Selection and extermination process

A reconstruction of crematorium I, Auschwitz I, 2014^[151]

On 31 July 1941, Hermann Göring gave written authorization to Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), to prepare and submit a plan for Die Endlösung der Judenfrage (the Final Solution of the Jewish question) in territories under German control and to coordinate the participation of all involved government organizations.^[152] Plans for the extermination of the European Jews—eleven million people—were formalized at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on 20 January 1942. Some would be worked to death and the rest killed.^[153] Initially the victims were killed with gas vans or by Einsatzgruppen firing squads, but these methods were impractical for an operation of this scale.^[154] By 1942, killing centers at Auschwitz, Sobibór, Treblinka, and other extermination camps had become the primary method of mass killing.^[155]

Hungarian Jews from the Tét ghetto arriving at Auschwitz II, May/June 1944

Jewish women and children from Subcarpathian Rus walking toward the gas chamber, Auschwitz II, May/June 1944. The gate on the left leads to sector BI, the oldest part of the camp.^[156]

Women on their way to the gas chamber, Auschwitz II, August 1944 (one of the Sonderkommandophotographs)

The first gassings at Auschwitz took place in early September 1941, when around 850 inmates—Soviet prisoners of war and sick Polish inmates—were killed with Zyklon B in the basement of block 11 in Auschwitz I. The building proved unsuitable, so gassings were conducted instead in crematorium I, also in at Auschwitz I, which operated until December 1942. There, more than 700 victims could be killed at once.^[157] Tens of thousands were killed in crematorium I.^[158] To keep the victims calm, they were told they were to undergo disinfection and de-lousing; they were ordered to undress outside, then were locked in the building and gassed. After its decommissioning as a gas chamber, the building was converted to a storage facility and later served as an SS air raid shelter.^[159] The gas chamber and crematorium were reconstructed after the war. Dwork and van Pelt write that a chimney was recreated; four openings in the roof were installed to show where the Zyklon B had entered; and two of the three furnaces were rebuilt with the original components.^[160]

In early 1942, mass exterminations were moved to two provisional gas chambers (the "red house" and "white house", known as bunkers 1 and 2) in Auschwitz II, while the larger crematoria (II, III, IV, and V) were under construction. Bunker 2 was temporarily reactivated from May to November 1944, when large numbers of Hungarian Jews were gassed.^[161] In summer 1944 the combined capacity of the crematoria and outdoor incineration pits was 20,000 bodies per day.^[162] A planned sixth facility—crematorium VI—was never built.^[163] Prisoners were transported from all over German-occupied Europe by rail, arriving in daily convoys.^[164] By July 1942, the SS were conducting "selections". Incoming Jews were segregated; those deemed able to work were sent to the selection officer's right and admitted into the camp, and those deemed unfit for labor were sent to the left and immediately gassed.^[165] The group selected to die, about three-quarters of the total,^[c] included almost all children, women with small children, the elderly, and all those who appeared on brief and superficial inspection by an SS doctor not to be fit for work.^[167]

After the selection process was complete, those too ill or too young to walk to the crematoria were transported there on trucks or killed on the spot with a bullet to the head.^[168][169] The belongings of the arrivals were seized by the SS and sorted in an area of the camp called "Canada", so called because Canada was seen as a land of plenty. Many of the SS at the camp enriched themselves by pilfering the confiscated property.^[170]

The crematoria consisted of a dressing room, gas chamber, and furnace room. In crematoria II and III, the dressing room and gas chamber were underground; in IV and V, they were on the ground floor. The dressing room had numbered hooks on the wall to hang clothes. In crematorium II, there was also a dissection room (Sezierraum).^[171] SS officers told the victims they were to take a shower and undergo delousing. The victims undressed in the dressing room and walked into the gas chamber, which was disguised as a shower facility; signs in German said "To the baths" and "To disinfection". Some inmates were even given soap and a towel.^[172]

Zyklon B container, Auschwitz Museum

The Zyklon B was delivered by ambulance to the crematoria by a special SS bureau known as the Hygienic Institute.^[104] The actual delivery of the gas to the victims was always handled by the SS, on the order of the supervising SS doctor.^[173][174] After the doors were shut, SS men dumped in the Zyklon B pellets through vents in the roof or holes in the side of the chamber. The victims were dead within 20 minutes.^[173] Despite the thick concrete walls, screaming and moaning from within could be heard outside. In one failed attempt to muffle the noise, two motorcycle engines were revved up to full throttle nearby, but the sound of yelling could still be heard over the engines.^[175]

Sonderkommando wearing gas masks then dragged the bodies from the chamber. The victims' glasses, artificial limbs, jewelry, and hair were removed, and any dental work was extracted so the gold could be melted down.^[176] The corpses were burned in the nearby incinerators, and the ashes were buried, thrown in the river, or used as fertilizer.^[176]

The gas chambers worked to their fullest capacity from April to July 1944, during the massacre of Hungary's Jews. Hungary was an ally of Germany during the war, but it had resisted turning over its Jews until Germany invaded that March.^[177] A rail spur leading to crematoria II and III in Auschwitz II was completed that May, and a new ramp was built between sectors BI and BII to deliver the victims closer to the gas chambers.^[178] On 29 April the first 1,800 Hungarian Jews arrived at the camp;^[178] from 14 May until early July 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews, half the pre-war population, were deported to Auschwitz, at a rate of 12,000 a day for a considerable part of that period.^[105] The crematoria had to be overhauled. Crematoria II and III were given new elevators leading from the stoves to the gas chambers, new grates were fitted, and several of the dressing rooms and gas chambers were painted. Cremation pits were dug behind crematorium V.^[178] The last mass transports to arrive in Auschwitz were 60,000–70,000 Jews from the Łódź Ghetto, some 2,000 from Theresienstadt, and 8,000 from Slovakia.^[166][179] The last selection took place on 30 October 1944.^[162] Crematorium IV was demolished after the Sonderkommando revolt on 7 October 1944. The SS blew up crematorium V on 14 January 1945, and crematoria II and III on 20 January.^[180]

At the Judenrampe, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, May or June 1944

Overall 268,657 male and 131,560 female prisoners were registered in Auschwitz, 400,207 in total.^[181] Many prisoners were never registered and much evidence was destroyed by the SS in the final days of the war, making the number of victims hard to ascertain.^[182] Himmler visited the camp on 17 July 1942 and watched a gassing; a few days later, according to Höss's post-war memoir, Höss received an order from Himmler, via Adolf Eichmann's office and SS commander Paul Blobel, that "[a]ll mass graves were to be opened and the corpses burned. In addition the ashes were to be disposed of in such a way that it would be impossible at some future time to calculate the number of corpses burned."^[183]

Following the camp's liberation, the Soviet government issued a statement, on 8 May 1945, that four million people had been killed on the site, a figure based on the capacity of the crematoria and later regarded as too high.^[184]Höss told prosecutors at Nuremberg that at least 2,500,000 people had been murdered in Auschwitz by gassing and burning, and that another 500,000 had died of starvation and disease.^[185] He testified that the figure of over two million had come from Eichmann.^[186][d] In his memoirs, written in custody, he wrote that he regarded this figure as "far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive possibilities."^[188] Raul Hilberg's 1961 work, The Destruction of the European Jews, estimated that up to 1,000,000 Jews had died in Auschwitz.^[189]

In 1983, French scholar George Wellers was one of the first to use German data on deportations; he arrived at a figure of 1,471,595 deaths, including 1.35 million Jews and 86,675 Poles.^[190] A larger study in the late 1980s by Franciszek Piper, published by Yad Vashem in 1991,^[191] used timetables of train arrivals combined with deportation records to calculate that, of the 1.3 million deported to the camp, 1,082,000 died there between 1940 and 1945, a figure (rounded up to 1.1 million) that he regarded as a minimum^[192] and that came to be widely accepted.^[e]

Nationality/ethnicity
(Source: Franciszek Piper)^[194]Registered deaths
(Auschwitz)Unregistered deaths
(Auschwitz)Total
Jews | 95,000 | 865,000 | 960,000
Ethnic Poles | 64,000 | 10,000 | 74,000 (70,000–75,000)
Roma and Sinti | 19,000 | 2,000 | 21,000
Soviet prisoners of war | 12,000 | 3,000 | 15,000
Other Europeans:
Soviet citizens (Byelorussians, Russians, Ukrainians), Czechs, Yugoslavs, the French, Germans, Austrians | 10,000–15,000 | n/a | 10,000–15,000
Total deaths in Auschwitz, 1940–1945 | 200,000–205,000 | 880,000 | 1,080,000–1,085,000

Around one in six Jews killed in the Holocaust died in Auschwitz.^[195] By nation, the greatest number of Auschwitz's Jewish victims originated from Hungary, accounting for 430,000 deaths, followed by Poland (300,000), France (69,000), Netherlands (60,000), Greece (55,000), Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (46,000), other camps (34,000), Slovakia (27,000), Belgium (25,000), Germany and Austria (23,000), Yugoslavia (10,000), Italy (7,500), and Norway (690).^[6] Fewer than one percent of Soviet Jews murdered in the Holocaust were killed in Auschwitz; German forces had already been driven from Russia when the killing at Auschwitz reached its peak in 1944.^[196] Of the 400 Jehovah's Witnesses who were imprisoned at Auschwitz, 132 died there.^[197]

Resistance, escapes, liberation

See also: Resistance movement in Auschwitz, Witold Report, The Polish White Book, Responsibility for the Holocaust § Allied knowledge of the atrocities, and The Holocaust § Flow of information about the mass 🤬

 

 

Information about Auschwitz became available to the Allies as a result of reports by Captain Witold Pilecki of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), who volunteered to be imprisoned there in 1940. As "Thomasz Serfiński", he allowed himself to be arrested in Warsaw and spent 945 days in the camp, from 22 September 1940^[198] until his escape on 27 April 1943. Michael Fleming writes that Pilecki was instructed to sustain morale; organize food, clothing and resistance; prepare to take over the camp if possible; and smuggle information out to the Polish military.^[199] Pilecki called his resistance movement Związek Organizacji Wojskowej (ZOW, "Union of Military Organization").^[198]

Captain Witold Pilecki

The resistance sent out the first oral message about Auschwitz with Dr. Aleksander Wielkopolski, a Polish engineer who was released in October 1940.^[200] The following month the Polish underground in Warsaw prepared a report on the basis of that information, The camp in Auschwitz, part of which was published in London in May 1941 in a booklet, The German Occupation of Poland, by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The report said of the Jews in the camp that "scarcely any of them came out alive". According to Fleming, the booklet was "widely circulated amongst British officials". The Polish Fortnightly Review based a story on it, writing that "three crematorium furnaces were insufficient to cope with the bodies being cremated", as did The Scotsman on 8 January 1942, the only British news organization to do so.^[201]

On 24 December 1941 the resistance groups representing the various prisoner factions met in block 45 and agreed to cooperate. Fleming writes that it has not been possible to track Pilecki's early intelligence from the camp. He wrote two reports after he escaped in April 1943; the second, Raport W, detailed his life in Auschwitz I and estimated that 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, had been killed.^[202] On 1 July 1942, the Polish Fortnightly Review published a report describing Birkenau, writing that "prisoners call this supplementary camp 'Paradisal', presumably because there is only one road, leading to Paradise". Reporting that inmates were being killed "through excessive work, torture and medical means", it noted the gassing of the Soviet prisoners of war and Polish inmates in Auschwitz I in September 1941, the first gassing in the camp. It said: "It is estimated that the Oswiecim camp can accommodate fifteen thousand prisoners, but as they die on a mass scale there is always room for new arrivals."^[203]

The camp badge for non-Jewish Polish political prisoners

From 1942, members of the Bureau of Information and Propaganda of the Warsaw area Home Army published reports based on the accounts of escapees. The first was a fictional memoir, "Oświęcim. Pamiętnik więźnia" ("Auschwitz: Diary of a prisoner"), written by Halina Krahelska and published in April 1942 in Warsaw.^[204] Also published in 1942 were the books Auschwitz: obóz śmierci (Auschwitz: Camp of Death) by Natalia Zarembina,^[205] and W piekle (In 🤬) by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, the Polish writer and founder of Żegota.^[206] A Polish report about Auschwitz titled "Oswiecim, Camp of Death (Underground Report)" with a foreword by Florence Jaffray Harriman was published in English by the Polish Labor Group in New York in March 1944. Gassing of prisoners from 1942 was described in this report.^[207]

The Polish government-in-exile in London first reported the gassing of prisoners in Auschwitz on 21 July 1942,^[208] and reported the gassing of Soviet POWs and Jews on 4 September 1942.^[209] In 1943, the Kampfgruppe Auschwitz (Combat Group Auschwitz) was organized within the camp with the aim of sending out information about what was happening.^[210] Sonderkommandos buried notes in the ground, hoping they would be found by the camp's liberators.^[211] The group also smuggled out photographs; the Sonderkommando photographs, of events around the gas chambers in Auschwitz II, were smuggled out of the camp in September 1944 in a toothpaste tube.^[212]

Further information: Vrba-Wetzler report and Auschwitz Protocols

Telegram from KL Auschwitz reporting the escape of Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler

From the first escape on 6 July 1940 of Tadeusz Wiejowski,^[213] at least 802 prisoners (757 men and 45 women) tried to escape from the camp, according to Polish historian Henryk Świebocki. He writes that most escapes were attempted from work sites outside the camp.^[214][f] Of these, 144 were successful and the fate of 331 is unknown.^[215] Four Polish prisoners—Eugeniusz Bendera (a car mechanic at the camp), Kazimierz Piechowski, Stanisław Gustaw Jaster, and a priest, Józef Lempart—escaped successfully on 20 June 1942.^[216] After breaking into a warehouse, the four dressed as members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände (the SS units responsible for concentration camps), armed themselves, and stole an SS staff car, which they drove unchallenged through the main gate, greeting several officers with "Heil Hitler!" as they drove past.^[217] On 21 July 1944, Polish inmate Jerzy Bielecki dressed in an SS uniform and, using a faked pass, managed to cross the camp's gate with his Jewish girlfriend, Cyla Cybulska (known as Cyla Stawiska), pretending that she was wanted for questioning. Both survived the war. For having saved her, Bielecki was recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.^[218]

Jerzy Tabeau (prisoner no. 27273, registered as Jerzy Wesołowski) and Roman Cieliczko (no. 27089), both Polish prisoners, escaped on 19 November 1943; Tabeau made contact with the Polish underground and, between December 1943 and early 1944, wrote what became known as the Polish Major's report about the situation in the camp.^[219] On 27 April 1944, Rudolf Vrba (no. 44070) and Alfréd Wetzler (no. 29162) escaped to Slovakia, carrying detailed information to the Slovak Jewish Council about the gas chambers. The distribution of the Vrba-Wetzler report, and publication of parts of it in June 1944, helped to halt the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. On 27 May 1944, Arnost Rosin (no. 29858) and Czesław Mordowicz (no. 84216) also escaped to Slovakia; the Rosin-Mordowicz report was added to the Vrba-Wetzler and Tabeau reports to become what is known as the Auschwitz Protocols.^[220] The reports were first published in their entirety in November 1944 by the United States War Refugee Board, in a document entitled The Extermination Camps of Auschwitz (Oświęcim) and Birkenau in Upper Silesia.^[221]

Aerial view of Auschwitz II-Birkenau taken by the RAF on 23 August 1944

Slovak rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl was the first to suggest, in May 1944, that the Allies bomb the rails leading to Auschwitz.^[222] At one point British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered that such a plan be prepared, but he was told that precision bombing the camp to free the prisoners or disrupt the railway was not technically feasible.^{[223][not in citation given]} In 1978, historian David Wymanpublished an essay in Commentary entitled "Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed", arguing that the United States Army Air Forces had the capability to attack Auschwitz and should have done so; he expanded his arguments in his book The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 (1984). Wyman argued that, since the IG Farben plant at Auschwitz III had been bombed three times between August and December 1944 by the US Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, it would have been feasible for the other camps or railway lines to be bombed too. Bernard Wasserstein's Britain and the Jews of Europe(1979) and Martin Gilbert's Auschwitz and the Allies (1981) raised similar questions about British inaction.^[224] Since the 1990s, other historians have argued that Allied bombing accuracy was not sufficient for Wyman's proposed attack, and that counterfactual history is an inherently problematic endeavor.^[225]

Further information: Sonderkommando § Revolts

Ruins of Crematorium IV, Auschwitz II, blown up during the revolt

Aware that as witnesses to the killings they would eventually be killed themselves, the Sonderkommandos of Birkenau Kommando III staged an uprising on 7 October 1944, following an announcement that some of them would be selected to be "transferred to another camp"—a common 🤬 ruse for the 🤬 of prisoners.^[226][227] They attacked the SS guards with stones, axes, and makeshift hand grenades, which they also used to damage Crematorium IV and set it on fire. As the SS set up machine guns to attack the prisoners in Crematorium IV, the Sonderkommandos in Crematorium II also revolted, some of them managing to escape the compound.^[227][228] The rebellion was suppressed by nightfall.^[229]

Ultimately, three SS guards were killed—one of whom was burned alive by the prisoners in the oven of Crematorium II^[228]—and 451 Sonderkommandos were killed.^[230][231] Hundreds of prisoners escaped, but all were soon captured and executed, along with an additional group who had participated in the revolt.^[228] Crematorium IV was destroyed in the fighting. A group of prisoners in the gas chamber of Crematorium V was spared in the chaos.^[229][228]

Further information: Death marches (Holocaust)

According to Polish historian Andrzej Strzelecki, the evacuation of the prisoners by the SS in January 1945 was one of the camp's "most tragic chapters".^[232] In mid-1944, about 130,000 prisoners were in Auschwitz when the SS moved around half of them to other concentration camps.^[233] In November 1944, with the Soviet Red Army approaching through Poland, Himmler ordered gassing operations to cease. The crematorium IV building was dismantled,^[234] and the Sonderkommando was ordered to remove evidence of the killings, including the mass graves.^[235] The SS destroyed written records, and in the final week before the camp's liberation, burned or demolished many of its buildings.^[236] The plundered goods from the "Canada" barracks at Birkenau, together with building supplies, were transported to the German interior. On 20 January, the overflowing warehouses were set ablaze. Crematoria II and III at Birkenau were blown up on 20 January and crematorium V six days later, just one day ahead of the Soviet attack.^[234]

That month, Himmler ordered the evacuation of all camps, charging camp commanders with "making sure that not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy".^[237] Beginning on 17 January, 56,000–58,000 Auschwitz detainees—over 20,000 from Auschwitz I and II, over 30,000 from subcamps, and two-thirds of them Jews—were evacuated under guard, largely on foot, in severe winter conditions, heading west.^[238][239] Around 2,200 were evacuated by rail from two subcamps; fewer than 9,000 were left behind, deemed too sick to move.^[240] During the marches, camp staff shot anyone too sick or exhausted to continue, or anyone stopping to urinate or tie a shoelace. SS officers walked behind the marchers killing anyone lagging behind who had not already been shot.^[232] Peter Longerich estimates that a quarter of the detainees were thus killed.^[233] Those who managed to walk to Wodzisław Śląski and Gliwice were sent on open freight cars, without food, to concentration camps in Germany: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Dora-Mittelbau, Ravensbruck, and Sachsenhausen.^[241]

A column of inmates reached the Gross-Rosen complex. Throughout February, the terribly overcrowded main camp at Gross-Rosen was cleared, and all 44,000 inmates were moved further west. An unknown number died in this last journey.^[242] In March 1945, Himmler ordered that no more prisoners should be killed, as he hoped to use them as hostages in negotiations with the Allies.^[243] Approximately 20,000 Auschwitz prisoners made it to Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated by the British in April 1945.^[244]

Young survivors at the camp, liberated by the Red Army in January 1945

Eyeglasses of victims, 1945

When Auschwitz was liberated on 27 January 1945 by the 322nd Rifle Division of the Red Army, the soldiers found 7,500 prisoners alive and over 600 corpses.^[245][246] Auschwitz II-Birkenau was liberated at around 3:30 p.m., and the main camp (Auschwitz I) two hours later.^[247] Among items found by the Soviet soldiers were 370,000 men's suits, 837,000 women's garments, and 7.7 tonnes (8.5 short tons) of human hair.^[245][246] Primo Levi described seeing the first four Russian soldiers on horseback approach the camp at Monowitz, where he had been in the sick bay. The soldiers threw "strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive ...":^[248]

Military trucks loaded with bread arrived on 28 January, and volunteers began to offer first aid and improvised assistance the following week.^[247] The liberation of the camp received little press attention at the time. Laurence Reesattributes this to three factors: the previous discovery of similar crimes at the Majdanek concentration camp, competing news from the Allied summit at Yalta, and the Soviet Union's Marxist presentation of the camp "as the ultimate capitalist factory where the workers were dispensible", combined with its interest in minimizing attention to Jewish suffering.^[250]

In early February, the Polish Red Cross hospital opened in blocks 14, 21, and 22 at Auschwitz I, headed by Dr. Józef Bellert and staffed by 30 volunteer doctors and nurses from Kraków, along with around 90 former inmates. The critically injured patients—estimated at several thousands—were relocated from Birkenau and Monowitz to the main camp. Some orphaned children were immediately adopted by Oświęcim residents, while others were transferred to Kraków, where several were adopted by Polish families. Others were placed in an orphanage at Harbutowice.^[251] The hospital cared for more than 4,500 patients (most of them Jews) from 20 countries, suffering from starvation, alimentary dystrophy, gangrene, necrosis, internal haemorrhaging, and typhoid fever. At least 500 patients died. Assistance was provided by volunteers from Oświęcim and Brzeszcze, who donated money and food, cleaned hospital rooms, delivered water, washed patients, cooked meals, buried the dead, and transported the sick in horse-drawn carts between locations. Securing enough food for thousands of former prisoners was a constant challenge. The hospital director personally went from village to village to collect milk.^[251]

In June 1945 the Soviet authorities took over Auschwitz I and converted it to a POW camp for German prisoners. The hospital had to move beyond the camp perimeter into former administrative buildings, where it functioned until October 1945.^[251] Many of the barracks at Birkenau were taken apart by civilians, who used the materials to rebuild their own homes, which had been levelled out in the construction of Auschwitz II. The poorest residents sifted the crematoria ashes in search of nuggets from melted gold, before warning shots were fired.^[252] The POW camp for German prisoners of war was used until 1947 by the Soviet NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs).^[253] The Soviets dismantled and exported the IG Farben factories to the USSR.^[254] Meanwhile, Soviet and Polish investigators worked to document the war crimes of the SS.^[255] After the site became a museum in 1947, exhumation work lasted for more than a decade.^[184]

After the war

Further information: End of World War II in Europe, Auschwitz trial, and Frankfurt Auschwitz trials

Gallows in Auschwitz I where Rudolf Höss was executed on 16 April 1947

Only 789 Auschwitz staff, 15 percent, ever stood trial;^[256] most of the cases were pursued in Poland and, following them, the Federal Republic of Germany.^[257] Female SS officers were treated more harshly than male; of the 17 women sentenced, four received the death penalty and the others longer prison terms than the men.^[258]

Camp commandant Rudolf Höss was arrested by the British at a farm near Flensburg, Germany, on 11 March 1946, where he had been working under the pseudonym Franz Lang.^[259] He was imprisoned in Heide, then transferred to Minden for interrogation, part of the British occupation zone. From there he was taken to Nuremberg to testify for the defense in the trial of SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Höss was straightforward about his own role in the mass 🤬 and said he had followed the orders of Heinrich Himmler.^[260][g] Extradited to Poland on 25 May 1946,^[261] he wrote his memoirs in custody, first published in Polish in 1951 then in German in 1958 as Kommandant in Auschwitz.^[262] His trial before the Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw opened on 11 March 1947; he was sentenced to death on 2 April and hanged in Auschwitz I, near crematorium I, on 16 April.^[263]

On 25 November 1947, the Auschwitz trial began in Kraków, when Poland's Supreme National Tribunal brought to court 40 former Auschwitz staff. The trial's defendants included commandant Arthur Liebehenschel, women's camp leader Maria Mandel, and camp leader Hans Aumeier. The trials ended on 22 December 1947, with 23 death sentences, 7 life sentences, and 9 prison sentences ranging from three to fifteen years. Hans Münch, an SS doctor who had several former prisoners testify on his behalf, was the only person to be acquitted.^[264] Arrested by the British after the war, he testified at Nuremberg before being extradited to Poland. He was hanged in Auschwitz I on 16 April 1947.^[265]

Other former staff were hanged for war crimes in the Dachau Trials and the Belsen Trial, including camp leaders Josef Kramer, Franz Hössler, and Vinzenz Schöttl; doctor Friedrich Entress; and guards Irma Grese and Elisabeth Volkenrath.^[266] The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, held in West Germany from 20 December 1963 to 20 August 1965, convicted 17 of 22 defendants, giving them prison sentences ranging from life to three years and three months.^[267]Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, the owner and the chief executive officer of the firm Tesch & Stabenow, one of the suppliers of Zyklon B, were executed for knowingly supplying the chemical for use on humans.^[268]

Barracks at Auschwitz II

Auschwitz II gate in 1959

In the decades since its liberation, Auschwitz has become a primary symbol of the Holocaust. Historian Timothy D. Snyder attributes this to the camp's high death toll and "unusual combination of an industrial camp complex and a killing facility", which left behind far more witnesses than single-purpose killing facilities such as Chełmno or Treblinka.^[269] In 2005 the United Nations General Assembly designated 27 January, the date of the camp's liberation, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.^[270] Helmut Schmidt visited the site in November 1977, the first West German chancellor to do so, followed by his successor, Helmut Kohl, in November 1989.^[271] In a written statement on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation, Kohl described Auschwitz as the "darkest and most horrific chapter of German history".^[272]

Notable memoirists of the camp include Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.^[195] Levi's If This is a Man, first published in Italy in 1947 as Se questo è un uomo, became a classic of Holocaust literature, an "imperishable masterpiece".^[273][h] Wiesel wrote about his imprisonment at Auschwitz in Night (1960) and other works, and became a prominent spokesman against ethnic violence; in 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.^[275] Camp survivor Simone Veil was later elected President of the European Parliament, serving from 1979 to 1982.^[276] Two Auschwitz victims—Maximilian Kolbe, a priest who volunteered to die by starvation in place of a stranger, and Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism—were later named saints of the Catholic Church.^[277]

In 2017 a Körber Foundation survey found that 40 percent of 14-year-olds in Germany did not know what Auschwitz was.^[278][279] The following year a survey organized by the Claims Conference, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and others found that 41 percent of 1,350 American adults surveyed, and 66 percent of millennials, did not know what Auschwitz was, while 22 percent said they had never heard of the Holocaust.^[280] A CNN-ComRes poll in 2018 found a similar situation in Europe.^[281]

Main article: Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum

Czesława Kwoka, photographed in Auschwitz by Wilhelm Brasse

Museum exhibit, 2016

Israeli Air Force F-15 Eagles fly over Auschwitz II-Birkenau, September 2003.

End of the rail track inside Auschwitz II-Birkenau

On 2 July 1947, the Polish government passed a law establishing a state memorial to remember "the martyrdom of the Polish nation and other nations in Oswiecim".^[282] The museum established its exhibits at Auschwitz I; after the war, the barracks in Auschwitz II-Birkenau had been mostly dismantled and moved to Warsaw to be used on building sites. Dwork and van Pelt write that, in addition, Auschwitz I played a more central role in the persecution of the Polish people, in opposition to the importance of Auschwitz II to the Jews, including Polish Jews.^[283] An exhibition opened in Auschwitz I in 1955, displaying prisoner mug shots; hair, suitcases, and shoes taken from murdered prisoners; canisters of Zyklon B pellets; and other objects related to the killings.^[284] UNESCO added the camp to its list of World Heritage Sites in 1979.^[285] All the museum's directors were, until 1990, former Auschwitz prisoners. Visitors to the site have increased from 492,500 in 2001, to over one million in 2009,^[286] to two million in 2016.^[287]

There have been protracted disputes over the perceived Christianization of the site. Pope John Paul II celebrated mass over the train tracks leading to Auschwitz II-Birkenau on 7 June 1979,^[288] and called the camp "the Golgothaof our age", referring to the crucifixion of Jesus.^[289] More controversy followed when Carmelite nuns founded a convent in 1984 in a former theater outside the camp's perimeter, near block 11 of Auschwitz I,^[290] after which a local priest and some survivors erected a large cross—one that had been used during the pope's mass—behind block 11 to commemorate 152 Polish inmates shot by the Germans in 1941.^[291][292] After a long dispute, Pope John Paul II intervened, and the nuns moved the convent elsewhere in 1993.^[293] The cross remained, triggering the "War of the Crosses", as more crosses were erected to commemorate Christian victims, despite international objections. The Polish government and Catholic Church eventually agreed to remove all but the original.^[294]

On 4 September 2003, despite a protest from the museum, three Israeli Air Force F-15 Eagles performed a fly-over of Auschwitz II-Birkenau during a ceremony at the camp below. All three pilots were descendants of Holocaust survivors, including the man who led the flight, Major-General Amir Eshel.^[295] On 27 January 2015, some 300 Auschwitz survivors gathered with world leaders under a giant tent at the entrance to Auschwitz II to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the camp's liberation.^[296][i]

Museum curators consider visitors who pick up items from the ground to be thieves, and local police will charge them as such. The maximum penalty is a prison sentence of ten years.^[298] On 22 June 2015, two British youths from the Perse School were convicted of theft after picking up buttons and shards of decorative glass they found on the ground near the area where camp victims' confiscated personal effects were stored. The boys, both 17 years old, received probation and were fined £170, but later appealed the sentence. Curators said that similar incidents happen once or twice a year.^[299][298] The 16-ft Arbeit Macht Frei sign over the gate of the main camp was stolen in December 2009 by a Swedish former neo-🤬 and two Polish men. The sign was later recovered.^[300]