Auschwitz was an 'industrial apparatus to kill people'

Oswiecim, a small Polish town of around 10,000 inhabitants, was occupied by the German Wehrmacht in 1939, annexed and renamed Auschwitz. In 1941, the Nazis established the largest German extermination camp in this area, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

By the end of January 1945, the Nazis had murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. Most of them were Jews, but countless thousands were Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, homosexuals, political prisoners and members of other minority groups.

Why here? Why Auschwitz? "The site was chosen because of its central location in Europe, where it was easy to reach by train. There were also logistical considerations," Christoph Heubner, vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee, told DW.

Nazis planned logistics of industrial murder

The logistics were critical — the Nazis wanted it to be done quickly and kill as many people as possible. They were good at planning, at mass murder, at the bookkeeping of death.

But the German mass murder of various groups of people had begun much earlier. Soon after the German attack on Poland in early 1939, there were numerous mass shootings in Eastern Europe. These crimes are also well documented.

Once Hitler's Germany and its armies were in control of large parts of Europe, the plan was to completely eradicate the Jews. To make their plans, a meeting was held on January 20, 1942, at a villa on Lake Wannsee west of Berlin, then police and SS guesthouse.

Fifteen men from the Nazi regime met for an hour and a half to clarify and optimize the organization of the mass deportation and murder of European Jews. One of the participants, SS top officer Rudolf Lange, had ordered the shooting of over 900 Jews near Riga the day before traveling to Berlin.

Visitors to the House of the Wannsee Conference remembrance site who examine the facsimile of the only surviving transcript of the 90-minute meeting will not find the words "murder" or "killing" anywhere. There is only talk of the "final solution" — but everyone involved knew what that meant. Also planned that day was the establishment of further extermination camps. A short time later, in March 1942, deportation trains began leaving from all over Europe, bound for occupied Poland. The Jewish people were to "disappear." 

Trains to death departed from all over Europe

 For many railroad platforms in Germany and Europe, Auschwitz was the final stop. The Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp had its own railway line. After exiting the trains, the prisoners were forced to move toward what was called the ramp. Many were sent directly from the ramp into the gas chambers to be murdered, while others were first sent to the concentration camp as laborers.

Memorial sites have been established in many German cities, including Cologne, Stuttgart, Hamburg and Wiesbaden, to commemorate the deportations to the death camps. The Track 17 memorial at the Grunewald train station in Berlin is among the most well-known, frequently visited by politicians and other official delegations. Around 35 trains carrying 17,000 Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau left from this station alone.

Trains were also used by the Nazis to transport Jews and other groups from many other European countries to Auschwitz and other camps, often in cattle cars. The trains came from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Greece and some parts of the Balkans.  

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch from Wroclaw, who will celebrate her 100th birthday in July, came to Auschwitz by train as a girl and was lucky to survive the camp — in part because she could play the cello and was therefore needed in the "girls' orchestra."

From December 1943 to November 1944, she was in Auschwitz before being sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In 2018, she spoke at the German parliament's hour of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism.

"If you aren't sent straight to the gas chamber on arrival, you don't survive long in Auschwitz anyway — three months at most," she remembered. Her musical skills gave her the chance to survive.

"There were a great many transports, and it happened that Crematorium V could not fit all the people arriving on the transport," said Lasker-Wallfisch. "Those who didn't fit into the gas chambers were shot. In many cases, people were thrown into the burning pits while still alive. I saw that too."

Auschwitz-Birkenau was a killing machine, with industrial ovens.

Soviet liberators 'could not believe their eyes'

Visitors to Auschwitz today who spend time in the barracks are stunned by the horror. Meter-high piles of human hair, eyeglasses, large piles of prostheses and personal belongings are all on display, testimonies from before the killings.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet Army soldiers reached the camp. Heubner, who has spoken with many survivors as a longtime vice president of the Auschwitz Committee, summarized their accounts:

"It was a moment of absolute calm. The liberators, young soldiers from Ukraine, Russia and other former republics of the Soviet Union, stood at the gates of Auschwitz and could not believe their eyes. They had already seen some terrible things. But not what was standing there, death on two legs. It was only once they saw their faces and their eyes that they realized: These skeletons are alive."

'Extent of the catastrophe was incomprehensible'

Prisoners at Auschwitz were given a number that the Nazis had tattooed on their arms. And the sheer, unimaginable inhumanity of the place is something hard to forget.

"The most unimaginable crimes against innocent people slowly emerged into the open. The extent of the catastrophe was incomprehensible," Lasker-Wallfisch told the Bundestag in 2018.

"It was the scene of a state-organized crime," said Heubner. "And the crime was setting up an industrial apparatus to kill people."

It took decades before a wider process of confronting the horrors of Auschwitz began in Germany. Some of the last witnesses are still alive today.

This article was originally written in German.