypothermia in the subsequent "Death March" to other camps. Many others are executed when they fail to keep up. Most of the survivors end up in other concentration camps like Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau.
Jan. 27, 1945 - First Soviet soldiers (the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front) enter Auschwitz and liberate the 7,000 remaining prisoners. At least one million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz, along with 75,000 Poles, 20,000 Roma, 10,000 Russian POWs and tens of thousands of homosexuals and others. But these are only estimates. No firm counts were taken of the countless numbers who were sent straight to the gas chambers on arrival.
Sources: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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