On the ramp inside Birkenau, the trains finally stopped. After days packed inside cattle cars, the doors slid open to shouts from SS guards, barking orders in a language most arrivals did not understand. Men were pulled to one side. Women and children to the other.
Their luggage was left where it fell. Within minutes, a doctor or SS officer scanned each person with a glance, and the decision was made—a gesture to the right meant forced labor; a gesture to the left meant the gas chamber. Most were sent left. Seventy to seventy-five percent of each transport was killed within about an hour of arrival.
Auschwitz had not been built for that purpose. The site, near the Polish town of Oświęcim about fifty kilometers west of Kraków, had been a set of old Polish army barracks. In April 1940, Heinrich Himmler ordered a concentration camp established there, and on June 14, 1940, the first prisoners arrived—728 Polish men, mostly students and soldiers, transferred from a prison in Tarnów. That first camp, later known as Auschwitz I, was designed as a prison and forced-labor camp, not a killing center.
Its commandant from the beginning was Rudolf Höss, an SS officer who had joined the Nazi Party in the 1920s. By late 1941, Germany was deep into a costly war against the Soviet Union, and Nazi leadership had turned toward a plan to kill the Jewish population of Europe. At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, senior officials coordinated what they called the Final Solution—the deportation and murder of European Jews. Auschwitz was already being expanded, and it became one of the principal sites where that plan would be carried out.
Construction on a second camp, about three kilometers from the original, had begun in October 1941, and it was built on a much larger scale. Called Auschwitz II-Birkenau, this was the part of Auschwitz that most people recognize today. In September 1941, SS guards tested the chemical pesticide Zyklon B on Soviet prisoners of war and sick prisoners in the basement of Block 11 in Auschwitz I. The gas killed large numbers of people without requiring guards to shoot each victim individually.
It proved efficient in the eyes of the SS, and that test established the method that would be used on a far greater scale. By spring 1942, gas chambers in Birkenau were operating regularly, and trains carrying Jewish families from across Europe were arriving. Deportations expanded country by country. French Jews began arriving in March 1942, Slovak Jews the same month under an agreement between the Slovak government and Nazi Germany, and transports from the Netherlands in July 1942, including the Frank family, though Anne Frank herself was not deported to Auschwitz for more than two years.
Greek Jews, mainly from Thessaloniki, were deported from March to August 1943, about 48,000 people from that city alone. The transports were organized with the involvement of SS officer Dieter Wisliceny, who worked directly with Adolf Eichmann’s office in Berlin. The largest wave came from Hungary. Between May and July 1944, about 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in eight weeks, so quickly that Rudolf Höss was brought back temporarily from his position to oversee the deportation and mass killing.
Historians later called this period Operation Höss, but it was the sheer volume that drove it. Four or five trains could arrive in a day, each carrying around three thousand people. By the time transports finally stopped in late 1944, more than 1. 3 million people had been deported to Auschwitz—most of them Jews, though Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and others were also imprisoned there.
By 1944, trains could stop directly inside Birkenau, at a section prisoners called the ramp. This brought the unloading closer to the gas chambers and crematoria. Before that, transports were offloaded at a station near Oświęcim, and prisoners were taken to the camp by truck or on foot. Arrivals stepped out exhausted, often without food or water for days, exhausted beyond measure, some already dead.
Guards ordered the survivors to leave their belongings and form lines for selection, including mothers whose children marked them as nonworkers, and anyone deemed unable to perform heavy labor. The smaller group selected for forced labor faced a different process. They were processed into the camp system, stripped naked, shaved and stripped of their identity, then given striped uniforms. Auschwitz was the main Nazi camp where prisoners received permanent tattoos, and this practice became widespread in 1943 as the camp grew and the SS required faster identification.
Numbers were tattooed on the forearm. From that moment, guards often used their numbers, not their names. The system made prisoners easier to control and easier to replace. Daily routine was built on exhaustion, hunger, and constant pressure.
Wake-up came before sunrise, often about 4:30 a. m. , followed by roll call, where prisoners stood in long rows in freezing weather while guards counted them, repeatedly, to check that the records matched the men standing before them, sometimes for hours. Food was deliberately far below survival needs for heavy physical labor, about 1300 to 1700 calories a day, and the work lasted up to twelve hours.
After weeks on short rations, bodies began consuming fat stores and then muscle for energy. In two or three months, many sank into a state prisoners called a Muselmann, a camp term for someone so weak and thin, eyes sunken, steps slow, that he could no longer respond to orders. Another part of the system, Auschwitz III-Monowitz, was built beginning in 1942 beside an industrial complex producing synthetic rubber and fuel, operated by IG Farben, one of Germany’s largest chemical companies. The camp supplied the firm with slave labor of about 35,000 Jewish prisoners, of whom around 25,000 died.
Even surviving selection at the ramp did not end the selections. SS doctors and officials conducted internal selections every few weeks. Those who looked weak or sick, who were no longer judged able to work, were taken from the roll call and sent to the gas chambers, sometimes after appearing before a doctor, without real medical examination, deemed useful in that moment. Typhus swept through overcrowded and unsanitary barracks repeatedly, hundreds dying from an outbreak in summer 1942.
The outbreak sparked massive selections and liquidated entire barracks complexes. One group inside Auschwitz followed a different timetable. These were the Sonderkommando, the special unit, mostly Jewish men forced to work inside the gas chambers and crematoria, pulling corpses from the gas chambers and running the furnaces for the SS to extract gold teeth from the dead. The SS replaced these men regularly because they did not want witnesses to what they had seen.
Food was generally slightly better, mainly to keep them physically able to do the grueling work, but not enough to protect them from danger. On October 7, 1944, members of the Sonderkommando finally rose in armed revolt, using gunpowder smuggled into the camp by Jewish women working in a nearby German munitions factory, including Rosa Robota, and used explosives to damage Crematorium IV and attacking SS guards. Guards were killed and wounded prisoners killed, the revolt was suppressed. Rosa Robota and three other women were executed by hanging on January 6, 1945, weeks before Soviet forces reached Auschwitz.
By late 1944, the war had turned decisively against Germany. Soviet forces were advancing west through Poland, and Auschwitz was likely to fall under Soviet control. SS began to destroy evidence, demolishing most crematoria buildings in November 1944, burning documents, and gas chambers largely ended. Transports stopped entirely.
The end of the gas chambers did not make Auschwitz safer, as the German war effort collapsed and rations dwindled, with hunger and disease still taking lives, even without mass selections. In mid-January 1945, the Soviets were dangerously close. Rather than leave thousands alive to tell the world what they had seen, the SS decided to evacuate the camp and move prisoners west. From about January 17 and 18, roughly 56,000 to 58,000 prisoners from Auschwitz and surrounding subcamps were forced to march on foot, in freezing Polish winter, to camps deeper in Germany, including Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald.
Many had already spent months or years starving and sick. Those who fell behind were shot by SS guards, and thousands died on the roads from exhaustion, hunger, exposure, and execution. On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops of the 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front entered Auschwitz. Most prisoners had already been evacuated.
About 7,000 people remained alive, too sick, too weak, too exhausted to join the death marches days before, some so sick with frostbite and disease they could barely move; being too ill to leave the camp had saved their lives.