All over the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Holocaust. It was established by Germans in 1940, in the suburbs of Oswiecim, a Polish city that was annexed to the Third Reich by the Nazis. Its name was changed to Auschwitz, which also became the name of Konzentrationslager Auschwitz.

The direct reason for the establishment of the camp was the fact that mass arrests of Poles were increasing beyond the capacity of existing “local” prisons. Initially, Auschwitz was to be one more concentration camp of the type that the Nazis had been setting up since the early 1930s. It functioned in this role throughout its existence, even when, beginning in 1942, it also became the largest of the death camps.

Division of the camp

The first and oldest was the so-called “main camp,” later also known as “Auschwitz I” (the number of prisoners fluctuated around 15,000, sometimes rising above 20,000), which was established on the grounds and in the buildings of prewar Polish barracks;

The second part was the Birkenau camp (which held over 90,000 prisoners in 1944), also known as “Auschwitz II” This was the largest part of the Auschwitz complex. The Nazis began building it in 1941 on the site of the village of Brzezinka, three kilometers from Oswiecim. The Polish civilian population was evicted and their houses confiscated and demolished. The greater part of the apparatus of mass extermination was built in Birkenau and the majority of the victims were murdered here;

More than 40 sub-camps, exploiting the prisoners as slave laborers, were founded, mainly at various sorts of German industrial plants and farms, between 1942 and 1944. The largest of them was called Buna (Monowitz, with ten thousand prisoners) and was opened by the camp administration in 1942 on the grounds of the Buna-Werke synthetic rubber and fuel plant six kilometers from the Auschwitz camp. On November 1943, the Buna sub-camp became the seat of the commandant of the third part of the camp, Auschwitz III, to which some other Auschwitz sub-camps were subordinated.

Interessengebiet

The Germans isolated all the camps and sub-camps from the outside world and surrounded them with barbed wire fencing. All contact with the outside world was forbidden. However, the area administered by the commandant and patrolled by the SS camp garrison went beyond the grounds enclosed by barbed wire. It included an additional area of approximately 40 square kilometers (the so-called “Interessengebiet” – the interest zone), which lay around the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau camps.

The local population, the Poles and Jews living near the newly-founded camp, were evicted in 1940-1941. Approximately one thousand of their homes were demolished. Other buildings were assigned to officers and non-commissioned officers from the camp SS garrison, who sometimes came here with their whole families. The pre-war industrial facilities in the zone, taken over by Germans, were expanded in some cases and, in others, demolished to make way for new plants associated with the military requirements of the Third Reich. The camp administration used the zone around the camp for auxiliary camp technical support, workshops, storage, offices, and barracks for the SS.

Auschwitz I

The Building and Expansion of Auschwitz Concentration Camp

The basis for Auschwitz consisted of 22 prewar brick barracks buildings. Over time, the camp expanded steadily in both organizational and spatial terms. At its peak in the summer of 1944, Auschwitz covered about 40 sq. km. in the core area, and more than 40 branch camps dispersed within a radius of several hundred kilometers. At this time, there were about 135 thousand people (105 thousand registered prisoners and about 30 thousand unregistered) in the Auschwitz complex, which accounted for 25% of all the people in the entire concentration camp system.

Considering the functions of the camp, it is plain that it underwent significant evolution in the almost 5 years of its existence: from the concept of a quarantine camp, which was the starting point for the decision to found the camp in 1940 (the concept was never implemented), through concentration camp (a place for the annihilation of all prisoners by depriving them of the basic prerequisites for life), to a new type of camp combining a Dachau- or Gross-Rosen-type concentration camp with a center for immediate killing on the model of Treblinka or Bełżec.

In view of the basic functions of Auschwitz, its history may be divided into two basic periods:

• from its founding in 1940 to the first months of 1942, when it functioned exclusively as a concentration camp—that is, predominantly a place of slow killing as the result of deliberately created, inhuman conditions, above all starvation;
• from the first months of 1942 to October 1944, when the camp continued to function as a concentration camp for prisoners of various ethnic backgrounds (from mid-1942 mainly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies), while simultaneously functioning as the largest center for the immediate, mass killing of Jews brought here within the framework of the campaign for the destruction of the entire Jewish population of Europe.

In the last two months of its existence, after the closing of the gas chambers in October 1944 in connection with the critical military situation of the Third Reich and the expected Soviet offensive, the camp entered the phase of final liquidation, which ended with the evacuation of the prisoners.

The division of the Auschwitz camp

The difficulties in running such a large camp complex led to its formal division on November 22, 1943 into three camps with considerable autonomy. There was a formally sanctioned functional division that was clear in most, but not all, aspects:

Auschwitz I, the main camp in Oświęcim. In August 1944, it held about 16 thousand prisoners (roughly 10 thousand Jews, 4 thousand Poles, and 3 thousand prisoners from other ethnic groups). This was the location of the SS garrison administration (SS Standortverwaltung), the commander of the local garrison, and the commandant of Auschwitz I, who enjoyed the formal prerogative of “senior” service status in relation to the other two commandants (“Der Lagerkommandant des KL Auschwitz I ist dienstältester Lagerkommandant und SS-Standortältester des SS-Standortes Auschwitz”). Auschwitz I was also the seat of the main offices of the political department and the prisoner labor department. Here, too, were the main supply stores, workshops, and SS companies (DAW, DEST, and Deutsche Lebensmittel GmbH). Work in these administrative and economic units and companies was the main labor assignment for the prisoners in this camp.

In October 1944, a camp for several thousand women prisoners employed producing artillery-shell fuses in the Union-Werke factory opened in the new blocks in the so-called camp extension (Schutzhaftlagererweiterung).

Auschwitz II

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.

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.

BI, 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.

Auschwitz III

The camp in Monowice was one of the first, and also the largest of the sub-camps of Auschwitz. Over time, it attained the status of headquarters of the “industrial” sub-camps, and its commandant was a manager and administrator, as well as the commander of the SS garrisons that reported to him.

The history of the founding of the camp is connected with the initiative by the German chemical concern IG Farbenindustrie A.G. to build its third large plant for synthetic rubber and liquid fuels. The new camp was to be located in Silesia, beyond the range of Allied bombers at the time. Among the several sites proposed in December 1940/January 1941, the final choice fell on the flat land between the eastern part of Oświęcim and the villages of Dwory and Monowice. The decision was justified by the favorable geological conditions, access to railroad lines, water supply (the Vistula), and the availability of raw materials: coal (the mines in Libiąż, Jawiszowice, and Jaworzno), lime (Krzeszowice), and salt (Wieliczka). Furthermore, the belief that it would be possible for the firm to employ prisoners from the nearby Auschwitz concentration camp was by no means a trivial consideration, and may in fact have been decisive in the choice of the project. IG Farben put the pieces of the deal in place between February and April 1941. The company bought the land from the treasury for a knock-down price, after it had been seized from its Polish owners without compensation; their houses were vacated and demolished. At the same time, the German authorities expelled the Jews from Oświęcim (resettling them in Sosnowiec and Chrzanów), confiscated their homes, and sold them to IG Farben as housing for company employees brought in from Germany. Some local Polish residents were dispossessed in the same way. Finally, IG Farben officials reached an agreement with the concentration camp commandant on hiring prisoners at a preferential rate of 3 to 4 marks per day for the labor of auxiliary and skilled construction workers. In a letter to his colleagues about the negotiations, IG Farben director Otto Ambros wrote that “our new friendship with the SS is very fruitful.”

Trucks began ferrying the first prisoner labor detail (known as Buna from the German trade name for synthetic rubber) to work at the plant construction site in mid-April 1941. From the beginning of May, the prisoners had to walk from the camp (6 to 7 km.) to labor at the factory. At the end of July, the labor detail, now numbering about a thousand, began taking the train to Dwory station. They had to do hard physical labor: leveling the ground, digging drainage ditches, laying cables, and building roads.

The prisoners returned to the construction site in the spring of 1942 and worked there until July 21, when an outbreak of typhus in the main camp and Birkenau halted their trips to work. Anxious over the prospect of losing the labor force, factory management decided to turn a barracks camp being built for civilian workers near Monowice over to the SS, as quarters for prisoners. Delays in the supply of barbed wire led to several postponements in the opening of the new camp. The first prisoners arrived there on October 26, and by early November the camp population was 2 thousand.

At this point, the camp took up only half the planned area. Its expansion was basically completed in the summer of 1943, although the last 4 of the 60 barracks were erected only a year later. The camp population rose gradually, from over 3.5 thousand in December 1942 to over 6 thousand in the latter half of the following year, and over 11 thousand, mostly Jews, in July 1944. This growth occurred despite significant mortality in the camp and numerous selections, both “general” and in the camp hospital. Factory management insisted on removing sick and exhausted prisoners from Monowice; the company, they argued, had not invested large amounts of money in building barracks to house prisoners incapable of labor.

After repeated memos and complaints, SS-Obersturmbannführer Gerhard Maurer, who was responsible for the employment of concentration camp prisoners, traveled to Oświęcim on February 10, 1943. He promised IG Farben the prompt supply of another thousand prisoners, and the systematic “exchanging” of those no longer capable of hard labor at the factory. More than 10 thousand prisoners fell victim to selection during the period that the camp was in operation. They were taken to the hospital in the main camp, where most of them were killed by lethal injection of phenol to the heart, or to Birkenau, where some were liquidated after so-called “re-selection” in the BIIf prison hospital or—in the majority of cases—murdered immediately in the gas chambers. More than 1,600 prisoners other prisoners died in the hospital in Monowice, and several dozen were shot at the construction site or hanged in the camp. Summing up these figures and adding several hundred known victims in the Buna labor detail, a total of about 10 thousand Auschwitz concentration camp prisoners thus lost their lives as a result of working for IG Farben.

The number of victims of the camp in Monowice cannot be attributed solely to the difficult living conditions that were typical of almost all the components of the Auschwitz complex. Although the barracks were as overcrowded as those in Birkenau, the ones in Monowice at least had windows and were heated in the winter. An additional portion of watery soup—the so-called “Buna-Suppe”—served as a supplement, however minimal, to the insufficient food rations. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that the main reason for the high death rate among the prisoners in the Monowice camp resulted from the desire by factory management to maintain a high work rate, and that this desire was expressed in the instructions given to foremen. In practical terms, the foremen were in charge of the various labor details, and they constantly demanded that the capos and SS men enforce higher productivity by the prisoners—by beating them. The management of the IG Farben plants approved such methods, as indicated by, among other things, reports sent from Monowice to corporate headquarters in Frankfurt am Main. Maximilian Faust, the engineer in charge of construction, repeatedly stated in these reports that the only way to keep prisoner labor productivity at a satisfactory level was through the use of violence and corporal punishment. While declaring his own opposition to “flogging and mistreating prisoners to death,” Faust nevertheless added that “achieving the appropriate productivity is out of the question without the stick.”

The fact that the prisoners worked more slowly on the average than German construction workers, despite the beatings, was a source of irritation and dissatisfaction to factory management. This led to repeated requests to the camp authorities for increased numbers of SS men to supervise the prisoners, and for the supply of “more energetic capos.” Soon afterwards, a group of specially chosen German common criminal capos was sent to Monowice. When these steps failed to yield tangible results, IG Farben officials proposed the introduction of a “rudimentary piecework system” and a motivational scheme including the right to wear watches, longer hair (rejected in practice), the payment of scrip that could be used in the camp canteen (which offered cigarettes and other low-value trifles for sale), and free visits to the camp bordello (which opened in the Monowice camp in 1943).

However, these steps had hardly any real effect on prisoner productivity. Only in December 1944, at the conference in Katowice, was attention paid to the true causes of low prisoner labor productivity: the motivational system was characterized as ineffective and the capos as “good,” but it was admitted that the prisoners worked slowly simply because they were hungry.

To an enormous degree, of course, the SS men from the garrison in Monowice were responsible for the conditions that prevailed in the camp. SS-Obersturmführer Vinzenz Schöttl held the post of Lagerführer during the period when Monowice functioned as one of the many Auschwitz sub-camps. In November 1943, after the reorganization of the administrative system and the division of Auschwitz into three quasi-autonomous components, the camp in Monowice received a commandant of its own. This was SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Schwarz, who until then had been the head of the labor department and Lagerführer in the main camp. At Monowice, he was given authority over the Jawischowitz, Neu-Dachs, Fürstengrube, Janinagrube, Golleschau, Eintrachthütte, Sosnowitz, Lagischa, and Brünn (Bohemia) sub-camps. Later, the directors of new sub-camps opened at industrial facilities in Silesia and Bohemia answered to him.

In May 1944, the headquarters of a separate guard battalion (SS-Totenkopfsturmbann KL Auschwitz III) was established in Monowice. It consisted of seven companies, who were on duty in the following sub-camps:

1 Company – Monowitz,

2 Company – Golleschau, Jawischowitz,

3 Company – Bobrek, Fürstengrube, Günthergrube, Janinagrube,

4 Company – Neu-Dachs,

5 Company – Eintrachthütte, Lagischa, Laurahütte, Sosnowitz II,

6 Company – Gleiwitz I, II and III,

7 Company – Blechhammer.

In September 1944, a total of 1,315 SS men served in these companies. The 439 of them who made up 1 Company were stationed at Monowice, and included not only guards but also the staffs of the offices and stores that saw to the needs of the remaining sub-camps.

In January 1945, the majority of the prisoners were evacuated on foot to Gliwice, and then carried by train to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen camps. Prisoners at the camp in Monowice included the Nobel Peace-Prize winner Elie Wiesel and the prominent Italian writer Primo Levi.

Source: www.auschwitz.org.pl