Museum and Memorial Auschwitz-Birkenau

Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau

Auschwitz, the largest National Socialist concentration and extermination camp, has come to be synonymous with the Holocaust. Here, members of the SS murdered about a million Jews, tens of thousands of Polish political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war as well as Sinti and Roma during World War II. Beginning 1940, the SS established a camp complex comprising 38 satellite camps 70 kilometres west of Cracow. Today, the state-run Museum and Memorial Auschwitz-Birkenau commemorates the victims.

History

Before World War I, the small Polish town of Oświęcim was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Located in close vicinity of Upper Silesia, the town was occupied by the German Wehrmacht already on September 4, 1939. It was soon renamed Auschwitz and annexed to the German Reich in October 1939. The region was immediately »germanized«, and local prisons were soon crowded with Polish intellectuals, political opponents and clergymen. In early 1940, the SS established the »Auschwitz I« concentration camp (main camp) in former army barracks, intended for interning Polish political prisoners. Later, Soviet prisoners of war were also brought here. At first, prisoners had to extend the camp or conduct forced labour in SS-owned factories. Thousands were shot, hanged or subjected to brutal and frequently fatal medical experiments. At the beginning of September 1941, Zyklon B poison gas was used for the first time in the murder of 850 Soviet POWs, Poles and Jews by the SS.
In October 1941, the »Auschwitz II-Birkenau« extermination camp was established about three kilometres away from the main camp; at the end of 1941, the SS built gas chambers at Birkenau, and beginning in the spring of 1942, systematically murdered Jews from all over Europe with Zyklon B. The SS carried out »selections« of the newly arrived prisoners. Those deemed fit for labour were deployed in forced labour, for example at the IG Farben-owned Buna rubber works at »Auschwitz III-Monowitz«. The elderly, the weak as well as children were immediately sent to the gas chambers. As the Red Army was advancing, Heinrich Himmler ordered a suspension of the killings and had the gas chambers and crematoriums blown up in November 1944. In mid-January 1945, the SS chased 58,000 prisoners on death marches towards the German Reich in the freezing cold. Special killing units murdered several hundred prisoners – witnesses of the mass murder – on January 20, before Soviet troops reached the camp on January 27, 1945.

Oświęcim, 2005, Prostheses of murdered Jews in a displace case of the permanent exhibition, Stiftung Denkmal

Oświęcim, 2010, Execution wall in the former main camp, Stiftung Denkmal

Victims

When Red Army units liberated the camp on January 27, 1945, they found about 7,000 ill and exhausted prisoners. By then, over one million people had been systematically murdered, others died of the inhumane conditions at the camp.
During the first two years of operation, the main camp was primarily used to detain political prisoners from Poland and prisoners of war from the Soviet Union. From the spring of 1942 on, Birkenau became the centre of the systematic mass murder of European Jewry.
About 100,000 Jews were assigned to forced labour and registered as prisoners; only 30,000 of them survived. Approximately 960,000 Jews from Hungary, Poland, France, the Netherlands, Greece and other countries occupied by Germany were murdered immediately upon arrival, about half of them during the last year of war. Moreover, the SS murdered 70,000 to 75,000 Poles, 21,000 Sinti and Roma, 15,000 Soviet POWs and 10,000 to 15,000 prisoners of other origin at the Auschwitz concentration camp complex.

The Second World War began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the occupation of the west of the country by German troops and the east of the country by the Red Army. Persecution and terror directly followed the invasion in both parts of the country. German units massacred members of the intelligentsia, Jewish and non-Jewish civilians as well as hospital patients. At the end of 1939 the German administration established ghettos where the Jewish population was forced to live in cramped and horrendous conditions. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, eastern Poland also fell under German control. SS Einsatzgruppen started to systematically murder Jewish men, later also women and children. In autumn 1941, local German authorities in the former west of the country began to prepare for the mass murder of Jewish ghetto prisoners using poison gas. By 1945, some three million Polish Jews had been murdered in the extermination camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek or Auschwitz, starved to death in the ghettos or shot dead. In 1943 the Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto staged an uprising, which was brutally crushed by the SS. Polish soldiers fought with the Allies on all fronts during the Second World War. Polish partisan groups, including the patriotic »Armia Krajowa« (Home Army), formed the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe. August 1, 1944 saw the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the most extensive civilian campaign against the Germans in occupied Europe. It failed also because the Red Army, already standing on the opposite side of the Vistula River, chose not to intervene. It is estimated that up to 250,000 people lost their lives in the uprising. A total of around three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death during the German occupation. Once the Red Army had arrived on (East) Polish soil in January 1944, the troops of the Armia Krajowa were stripped of their weapons by the Soviet secret service and the officers were either shot or deported. The millions of deaths during the occupation, the permanent Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the incorporation of former eastern German territories and the ensuing population transfers all left a traumatic political and social legacy in Poland. Remembrance of the murder of European Jews in German extermination camps was initially marginalised in the Polish culture of memory. Although Auschwitz soon became an international symbol of the Holocaust, in Poland it was viewed for decades above all as a »site of Polish martyrdom«. However, the start of the 21st century brought about changes in this respect, due in part to the fierce debates over the Jedwabne massacre in eastern Poland. The massacre of around 340 Jews on July 10, 1941 was originally attributed to the »Gestapo and Hitler police« but had in fact been carried out by Polish »neighbours« without orders from the Germans. Debates in Poland and abroad on Polish perpetration resulted in the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (*1954) issuing an apology to the victims in 2001. There were increasing calls from experts, such as those from Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance, for the country to confront the most difficult chapters in its history, which also include the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1946-47 and state anti-semitism in communist Poland during the post-war period. The Polish invests extensively in memorial culture, including grand projects with international ambition. The Warsaw Rising Museum was opened already in 2004. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in 2013 on the territory of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new museum dedicated specifically to the Warsaw Ghetto will follow suit in 2024. Since 2017, there is a major Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Since the turn of the millennium, the sites of the former German extermination camps have also been converted into modern memorial sites. An ever-growing preoccupation with Poland’s Jewish and multicultural heritage can be observed in the field of culture as well.

Remembrance

In the summer of 1945, the Red Army handed over the camp premises to Polish authorities. Commemorating the camp was mainly left to former political prisoners: In 1946, they founded an association, began guiding visitors on the camp premises, protected the area from vandalism and established an archive.
On July 2, 1947, the memorial was officially opened, centred around the area of the former main camp. The exhibition concentrated on the fate of the Polish prisoners and the victimhood of the Polish nation. The systematic murder of Jews was embedded in the portrayal of the persecution of various nations and altogether secondary in the historical narrative. Between 1960 and 1985, 13 states created their own exhibitions in buildings of the former main camp.
In 1967, a monument which was the joint work of Polish and Italian artists was inaugurated on the area of the former extermination camp at Birkenau (Polish: Brzezinka). Despite this, the memorial site at Birkenau was neglected for a long time and only after the political transformation of 1989 did it become more strongly integrated into the memorial's work.
In the autumn of 1989, the first non-communist prime minister of Poland since 1945, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, initiated the reorganisation of the Auschwitz Memorial. Holocaust researchers were also consulted in the restructuring process. Old inscriptions in the former Birkenau camp which cited the number of victims at four million were removed. For the first time, the information presented made clear that the majority of the over one million victims of the Auschwitz camp complex were Jews.

Brzezinka, 2010, Inner view of a barrack in the former extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, Stiftung Denkmal

Brzezinka, 2005, Ruins of Crematorium II, Stiftung Denkmal

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition, guided tours, publications, lectures, seminars, conferences, workshops, archive, research

Open

December daily 7.30 a.m. to 2 p.m.,
January, November daily 7.30 a.m to 3 p.m.,
February daily 7.30 a.m. to 4 p.m.,
April, May, September daily 7.30 a.m. to 6 p.m.,
June, July and August daily 7.30 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Closed on January 1, December 25 and the first day of Easter

Contact

http://www.auschwitz.org

muzeum@auschwitz.org

+48 (0)33 844 8100

ul. Więźniów Oświęcimia 20
32-603 Oświęcim

Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944, Arrival of Hungarian Jews at the death camp, Yad Vashem

Brzezinka, 2010, Entrance gate to the former extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, view from the ramp, Stiftung Denkmal

Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944, Hungarian Jews selected for extermination shortly before being murdered, Yad Vashem

Oświęcim, 2010, Gate to the main camp with the »Arbeit macht frei« sign, Stiftung Denkmal

Oświęcim, 2010, Barbed wire at the former main camp, Stiftung Denkmal

Brzezinka, 2005, Memorial stones behind the former location of crematorium III, in front of a pond into which the ashes of victims were scattered, Targon

Auschwitz, 2005, Warning sign on the barbed wire fence of the main camp, Stiftung Denkmal

Brzezinka, View of the premises of the former extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, Stiftung Denkmal

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