Nazi - The Auschwitz Concentration Camps Memorial Museum

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The Auschwitz Nazi concentration camps memorial museum is a sobering place even today.

Admission is free of charge but to get the best out of your visit it is best to hire a guide.

The minimum time suggested for a tour is three and a half hours.

Respect also needs to be shown as this is a memorial to all those who died.

It is not an entertainment show.

The name came about because it is the German pronunciation of the nearby Polish town of Oœwiêcim. And the camp came into being when the Germans invaded Poland in the Second World War.

Originally a Polish army barracks it was used initially as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners because the local prisons were overflowing with Polish disenters and resistance fighters.

It grew into three main camps: Auschwitz one, which was the administrative centre, Auschwitz two also known as Birkenau, which was an extermination camp and Auschwitz three also known as Monowitz, which was a work camp.

Part of the evil Nazi doctrine of the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe, it grew into the largest of the German concentration camps. It was chosen as the major center for the extermination of the Jews of Europe because of it’s railway links to all of the European continent. From spring 1942 until the fall of 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over Nazi-occupied Europe.

Ninety percent of the camps population was jewish but also there were people from many different nations, Polish prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies and Homosexuals. Men, women and children, the old and infirm, babies and young people at the height of their health were all systimatically gassed, shot, starved, worked and beaten to death by the so called master race.

At the end of the war in an attempt to hide their crimes from the world the Germans started to evacuate the camps and most of the prisoners were forced on a death march West. Those too weak or sick to walk were left behind.

The camps, which contained around 7,500 dieing prisoners, were liberated by the Soviet army on January 27, 1945 and the horror of the situation then became known to the whole world.

It was in 1947 that the museum was established, by an act of the Polish parliament, on the site of Auschwitz one and two.

You can visit the official mememorial site here.

Since then many millions have visited the site and my wife and myself were just two other visitors acknowleding those who were there and adding our voice to the sentiment that it must never ever happen again.

We did an arranged coach tour from Cracow which was well organised and of reasonable cost. A guide was included in the cost and he made the whole place ‘come alive’ in an inteligent and thoughtful way.

On your way there on the coach you are shown a very helpful film which sets the scene for your visit.

As you begin your visit you pass through the camp gates and beneath the infamous iron motto ‘Arbeit macht frei’ which when translated means, work makes you free.

You then learn how the Nazis evicted the local people to create an empty area of some forty square kilometers and used three hundred Jewish residents of Oœwiêcim to lay the foundations of the camp.

The first prisoners were thirty German criminals brought in to act as supervisors within the prison system. Then came seven hundred and twenty eight Polish prisoners which included twenty Jews who arrived on June 14, 1940.

By March 1941, 10,900 were imprisoned there, most of them Poles. And then as the Jews were transported in from all over Europe it just grew and grew.

Today, at Birkenau extermination camp the entrance building and some of the brick-built barracks still stand. The camp was made up of around 300 wooden barracks, each filled with wooden tiers, now only 19 remainand of the others there are just the chimneys reaching up into the sky.

The hellish gas chamber and crematorium were made by adapting an exising bunker. The gas chamber still exists, together with the associated crematorium. Today it stands as a simple but yet moving memorial to those who died there. As you exit straight across there stands the gallows where the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, was hung for his part in the crime.

The exact number of people killed in Auschwitz camps is not known. Rudolf Höss, testified at the Nuremberg Trials that 3 million people had died there. The death toll given by the Red Army was 4 million people. The Auschwitz Museum revised these figures in 1990, and new calculations now place the figure at between 1.1-1.5 million.

The Auschwitz concentration camps memorial museum stands as a witness to the inconceivable atrocities they suffered and to their deaths.

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