Auschwitz (Auschwitz II-Birkenau)

Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp run by the SS and the largest site of the immediate, direct murder of Jews. It was set up in 1940 on the outskirts of the Polish town of Oświęcim, in territory annexed to the German Reich after the invasion of Poland. It was originally established for Polish prisoners, who were its first political prisoners; in 1941 about 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war and more than 1,000 Jews were also registered there.

From March 1942 the second camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, functioned both as a concentration camp and as a killing centre. On arrival, SS personnel subjected the deportees to a "selection": a minority judged fit for work were registered as prisoners and forced to labour under conditions few survived, while most – among them children, the elderly and the sick – were taken directly to the gas chambers and murdered. According to the Auschwitz Memorial, almost 1.1 million Jews were deported to the camp between 1942 and 1944, of whom about 200,000 were registered as prisoners.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) estimates that approximately 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, about one million of them Jews; the other victims included 70,000–75,000 non-Jewish Poles, about 21,000 Roma and more than 14,000 Soviet prisoners of war. From 17 January 1945 the SS drove tens of thousands of prisoners, most of them Jews, on death marches. Soviet troops liberated the camp on 27 January 1945 and found about 7,000 prisoners still alive. The coordinates given here mark Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where most Berlin deportees were murdered.

From Berlin

From late 1942 Auschwitz was the main destination of the deportations from Berlin. An earlier, smaller transport – the 17th, which left Berlin on 11 July 1942 with about 200 people (210 according to the Statistik des Holocaust list, 192 according to the list published by the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district office) – is linked by a handwritten note on the Berlin transport list to a Hamburg transport to Auschwitz; its destination was long disputed, and Warsaw has also been suggested. Because no prisoner numbers were issued for it in Auschwitz, it is assumed that all of its deportees were murdered on arrival. From the 23rd "Osttransport" of 29 November 1942 – about 1,000 people, including 36 children from the Auerbach orphanage in Prenzlauer Berg, of whom only one deportee is known to have survived – every regular "Osttransport" from Berlin went to Auschwitz, up to the 58th on 12 October 1944: 36 transports in all, most of them leaving from the Moabit freight station on Putlitzstraße. Added together, the per-transport figures in the Statistik des Holocaust list come to about 18,300 people. Among those murdered on arrival was the children's author Else Ury, deported on the 26th transport of 12 January 1943.

The largest transports came after the "Fabrikaktion", the mass arrest of Jews still doing forced labour in Berlin factories that began on 27 February 1943 (8,000 to 11,000 people were arrested, according to the Berlin-Mitte district office). Between 1 and 12 March 1943 six transports carrying between about 660 and 1,760 people each left Berlin for Auschwitz – almost 8,000 people in all, adding up the per-transport figures in the Statistik des Holocaust list. From the 33rd transport (3 March 1943, 1,726 people), for example, the SS selected 517 men and 200 women for forced labour and murdered 1,033 people on arrival, according to the Auschwitz chronicle cited by Yad Vashem. From mid-1943 the transports were small – often fewer than 50 people – and carried Jews who had been caught in hiding, partners in so-called "mixed marriages" who had lost their protection and, occasionally, prisoners taken from jails. Very few of the deportees survived: for the individual Berlin transports documented by Yad Vashem, the number of known survivors ranges from none (for example the 25th and 27th transports) to 28 (the 33rd).

37 transports from Berlin brought 18,506 people here; at least 241 of them are known to have survived.