Deathgate

DEATHGATE 14 Located near the Southern Polish town of O ś wi ę cim, Auschwitz was, by land mass and number of detainees, the largest and most deadly network of concentration/ extermination camps established by the Nazi’s. First opened in the Spring of 1940, this network consisted of three major sites: Auschwitz I, which was the original concentration camp of the area, later expanded to include the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) extermination camp, which was the most concentrated site for mass killing by the Nazi’s. The third camp, Auschwitz III – Monowitz, was built after Auschwitz II for the sole purpose of prisoner labour in the latter years of WWII. Alongside these three main camps, the Auschwitz network included 45 sub or satellite camps built for specific purposes involving medical experimentation, forced labour, general detention and murder. Detainees of the Auschwitz camps were people either forcibly removed from their homes, towns and cities or were people captured in hideouts or during combat as the Nazi’s expanded their controlled territory. Detainees were primarily forced into cattle-cars and transported to the camps via railway line. As a complex designed and build for genocide, many methods of killing and abuse resulting in death were carried out in the Auschwitz sites. Of these methods, the gas chambers of Auschwitz claimed the majority of lives. First utilised in Auschwitz, Zyklon-B, a cyanide-based pesticide, became the Nazi’s preferred tool for extermination. All at once, thousands of men, women and children were stripped of their clothing and directed into large, sealed concrete rooms. Once locked inside, pellets of Zyklon-B were dropped through small openings in the ceiling. The pesticide would react to the moisture and heat in the room, consequently emitting an asphyxiant gas that, within a matter of minutes, would kill everyone inside. As the cattle-cars of prisoners arrived on site, the majority of these people would be sent directly to the gas chambers. Of the six million killed in the Holocaust, Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was responsible for 1.1 million of those deaths. Approximately 200,000 people survived this network of camps. As permanent evidence to Nazi crimes, the Auschwitz I and II camps, as they were discovered when liberated by the Allied forces on January 27th, 1945, have been preserved as a museum/memorial site and are open to the public.