dKOS, should you care to recommend.


Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
Czeslaw Milosz

I believe there are just a couple of points to add and expand to this.

Auschwitz town was in part of pre-war Poland directly annexed to the Reich and the pre-war population of the town (ethnic Poles and Jews and others) was mostly deported  to the rump occupation zone known as the GG, the Government-General (the very name Poland was eradicated by the Nazis). The area was largely resettled by German-speakers moved to the Rich from eastern Europe who formed an armed militia in the countryside. The frontier between the Reich and the GG was the tightest-policed in Nazi Europe. This made AK operations in the vicinity especially difficult.

Because it was a very important rail junction with excellent connections to most of Europe and also out of range of bombers based in Britain (and indeed later the USSR) the Nazis relocated a large number of industries to the locality. These each had associated forced labour camps so there were up to 50 `camps' in the Auschwitz complex depending on where you draw the line on definition of a camp.

Auschwitz did not come into range of Allied bomber aircraft even in theory until December 1943 when Foggia airfield in central Italy was captured.

The first camp to be built, 1n 1939, and an out-and-out concentration Camp, became known as Auschwitz-1. This is the camp with the famous `Arbeit macht Frei' sign over the gates. (Other camps in other locations had the same slogan so you cannot assume that a drawing with that camp entry sign is Auschwitz). Work parties were indeed I believe sent out from this camp to other centres.

The second camp to be built I believe was Auschwitz-2 also known as Buna. This was a huge chemical factory with associated labour barracks. It was here that Primo Levi served his time in `Auschwitz'.

The camp site with the four gas chambers and associated crematoria was some miles west of these two and known as Auschwitz Birkenau. This is the camp with the horrifying towers and the railway lines running in, and the industrial-scale kiiling of people within an hour of arrival. To the best of my knowledge it did not have a slogan over the gates. Early experiments in gassing in other Auschwitz camps were I believe discontinued and inmates of these other camp routinely selected for death were taken to Birkenau.

Auschwitz-1 was a centre for killings of the Polish social elite right from the start of the occupation. Polish Jews were killed here and so were many other Polish peoples. I believe the resistance group was based in Auschwitz-1 and I believe  the plan for a revolt also centred on this.

Auschwitz Birkenau was established and became fully operational as a major killing centre sometime in 1942. So Piecki's first ZOW reports could not have detailed conditions in the major killing centre as they were written before it was fully operational.

Most of the three million plus Jews of Poland who were murdered did not in fact die here, but in a number of other camps such as Madjanek and Sobribor which were specialist murder sites with no `forced labour' components, and which were located in the `Governorship-General'. . We know very little about these camps basically because there were virtually no survivors. The murder of the Jews of Poland by the Nazi occupiers was called `Operation Rheinhard' and was essentially completed by late 1943 when the specialist camps were closed down leaving Auschwitz Birkenau as the main specialist murder centre for all of Nazi held Europe, including most of the remaining Jews in Poland..

I think it is important to bear this bit of history and geography in mind as many people think `Auschwitz' was one camp on one site and this leads to bitter and poisonous conflicts over commemoration, especially over memorials located at Auschwitz-1 to peoples other than Jews.  It is Auschwitz Birkenau with conditions even more horrifying than the other camps in the locality, which should be the focus for commemorating the special horror of the Jewish experience.  

Current students of the camps do now  think  that Pliecki's estimates for the numbers of deaths in Auschwitz were much higher than available evidence now shows. Probably about a million Jewish people died in Auschwitz , for example, (and that is about one-third of the number killed in Operation Rheinhardt). Perhaps a million others including Soviet prisoners of war also died in this complex of camps. It is important to take this on board as holocaust deniers seize on the early many-multi-million Auschwitz estimates to pour scorn on the `six million Jews died' total.  We need to be scrupulous in our handling of data.

Just for the record my father was one of the liberators of Belsen camp in Western Germany. A horrific place in its own right. As an engineer officer he had the job of burying the dead and estimating the totals and gave evidence at the war crimes tribunals. This subject haunts me.