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Auschwitz: Prisoners
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The one event that was the change the way Auschwitz was run came in June 1941 – Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on Russia. Within months, the German army was overrun with about three million prisoners-of-war. Some of these Russian POW’s ended up at Auschwitz. Their treatment was worse than that handed out to the Poles.
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During World War 2 Auschwitz-Birkenau became the killing centre where the largest numbers of European Jews were killed. After an experimental gassing there in September 1941 of 850 malnourished and ill prisoners, mass murder became a daily routine.
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At first prisoners in Auschwitz were not systematically killed but many died of disease or malnutrition or both. Prisoners were, of course, treated with appalling cruelty and beatings and executions were common. Food and clothing were inadequate and prisoners were made to do hard labour (overwork contributed to many deaths).
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Auschwitz was not initially built to house/murder Jews and other identified ‘untermenschen’ (sub-humans). It was first built to house Polish political prisoners who were deemed to be a danger to the occupying Nazis in Poland.
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On 26th March 1942, the first women prisoner arrived at Auschwitz. A gynecologist Dr. Carl Clauberg did many types of experiments on Jewish women during the period from April 1943 to May 1944. She was trying to develop a simple injection to make these women sterilized. Another doctor named Joseph Mengele did experiments on twins and dwarfs. He did things like castration without using any anesthetics. All these experiments were very crude and painful.
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The first prisoners to be sent to Auschwitz, a group of 728 Polish political prisoners (including some Jews), arrived in Auschwitz from Tarnow on 14 June 1940. The first large group sent to Auschwitz from outside Poland was a transport of Czechs. This was in June 1941. Soviet prisoners of war started arriving a month later (immediately after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union), and groups from Yugoslavia in September 1941 - initially men, but by July 1942 women as well. Among the latter were uniformed women partisans who demanded to be treated as prisoners of war and refused to have their heads shaved.
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