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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.
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps, also called death camps, or killing centers, in Central Europe, primarily Occupied Poland, during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million people – mostly Jews – in the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily murdered by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Extermination through labour was also used at the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps. Millions were also murdered in concentration camps, in the Aktion T4, or directly on site.
Sonderkommandos were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. The death-camp Sonderkommandos, who were always inmates, were unrelated to the SS-Sonderkommandos, which were ad hoc units formed from members of various SS offices between 1938 and 1945.
The Holocaust—the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945—is the most-documented genocide in history. Although there is no single document which lists the names of all Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, there is conclusive evidence that about six million Jews were murdered. There is also conclusive evidence that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Operation Reinhard extermination camps, and in gas vans, and that there was a systematic plan by the Nazi leadership to murder them.
Roza Robota or Róża Robota in Polish, referred to in other sources as Rojza, Rózia or Rosa, was the leader of a group of four women Holocaust resistors hanged in the Auschwitz concentration camp for their role in the Sonderkommando prisoner revolt of 7 October 1944.
Filip Müller was a Jewish Slovak Holocaust survivor and Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, the largest Nazi German concentration camp during World War II, where he witnessed the murders of tens of thousands of people.
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 forensic doctor and was sent to work at No. 12 barracks where he mainly performed autopsies. He was under the supervision of Josef Mengele, a Schutzstaffel officer and physician.
Gideon Greif is an Israeli historian who specializes in the history of the Holocaust, especially the history of the Auschwitz concentration camp and particularly the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. He served as a visiting lecturer for Jewish and Israeli History at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin during the academic year 2011–2012. He headed a commission that issued a report in July 2021 that denied that the killing of Bosnian Muslims at and around Srebrenica in July 1995 constituted genocide.
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. He was known as "Cyclops", due to having a glass eye, and as the "Butcher of Birkenau".
Erich Kulka was a Czech-Israeli writer, historian and journalist who survived the Holocaust. After World War II, he made it his life's mission to research the Holocaust and publicize facts about it.
Henryk (Tauber) Fuchsbrunner was a Polish Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp during the Holocaust, who gave detailed testimony at the end of World War II. Tauber was his mother's maiden name. His parents were married by a rabbi and never filed for a civil licence due to quotas on the number of Jewish marriages in Galicia then under Austrian rule. Henryks father's name was Abraham Fuchsbrunner and Fuchsbrunner was the name by which he was known. Henryk Fuchsbrunner shortened his name to Henry Fuchs after he arrived in the United States in 1952.
Leib Langfus, or also Leyb Langfus, was one of the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. A rabbi and Dayan in Maków Mazowiecki, he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942, where he was forced to work as a Sonderkommando. After the war, a diary he kept was unearthed in the grounds of Birkenau - that was later to be published with a number of other diaries, under the title, The scrolls of Auschwitz. The accounts written by Langfus are considered one of the most important historical documents dealing with subject of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, and the Holocaust in general.
The Sonderkommando photographs are four blurred photographs taken secretly in August 1944 inside the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. Along with a few photographs in the Auschwitz Album, they are the only ones known to exist of events around the gas chambers.
Alberto Israel Errera was a Greek-Jewish officer and a member of the anti-Nazi resistance. He was a member of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau from May to August 1944.
Leon Cohen, was a Greek Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was a member of the Sonderkommando in Birkenau from May to November 1944. He was one of the only three members of the Sonderkommando who wrote his memoirs after the war, along with Filip Müller and Marcel Nadjari. He took part in the preparation of the Sonderkommando uprising.
Zalman Gradowski or Chaim Zalman Gradowski originally from Suwałki, was a Polish Jewish prisoner of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust in occupied Poland. On November 2, 1942, he was deported, as were all Jews then living in Lunna, as well as neighboring towns, to the Kielbasin (Kolbasino) transit camp. On December 5, he and all his Jewish townsfolk were forcibly marched from the Kielbasin transit camp to Lososno, Poland, where they boarded a train bound for, as he later discovered, Auschwitz. The train arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau on the morning of December 8. After "selection" at Auschwitz-Birkenau, his family members as well as all women and children, and most of the men who were on the transport, were immediately sent to the gas chamber and murdered. Shortly afterward, Gradowski and several others from the transport who survived the “selection” were sent to work in crematoria as part of the Sonderkommando slave labour unit.
Marcel Nadjari was a Jewish-Greek survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Nadjari was a member of the Sonderkommando in Birkenau from May 1944 to November 1944. He is one of three members of the Sonderkommando that wrote his memoirs after the war, along with Filip Müller and Leon Cohen. He took part in the preparation of the Sonderkommando uprising. He authored one of the 19 manuscripts of Sonderkommando members found near the ruins of the Birkenau crematoria.
Henryk Świebocki is a Polish historian. A senior custodian of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Świebocki specializes in the resistance movement within the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland during World War II. He is the editor of London has been informed: Reports by Auschwitz escapees (1997); author of The Resistance Movement, volume IV of Auschwitz 1940–1945 (2000); and editor of People of Good Will (2009).
The Kanada warehouses, also known as Effektenlager or simply Kanada, were storage facilities in the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. The buildings were used to store the stolen belongings of prisoners, mostly Jews who had been murdered in the gas chambers on arrival. The property of prisoners registered in the camp and used as slave labour was kept on deposit.
The Sonderkommando revolt in Auschwitz occurred on 7 October 1944, when a large group of Sonderkommando members in the crematoria area of Birkenau camp rebelled against the Nazi guards of the camp. The revolt was suppressed after Crematorium IV was blown up, killing three German guards and 452 members of the Sonderkommando.
References
- ↑ Greif, Gideon (1999). Bakhinu beli dema'ot-- / (in Hebrew). p. 420. ISBN 965-448-450-1.
- ↑ Greif, Gideon (2005). We Wept Without Tears. Yale University Press. p. 381. ISBN 0-300-10651-3.
- ↑ We Wept Without Tears
- ↑ Royle, Trevor (2002-10-27). "They helped the Nazis murder their fellow Jews now these Holocaust victims' grim secret has been unveiled on film". Sunday Herald . p. 2.
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