An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 Poles perished at the camp, along with 19,000 to 20,000 Romas and smaller numbers of Soviet prisoners of war and other individuals.Written in Auschwitz itself, this one-of-a-kind, minute-by-minute true account is a crucial historical testament to a Holocaust survivor's fight for his life at the largest extermination camp in Nazi Germany, translated for the first time ever into English. According to some estimates, between 1.1 million to 1.5 million people, the vast majority of them Jews, died at Auschwitz during its years of operation. The liberators also discovered mounds of corpses, hundreds of thousands of pieces of clothing and pairs of shoes and seven tons of human hair that had been shaved from detainees before their liquidation. When the Soviet army entered Auschwitz on January 27, they found approximately 7,600 sick or emaciated detainees who had been left behind barbed wire. Countless prisoners died during this process those who made it to the sites were sent on trains to concentration camps in Germany. Before the end of the month, in what came to be known as the Auschwitz death marches, an estimated 60,000 detainees, accompanied by Nazi guards, departed the camp and were forced to march to the Polish towns of Gliwice or Wodzislaw, some 30 miles away. In January 1945, as the Soviet army entered Krakow, the Germans ordered that Auschwitz be abandoned. Buildings were torn down, blown up or set on fire, and records were destroyed. READ MORE: Horrors of Auschwitz: The Numbers Behind WWII's Deadliest Concentration Camp Liberation of Auschwitz: 1945Īs 1944 came to a close and the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allied forces seemed certain, the Auschwitz commandants began destroying evidence of the horror that had taken place there. Instead, he became convinced that his “Jewish problem” would be solved only with the elimination of every Jew in his domain, along with artists, educators, Romas, communists, homosexuals, the mentally and physically handicapped and others deemed unfit for survival in Nazi Germany. ![]() Auschwitz: Genesis of Death CampsĪfter the start of World War II, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, implemented a policy that came to be known as the “Final Solution.” Hitler was determined not just to isolate Jews in Germany and countries annexed by the Nazis, subjecting them to dehumanizing regulations and random acts of violence. When the Soviets entered Auschwitz, they found thousands of emaciated detainees and piles of corpses left behind. In January 1945, with the Soviet army approaching, Nazi officials ordered the camp abandoned and sent an estimated 60,000 prisoners on a forced march to other locations. During World War II (1939-45), more than 1 million people, by some accounts, lost their lives at Auschwitz. Some prisoners were also subjected to barbaric medical experiments led by Josef Mengele (1911-79). ![]() However, it evolved into a network of camps where Jewish people and other perceived enemies of the Nazi state were exterminated, often in gas chambers, or used as slave labor. Located in southern Poland, Auschwitz initially served as a detention center for political prisoners.
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