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Auschwitz
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The liberation of Auschwitz should have been the start of a 'better' time for the Jews and other prisoners held there. This was not necessarily the case. The few surviving Russian POW’s held there were arrested by their own police and charged with being trained as spies. Many went from Hitler’s Auschwitz to Stalin’s gulags. Some women prisoners at Auschwitz claimed that they were raped by Russian soldiers - a charge that the Russian authorities deny to this day. Former Jewish prisoners returned to their hometowns to find that their property had been taken over by someone else.
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The first prisoners in Auschwitz were Poles who were sent there in June 1940. However at first Auschwitz was only a transit camp. Prisoners were moved on from there to other camps. Soon... Auschwitz became a permanent camp. By 1942 it held prisoners from all over Europe. At first only a small proportion were Jews but the number of Jewish prisoners rapidly increased.
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Auschwitz attracted the attention of SS men associated with the murder of the physically and mentally handicapped in Germany. The so-called Adult Euthanasia Programme (AEP) was responsible for these murders (probably in the region of 70,000) and they visited Auschwitz to work out what could be done with those people who could not work anymore. Himmler wanted the work that the AEP had done, extended to the concentration camps as those unfit to work could not serve the Nazi cause. In the first move, 575 prisoners from Auschwitz were taken from the camp to Germany where they were gassed. The AEP used carbon monoxide poisoning. Therefore, the first prisoners at Auschwitz deliberately targeted for death were, ironically, gassed away from the death camp most associated with gas chambers.
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The Auschwitz camp plays a special role in the resolution of the Jewish question. The most advanced methods permit the execution of the FŸhrer-order in the shortest possible time and without arousing much attention. The so-called "resettlement action" runs the following course: The Jews arrive in special trains (freight cars) toward evening and are driven on special tracks to areas of the camp specifically set aside for this purpose. There the Jews are unloaded and examined for their fitness to work by a team of doctors, in the presence of the camp commandant and several SS officers. At this point anyone who can somehow be incorporated into the work program is put in a special camp. The curably ill are sent straight to a medical camp and are restored to health through a special diet.
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At the Auschwitz complex 405,000 prisoners were recorded as laborers between 1940 and 1945. Of these about 340,000 perished through executions, beatings, starvation, and sickness. Some prisoners survived through the help of German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved about 1000 Polish Jews by diverting them from Auschwitz to work for him, first in his factory near Krakow and later at a factory in what is now the Czech Republic. A third group, mostly twins and dwarfs, underwent medical experiments at the hands of doctors such as Josef Mengele, who was ... known as the "Angel of Death." The camp was staffed partly by prisoners, some of whom were selected to be kapos (orderlies) and sonderkommandos (workers at the crematoria).
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The Auschwitz gassing story is based in large part on the hearsay statements of former Jewish inmates who did not personally see any actual signs of extermination. Their beliefs are understandable, because rumors about gassings at Auschwitz were widespread. Allied planes dropped large numbers of leaflets, written in Polish and German, on Auschwitz and the surrounding areas which claimed that people were being gassed in the camp. The Auschwitz gassing story, which was an important part of the Allied wartime propaganda effort, was ... broadcast to Europe by Allied radio stations. [15]
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Auschwitz