A
Nazi concentration camp location established in the city of Oswiecim (German: Auschwitz) in German-occupied
Poland during World War 2.
Auschwitz was not a single camp, but rather a complex
system of more than 40 camps constructed by the Nazis, and was administered by the SS-Totenkopfverbände or “Death’s Head units” of the SS along with the rest of the
Nazi concentration camps; Auschwitz I was a typical Konzentrationslager, or concentration camp designed for the forced labour of its inmates, while Auschwitz
II-Birkenau was an extermination camp, or Vernichtunglager designed for the systematic
mass killing of Jews, Poles, and other prisoners brought in from all across German-occupied Europe during the Second World War in a near-industrial scale through methods such as lethal forced labour and most famously through the utilization of gas chambers as part of the
Holocaust. After the Jews were stripped of their inmate clothes and murdered in the gas chambers through hydrogen cyanide, they were cremated to ashes in the crematorium of the camp which was located
right next to the chambers. More than
4 million Jews and Poles were murdered by the Nazis during the war within Auschwitz’s camps.
The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labor in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas
vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied
Poland.
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Wikipedia, “The Holocaust”