Auschwitz II-Birkenau

Birkenau was the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. During its three years of operation, it had a range of functions. When construction began in October 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened as a branch of Auschwitz in March 1942, and served at the same time as a center for the extermination of the Jews. In its final phase, from 1944, it also became a place where prisoners were concentrated before being transferred to labor in German industry in the depths of the Third Reich.

The majority—probably about 90%—of the victims of Auschwitz Concentration Camp died in Birkenau. This means approximately a million people. The majority, more than nine out of every ten, were Jews. A large proportion of the more than 70 thousand Poles who died or were killed in the Auschwitz complex perished in Birkenau. So did approximately 20 thousand Gypsies, in addition to Soviet POWs and prisoners of other nationalities.

Birkenau was the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. During its three years of operation, it had a range of functions. When construction began in October 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened as a branch of Auschwitz in March 1942, and served at the same time as a center for the extermination of the Jews. In its final phase, from 1944, it also became a place where prisoners were concentrated before being transferred to labor in German industry in the depths of the Third Reich.

Zdjęcie lotnicze Birkenau - lato 1944 r.The initial mention of the idea of founding a camp in Brzezinka, a village near Auschwitz concentration camp, is connected with Heinrich Himmler’s first inspection of Auschwitz on March 1, 1941. The former Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss, noted in his autobiography that Himmler issued a range of decrees during this visit about expanding the existing camp and employing the prisoners. One of the newly planned objects that Himmler listed on this occasion was a “camp for 100 thousand POWs.”

The first plans for the camp envisioned an initial capacity of 100 to 125 thousand prisoners. This concept underwent changes several times in 1942. The revised plans called for a doubling of capacity, to 200 thousand. The camp would be divided into four parts, often referred to as construction segments (Bauabschnitte), designated by roman numerals. The first segment was planned for 20 thousand prisoners, and the other three for 60 thousand each. The whole camp would cover an area of 175 acres.

The decision was made in 1941 to locate mass extermination facilities adjacent to the camp that was under construction in Birkenau—gas chambers for the mass killing of Jews brought to Birkenau as part of the Third Reich leadership’s plans for the complete extermination of the Jews of Europe. These gas chambers went into operation the following year.

Original plans called for the POWs who would be imprisoned there to build the camp themselves. Ten thousand Soviet POWs were brought from the Neuhammer am Quais (now Świętoszów) POW camp, and probably also from Lamsdorf (now Łambinowice) for this purpose in October 1941. At first, they were housed in separate, fenced-off blocks in the Auschwitz main camp. In that same month, they began being marched every day to the construction site in the village of Brzezinka.

All the Poles who lived in the village had been expelled in April 1941, and their homes demolished. Brzezinka lay within the 40 sq. km. of the so-called camp interest zone (Interessengebiet), administered by the camp. The residents of other villages in the zone shared the same fate, as had the people living in the Oświęcim suburb of Zasole at the time of the founding of the Auschwitz camp.

Więźniowie przy kopaniu rowu odwadniającegoBI, the first of the four planned Birkenau segments, was built in the village of Brzezinka over the winter of 1941/1942 and during the rest of 1942, and divided into two sectors, BIa and BIb. Including buildings added later, this segment contained 62 residential barracks in the final phase of its existence (30 brick and 32 wooden), along with 10 barracks containing washrooms and toilets, 2 kitchens, 2 bathhouses, and 2 storage barracks. Work on the second construction segment (BII) began in 1942 and was finished near the end of 1943. This segment was divided into 7 sectors of wooden barracks. Sector BIIa contained 16 residential barracks, 3 barracks containing washrooms and toilets, and a kitchen barracks. Sectors BII b, c, d, and e each contained 32 residential barracks, 6 barracks containing washrooms and toilets, and 2 kitchens. In sector BIIf there were 17 residential barracks and 1 bathhouse barracks. Thirty barracks used mainly as warehouses were built in sector BIIg, along with 1 brick bathhouse (sauna). That same year, work began on the third construction segment (BIII). The approach of the front lines in 1944 brought construction to a halt. Work on the fourth construction segment never got underway.

The construction segments were divided into sectors (“camps”) separated by electrified barbed-wire fences. Guard towers surrounded the entire camp. A three-track railroad spur and unloading ramp went into operation in May 1944.

The Germans managed to build a total of approximately 300 housing, administrative, and infrastructure barracks and buildings, 13 km. of drainage ditches, 16 km. of barbed-wire fencing, and more than 10 km. of roads within an area of about 140 hectares at Birkenau.

Two provisional gas chambers, known as bunkers 1 and 2, went into operation next to the Birkenau construction site in 1942, when Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss was entrusted with carrying out part of the campaign to exterminate the Jews. They were adapted farmhouses that previously belonged to expelled Poles. The first began operating in early 1942, probably in March, and the second in mid-year.

The construction of a complex of four gigantic gas chambers and crematoria began in mid-1942. The Germans estimated that 1.6 million people a year could be killed and burned there.

From March 1, 1942 to November 22, 1943, Birkenau was under the command of the commandant of the whole Auschwitz complex, Rudolf Höss. When Himmler ordered that Auschwitz be reorganized and divided into three separate camps, Birkenau was renamed Auschwitz II Concentration Camp, with Fritz Hartjenstein (replaced by Josef Kramer on May 8, 1944) as its commandant. This state of things continued until November 25, 1944, when Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II were again merged as a single entity under the name Konzentrationslager Auchwitz, headed by the Auschwitz I commandant, Richard Baer.

Several separate organizational units, also referred to as “camps,” along with the mass extermination facilities, came into being in Birkenau between 1942 and 1945. Each of these internal divisions of Birkenau was run by a camp director (Lagerführer), with a non-commissioned report officer (Rapportführer) and block  supervisors (Blockführer) reporting to him.

The commandant of Auschwitz II Concentration Camp was also in charge of the sub-camps and farms within the camp interest zone (Interessengebiet).

The first of the camps to be founded inside Birkenau, in March 1942, was the men’s camp for prisoners of various nationalities. Until July 1943, it was located in sector BIb.

The women’s camp opened in August 1942. Located in sector BIa, it expanded to take in BIb in July 1943. Over 10 thousand women of various ethnic origins (the majority of them Jews, but also including Poles, Germans, and others) were transferred to Birkenau from Auschwitz I, where they had been held temporarily since March 26, 1942.

 Seven new administrative units were opened in segment BII in 1943.

The first, in February 1943, was the Gypsy Family Camp (sector BIIe). Throughout its existence, a total of 23 thousand Gypsies from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the lands annexed to the Third Reich were sent there. The camp was liquidated on August 2, 1944, when the approximately 3 thousand Gypsies still there were killed in the gas chambers.

A men’s camp (sector BIId) was created in July 1943; the men from sector BIb were moved there.

That same month, a hospital camp for men of various nationalities opened in sector BIIf.

A quarantine camp for men prisoners of various nationalities opened in sector BIIa in August.
A family camp for Jews from Theresienstadt (sector BIIb) opened on September 8. About 18 thousand Jews from the ghetto in Terezin were placed there in 1943 and 1944. This was the second camp, after the Gypsy camp, where men stayed together with women and children.

Both these family camps were probably set up for propaganda purposes. In what was known as the Briefaktion (letter campaign), prisoners in the BIIb family camp were required to write censored correspondence with predetermined contents, in an effort to mislead public opinion and potential victims as to the purpose of the Third Reich’s deportation of Jews.

A warehouse complex known as “Kanada II,” where baggage confiscated from the mass transports of Jews was stored and sorted, opened in December in the last sector of this segment (BIIg).

Three transit camps opened in 1944. Two of them (BIIc and BIII) were for Jewish women, while the one for Jewish men (BIIe) used the vacant barracks where the Gypsy camp had been.

The mass extermination facilities—the gas chambers used to kill people and the crematoria used to burn the corpses—constituted a separate complex under the overall direction of the camp commandant, and supervised directly by the Politische Abteilung. After the division of the camp into three parts, the garrison commander used order no. 53/43 to entrust supervision of the extermination operation and installations to the commandant of Auschwitz II Concentration Camp as head of the Auschwitz Command Post (for Special Assignments) [Befehlstelle Auschwitz (für besondere Aufsätze)].

Both during the time when the complex of camps in Birkenau was subject to orders from the commandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp and later when it became an autonomous concentration camp, it was closely connected with Auschwitz I (the main camp) and Auschwitz III (the sub-camps). An order from the commander of the Auschwitz garrison on November 22, 1943 required them to cooperate closely. The Auschwitz I commandant was the garrison commander. Since he was designated as senior in service terms (dienstältester) in relation to the other commandants, he had the authority to resolve disputes among them. The garrison administrative offices, the central employment bureau, the political department, and the office of the garrison physician, who was the head of the medical service in all the camps, continued to be located in the Auschwitz I camp.

When construction began, Birkenau was referred to as a POW camp (Kriegsgefangenenlager), and this terminology continued in use in construction records (correspondence, plans, and reports) until 1944. The location of a camp for Soviet POWs in the vicinity of Auschwitz, and the facts that it was under SS control and that work began on the installation of crematoria with an annual capacity of 525 thousand corpses, indicate beyond any doubt that the intended purpose of the camp was the gradual extermination of the POWs by depriving them of the essential conditions for remaining alive—and this, after all, had been the common practice with regard to POWs since the launching of German aggression against the Soviet Union. This is also confirmed by the fact that over 9 thousand of the 10 thousand POWs imprisoned temporarily in Auschwitz in October 1941 died within 5 months, as a result of the conditions there. All of this was in line with the German exterminationist policy towards Soviet POWs.

In reality, the camp never served its original function. While construction was still underway, in February 1942 at the latest, the Germans decided to change the nature of the camp and make it an integral part of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

This decision would seem to have been made for two reasons. In the first place, the collapse of the German drive on Moscow and the entry into the war of the USA, with its vast economic and military potential, radically altered the German strategic situation in political, economic, and military terms. This situation compelled the leaders of the Third Reich to begin treating the POWs as a labor resource, and to exploit them more widely in German industry. The Birkenau camp did not meet these conditions, since there were no industrial facilities in the Oświęcim area where the POWs could be employed.

Because of this change in policy towards Soviet POWs, the German leadership no longer directed incoming transports from the front to Birkenau, distributing them instead to POW camps and their labor details, such as the POW camp in Cieszyn, which supplied POWs to plants in Upper Silesia.

In the second place, the decision to send mass transports of Jews to the concentration camps in order to exploit them in the German war economy, and the designation of Auschwitz as one of the centers for their extermination as well as a distribution point for Jewish labor resources, meant that quarters had to be prepared in which they could be held temporarily. The Birkenau camp was under construction, and, since it was no longer to be used as a POW camp, this must have seemed like the best solution to the problem.

When the Soviet POWs who remained alive were transferred to Brzezinka in March 1942, the new camp was already a part of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Instead of POWs, Jews selected for labor were sent there (of the approximately 1.1 million Jews deported to Auschwitz, more than 200 thousand were selected for labor). Some of the 140 thousand Poles registered in Auschwitz, about 23 thousand Gypsies, and men and women from other ethnic groups were also sent there.

The division of Auschwitz into three camps was caused, on the one hand, by the difficulty of administering such an extensive and constantly expanding camp complex; on the other hand, this division formalized the increasingly divergent functions of the entities that made up the Auschwitz complex.

The Auschwitz camp (after the division: Auschwitz I) comprised the central administrative offices as mentioned above, and the main SS warehouses, workshops, and companies: Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke G.m.b.H-DAW, Deutsche Erd-und Steinwerke G.m.b.H – DEST, and Deutsche Lebensmittel GmbH. Working in these units was the principal labor assignment for the prisoners in this camp. On August 22, 1944, there were 15,971 prisoners in this camp (the majority Jewish, although there were 3,934 Poles among them).

The main task of the Auschwitz III camp, made up of sub-camps located at industrial plants, was to rent the labor of prisoners to business concerns.

Auschwitz II, in turn, was above all a center for the extermination of Jews brought there to be killed.

Sick prisoners and those selected for death from the entire complex of Auschwitz camps, and on a vestigial scale from other camps as well, were also assembled and systematically killed in Auschwitz II.

After the implementation of selection of the Jews arriving in mass transports (selection initially took place before deportation, and only later on the unloading ramp in Birkenau), Auschwitz II was intended to become the central labor reservoir and distribution point for the entire concentration camp system, which, in Himmler’s plans, would become involved on a broad scale in the functioning of the German economy. After the rejection of the POW-camp concept, this could serve as justification for building the Birkenau camp on such a gigantic scale. However, Birkenau supplied Germany with prisoner labor on only a very limited scale in 1942-1943. In the first place, the camp’s own labor requirements were great. At this time, as well, concentration camps in Germany proper were placed off limits to Jewish prisoners, who made up an increasing proportion of the Birkenau population; indeed, the transfer of 1,600 prisoners from camps in Germany to Birkenau in October 1942 was the occasion for announcing that German camps were Judenfrei. Such organizational considerations as quarantines, security, and the health situation at Birkenau all served as additional limiting factors.

During this period, in principle, the Germans transferred only Poles to camps in the Reich, in preference to employing them in Silesia, where the chance that they would make contact with local Polish civilians was a political consideration. There were few opportunities for rational employment within Birkenau itself. The camp assigned the greater part of its prisoners to labor in its own sub-camps or in jobs connected with mass extermination: on the unloading ramp or in the gas chambers and crematoria; sorting the baggage plundered from victims; in camp farms; making fuses in the Union armaments factory; or salvaging aircraft wrecks in the Zerlegebetriebe. Half the prisoners were incapable of any sort of work. Only in the spring of 1944 did Germany find itself in such a critical military and economic situation—having lost Byelorussia and the Ukraine, enormous reservoirs of labor—that the leadership abandoned their previous scruples and began transferring prisoners—mostly Jews, but also Poles, Russians, and others—to camps in Germany proper, so that they could be employed in armaments factories.

Once the great transfer of prisoners to camps in Germany began, Birkenau became in effect a transit camp where “human material” went through preliminary selection. People fit for labor and possessing the appropriate qualifications were sent to work in other camps (or put to work in Birkenau itself), while the others, representing superfluous deadweight, were put to death in the gas chambers and burned, or killed through lethal injections, sickness, execution, prolonged roll call, beating by the SS and prisoner functionaries, or hard labor. On August 22, 1944, there were about 90 thousand men and women imprisoned in Birkenau. Sixty thousand of them were registered—designated by camp numbers—and 30 thousand were unregistered. Seventy-four percent of the prisoners in Birkenau at the time were Jews.

 Birkenau, like the whole Auschwitz complex, combined two functions in a single place and time: as a concentration camp, that is, a place where various categories of prisoners were imprisoned and slowly exterminated as a result of deliberately created conditions that made long-term survival impossible; and as a direct extermination center, where Jews, above all, were exterminated, although other categories of victims were also murdered on a smaller scale. Prisoners registered in the concentration camp died mainly of starvation; the direct extermination center used the gas chambers above all for this purpose.

Aside from the gas chambers and crematoria, the basic facilities of the extermination center included the unloading ramp and the warehouses used for storing, sorting, and shipping the victims’ plundered property. The basic facilities in the concentration camp were living quarters for the prisoners and the SS supervisors, kitchens, storage areas, workshops, offices, and transportation and communication equipment.

These two constituent institutions that made up the Auschwitz camp complex, which went under the name Konzentrationslager Auschwitz, did not exist in parallel; rather, they functioned in mutual symbiosis. Along with the Security Police posts scattered across the Third Reich and the occupied countries, the extermination center supplied the concentration camp with an uninterrupted flow of human labor; from the concentration camp, it took in corpses and people suffering from terminal exhaustion in order to put them to death and burn them. The concentration camp supplied the direct extermination center with the SS and prisoner crews who worked the unloading ramps, the gas chambers, the crematoria, and the open-air pyres; it also provided the transport that brought the victims and their property to the intended destination, and the clerical services required by the direct extermination center.

Birkenau and the other components of the Auschwitz complex combined in a single place and time the functions of concentration camps like Mauthausen or Dachau with those of direct extermination centers like Treblinka or Bełżec. It represented a new category of Nazi camp, intended to carry out the economic and exterminationist tasks of the Nazi state simultaneously and in the most efficient manner possible.