Auschwitz

The hardest and by far most touch part of my trip was our day visit to Auschwitz. Seeing the museum and going through the camp was extremely hard and terrifying. It was particular interesting to be in a group with German chaperons and they were not greeted with the best feelings. Furthermore there was a large number of Israelis at the camp that were carrying the Israeli flag and chanting songs in memorium of those who died. Here is some info on Auschwitz, since I didn’t know that much about it before going there…

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of Nazi extermination camps. One major difference pointed out was the difference between concentration and extermination camps. Extermination camps were meant to kill people and that is what Auschwitz was. The camp commandant, Rudolf HoB, testified that up to 3 million people had died at Auschwitz.

COMPONENTS: There were three main camps at Auschwitz, Auschwitz I, II, and III.
1. Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp, served as the administrative center for the whole complex, and was the site of the deaths of roughly 70,000 people, mostly Polish and Siveit POWs.
2. Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was an extermination camp or Vernichtungslager, and was the site of the deaths of at least 960,000 Jews, 75,000 Poles, and some 19,000 Gypsies ..
3. Auschwitz III (Monowitz) served as a labor camp for the Buna-Werke factory.

MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS: Nazi doctors at Auschwitz performed a wide variety of "experiments" on helpless prisoners. SS doctors tested the efficacy of X-rays as a sterilization device by administering large doses to female prisoners. Prof. Dr. Carl Clauberg injected chemicals into women's uteruses in an effort to glue them shut. Bayer, then a subsidiary of IG Farben, bought prisoners to use as guinea pigs for testing new drugs. The most infamous doctor at Auschwitz was Josef Mengele, who was also known as the “Angel of Death”. Particularly interested in "research" on identical twins, Mengele performed cruel experiments on them, such as inducing diseases in one twin of a pair and killing the other when the first died to perform comparative autopsies. He also took a special interest in dwarves, injecting twins, dwarves and other prisoners with gangrene to "study" the effects.

ESCAPES: About 700 prisoners attempted to escape from the Auschwitz camps during the years of their operation, of which about 300 were successful. A common punishment for escape attempts was death by starvation; the families of successful escapees were sometimes arrested and interned in Auschwitz and prominently displayed to deter others. If someone did manage to escape, the SS would pick ten random people from the prisoner's block and starve them to death.