Auschwitz-Birkenau was the most deadly Nazi concentration camp. It was a killing center where the largest number of European Jews were killed during the Holocause. The first deaths by gas chamber occurred on September 1941 where 850 prisoners were killed. From that day one, mass murders became a daily routine with competitions being done daily, trying to kill more people than had died the previous day. By 1942, mass killings were routine, mostly using Zyklon-B gas. One estimate is that over three million people were killed at this camp through gassings, starvation, disease, shootings, and burnings.
Nine out of ten of these deaths were Jews. The rest were Gypsies, Soviet POWs, and other POWs from other nationalities. Between May 14 and July 8 in 1944: an estimated 437,402 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz, the largest single mass deportation during the Holocaust.
Aushwitz was the largest Nazi Germany concentration camp to be built, with the largest extermination facilities. It was located near the Polish town Oshwiecim in Glacia. Private diaries unearthed from the Soviet archives revealed that Adolf Hitler himself ordered the mass murders of Jews at this camp, and personally monitered their “progress”.
Often, children and the elderly or “fragile looking” were often killed upon arrival. Any children killed while in the camps were killed on site, and mothers would often stuff their children in small places trying to hide them, but the attempt would be futile. The children would always be found, and would face a slow death along with the mother and anyone else who helped hide the child. During the end of the war when Germany was going broke, Auschwitz enabled the cost-accountant considerations which would save and cut expenses on gas. This “law” allowed living children to be placed directly into ovens or thrown into open burning pits.
Lucie Adelsberger, a survivor from Auschwitz watched many children die and describes their lives as:
“Like the adults, the kids were only a mere bad of bones, without muscles or fat, and the thin skin like pergament scrubbed through and through beyond the hard bones of the skeleton and ignited itself to ulcerated wounds. Abscesses covered the underfed body from the top to the bottom and thus deprived it from the last rest of energy. The mouth was deeply gnawed by noma-abscesses, hollowed out the jaw and perforate the cheecks like cancer. Many decaying bodies were full of water because of the burning hunger, they swelled to shapeless bulks which could not move anymore. Diarrhea, lasting for weeks, dissolved their irresistant bodies until nothing remained…”
Doctors at the camp were evil and no help to the suffering prisoners. Camp doctors, like the infamous Josef Mengele, would tortue and expirement and inflict incredible pain on Jewish, Gypsie, and mentally disabled children. These “patients” would be put into pressure chambers until their bodies exploded, tested with drugs that would decay them from the inside out, castrated without any anesthetic, frozen to death, and many other cruel expirements.
One incident reports a mother who did not want to be separated from her thirteen-year-old daughter, and fought the SS mean who was forcing the two apart. “Mengele drew his gun and shot both the women and the child. As a blanket punishment, he sent to the gas chamber all people from the transport who had previously been selected for work, with the comment: Away with this shit!”
Mengele would step out and decide who lived and who died. Thousands would be before him, just getting off of the train ride where they had been starved and forced into cramped spaces. If waved to the left, those people were sentenced to immediate death. If waved to the right, those people would be forced to work, starved, and beated, but they would be allowed to live for as long as they could hold on. Mengele casually sent babies, small children, young girls, young boys, mothers, fathers, and grandparents to their death with a simple flick of his cane.
However, not all children would be sent to death right away, Mengele kept all the twins, especially identicle twins, for expirementation. At Auschwitz Josef Mengele did a hundreds of twin studies, where he would seperate the twins, one would be subjected to the painful tests which would usually result in his/her death, and the other would just be observed, to see if they felt any of their twins pain or experianced any changes. The twin who was unfortunate to get pick for Mengele’s expirimintation would have limbs cut off withouth any anesthetic, hand dipped in water and left out in the snow until his/her hand fell off, they would have dye injected into their eye to change its color, they would have their vocal cords cut, and more while the other twin would be observed to see if their showed any of these changes. After one twin died, usually the other would be killed and they would both be dissected to compare their anatomy. Mengele drew extensive sketches for each twin comparing them, and was fanatical about twins. Only a few twins would survive these expirimentations.
The few surviving children talk about their experiance at Aushwitz: “…they were visited by a smiling Ungle Mengele who brought them candy and clothes. Then he had them delivered to his miedical laboratory either in trucks painted with the Red Cross emblem or in his own personal car to undergo his experiments.”
One twin, who recalls the death of his brother says:
” Dr. Mengele had always been more interested in Tibi. I am not sure why – perhaps because he was the older twin. Mengele made several operations on Tibi. One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore. Then they took out his sexual organs. After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore. I cannot tell you how I felt. It is impossible to put into words how I felt. They had taken away my father, my mother, my two older brothers – and now, my twin…”
In December 1942, a new doctor entered Auschwitz, Professor Carl Clauberg, and he began his own experiments. He was facinaed by pregnant women and would inject chemicals into the womb. Thousands of women were subjected to this torturous treatment. These injections caused them to become sterile, producing horrible pain, inflaming the ovaries, bursting spasms in the stomach, and uncontrolably bleeding. The ovaries would be seriously damaged, and would later be removed and sent to Berlin for studies.
Clauberg’s colleague, Dr. Herta Oberhauser, killed children with oil and evipan injections, would remove their limbs, and would rub ground up glass and sawdust in wounds, all seemingly without scientific cause, and just for pure torture.
Aushwitz killed over a million people by the end of WW2, and was one of the worst camps to be sent to during the war. The pure evilness of that went into these killings was shocking, and children were often subjected to the worse of these tortures because they could not defend themselves.
Israel scholar Yehuda Bauer gives these statistics, considered some of the most reliable: (Deaths at Auschwitz)
polish-Soviet area |
approx. 4,565,000 |
Germany |
125,000 |
Austria |
65,000 |
Czechoslovakia |
277,000 |
Hungary |
402,000 |
France |
83,000 |
Belgium/Luxembourg |
24,700 |
Netherlands |
106,000 |
Italy |
7,500 |
Norway |
760 |
Romania excluding Bessarabia, N. Bukovina and northern Transylvania |
271,000 – 287,000 |
Yugoslavia |
60,000 – 67,000 |
Greece |
60,000 – 67,000 |
Totals number of Jewish victims |
5,700,000 – 5,860,000 |
Source: Yehuda Bauer. A History of the Holocaust. New York, Frankin Watts Revised edition 2001. |
US Holocaust Memorial Museum: “approximately six million.”
http://www.auschwitz.dk/auschwitz.htm