Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager) in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labour camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish question.
Josef Rudolf Mengele was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician during World War II. Nicknamed the "Angel of Death", he performed deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp, where he was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers, and was one of the doctors who administered the gas.
Natzweiler-Struthof was a Nazi concentration camp located in the Vosges Mountains close to the villages of Natzweiler and Struthof in the Gau Baden-Alsace of Germany, on territory annexed from France on a de facto basis in 1940. It operated from 21 May 1941 to September 1944, and was the only concentration camp established by the Germans in the territory of pre-war France. The camp was located in a heavily-forested and isolated area at an elevation of 800 metres (2,600 ft).
Majdanek was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, placing it among the largest of Nazi concentration camps. Although initially intended for forced labor rather than extermination, it was used to murder people on an industrial scale during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Polish Jews within their own occupied homeland. In operation from 1 October 1941 to 22 July 1944, it was captured nearly intact. The rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration prevented the SS from destroying most of its infrastructure, and Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes failed to remove the most incriminating evidence of war crimes.
Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss was a German SS officer and from May 1940 until November 1943 and again from May 1944 until January 1945 the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II, he was convicted in Poland and executed for war crimes committed on the prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp and for his role in the Holocaust.
Margot Elisabeth Dreschel, also spelled Drechsler, or Drexler, was a prison guard at Nazi concentration camps during World War II. For her role in the Holocaust, she was sentenced to death and hanged.
August Hirt was an anatomist with Swiss and German nationality who served as a chairman at the Reich University in Strasbourg during World War II. He performed experiments with mustard gas on inmates at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and played a leading role in the murders of 86 people at Natzweiler-Struthof for the Jewish skull collection. The skeletons of his victims were meant to become specimens at the Institute of anatomy in Strasbourg, but completion of the project was stopped by the progress of the war. He was an SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) and in 1944, an SS-Sturmbannführer (major).
Eduard Wirths was the chief SS doctor (SS-Standortarzt) at the Auschwitz concentration camp from September 1942 to January 1945. Thus, Wirths had formal responsibility for everything undertaken by the nearly twenty SS doctors who worked in the medical sections of Auschwitz between 1942 and 1945.
Hans Wilhelm Münch, also known as The Good Man of Auschwitz, was a German Nazi Party member who worked as an SS physician during World War II at the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1943 to 1945 in German occupied Poland. He was acquitted of war crimes at a 1947 trial in Kraków.
Miklós Nyiszli was a Hungarian prisoner of Jewish heritage at Auschwitz concentration camp. Nyiszli, his wife, and young daughter, were transported to Auschwitz in June 1944. Upon his arrival, Nyiszli volunteered as a doctor and was sent to work at No. 12 barracks where he operated on and tried to help the ill with only the most basic medical supplies and tools. He was under the supervision of Josef Mengele, a Schutzstaffel officer and physician.
Johann Paul Kremer was a German professor, physician and war criminal.
Karl-Friedrich Höcker was a Nazi war criminal, German commander in the SS and the adjutant to Richard Baer, who was a commandant of Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to December 1944. In 2006, a photo album created by Höcker, with some 116 pictures from his time at Auschwitz, was given to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, sparking new interest in his activities as a concentration camp administrator.
The Höcker Album is a collection of photographs believed to have been collected by Karl-Friedrich Höcker, an officer in the SS during the Nazi regime in Germany. It contains over one hundred images of the lives and living conditions of the officers and administrators who ran the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex. The album is unique and an indispensable document of the Holocaust; it is now in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C.
Oskar Gröning was a German SS Unterscharführer who was stationed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. His responsibilities included counting and sorting the money taken from prisoners, and he was in charge of the personal property of arriving prisoners. On a few occasions he witnessed the procedures of mass killing in the camp. After being transferred from Auschwitz to a combat unit in October 1944, Gröning surrendered to the British at the end of the war; his role in the SS was not discovered. He was eventually transferred to the UK as a prisoner of war and worked as a farm labourer.
Otto Hermann Wilhelm Moll was an SS non-commissioned officer who committed numerous atrocities at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War. Moll held the rank of SS-Hauptscharführer "Head Section Leader", the equivalent to a US Military Master Sergeant and or British Military Warrant Officer.
Adolf Theuer was an SS-Unterscharführer at Auschwitz concentration camp. He was executed after the war as a war criminal.
Horst Paul Silvester Fischer was a German medical doctor and member of the SS who participated in selections in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during World War II. He selected at least 70,000 prisoners to be gassed, then supervised their gassings. Although he avoided immediate detection after the war, Fischer's crimes came to light in the late 1950s. After tracking him down, Fischer was arrested by East German secret police officials in 1965. In a high-profile public case tried directly by the Supreme Court of East Germany, Fischer, the highest-ranking concentration camp doctor to ever stand trial in front of a German court, was found guilty of crimes against humanity and condemned to death. He was executed by guillotine in 1966.
Hans Delmotte was a Nazi SS doctor at the Auschwitz concentration camp in the branch of the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS. He came from Liège, Belgium.
Friedrich Karl Hermann Entress was a German camp doctor in various concentration and extermination camps during the Second World War. He conducted human medical experimentation at Auschwitz and introduced the procedure there of injecting lethal doses of phenol directly into the hearts of prisoners. He was captured by the Allies in 1945, sentenced to death at the Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials, and executed in 1947.
Hans-Joachim Lang is a German journalist, historian, and adjunct professor of cultural anthropology at the Ludwig-Uhland Institute for Empirical Cultural Studies University of Tübingen. Dr. Lang researched and authored the award-winning book Die Namen der Nummern, published in 2004, which identified all of the victims murdered in the gas chamber of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp for Nazi anatomist August Hirt as part of his plan to create a pseudo-scientific Jewish skeleton collection during World War II.
Germany 
Schutzstaffel 
