LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Auschwitz: Auschwitz Concentration Camp
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Auschwitz is the German name for the small town of Oswiecim (40,000 inhabitants) located 60 km West to Krakow. The town centre has a historical centre reminding that in 14-16th centuries Oswiecim was the seat of one Silesian principality. The Slavonic town name's etymology is "consecration" sharply contrasting with the town's fate after 1940 when on the territory of defeated Poland the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler ordered to convert the Polish army barracks in a punitive camp. It was to became a nucleus of the biggest extermination camp of World War II and the entire human history. The concentration camps areas are preserved as a museum and testimony of Holocaust (90% of the killed were Jews), so that the genocide caused by Nazi Germany is never forgotten.
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The infamous Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau is the site of the greatest crime against humanity in history. About one and a half million people from all German occupied countries and territories, the vast majority of them innocent Jewish children, women and men of all ages and walks of life were murdered here during the Holocaust. Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by the Soviet Army on January 27, 1945
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In 1939 Hitler annexed the old Polish town of Oswiecim to his Third Reich as Auschwitz, and a year later the Nazis could start the conversion of the town’s abandoned barracks into a concentration camp. First inmates, a group of Polish political prisoners, arrived on June 14, 1940. In addition to Poles there were soon imprisoned Soviet POW’s, Gypsies, and other nationals from the rest of German-occupied Europe to suffer and die in hellish conditions. In 1942, notably after the construction of the nearby Birkenau (Auschwitz II) concentration camp, trainloads of European Jews start to come. Most of them were immediately put to death in the Birkenau gas chambers.
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You will spend about 3,5 hour in Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, where you will be given an English guided tour by the Museum's licensed guide. The tour begins with a 15-minute documentary film about the liberation of the camp, then the museum guide will show you exhibits in some of the surviving prison blocks, the gas chamber and the crematorium. After a short break you continue to Birkenau, where you go up to the watchtower above the entrance gate to see the view of the biggest Nazi extermination camp. The tour includes the transport to and from Krakow.
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Like all German concentration camps, the Auschwitz camps were operated by Heinrich Himmler's SS. The commandants of the camp were the SS-Obersturmbannführers Rudolf Höß (often anglicised to "Hoess") until the summer of 1943, and later Arthur Liebehenschel and Richard Baer. Höß provided a detailed description of the camp's workings during his interrogations after the war and ... in his autobiography. He was hanged in 1947 in front of the entrance to the crematorium of Auschwitz I. Command of the women's camp, which was separated from the men's area by the incoming railway line was held in turn by Johanna Langefeld, Maria Mandel, and Elisabeth Volkenrath.
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This Soviet Army film of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp was awarded the Red Banner in 1945. It contains dramatic footage of the survivors and some of the atrocities perpetrated in this most notorious of camps, including captured German film of medical experiments performed on prisoners. Photography by cameramen of the First Ukrainian Front: N. Bykov, K. Kutub-Zade, A. Pavlov, A. Vorontzov.
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Auschwitz Concentration Camp