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275 Extermination and Concentration Camps During the Holocaust the Nazis established numerous concentration and death camps throughout Europe. Six of these camps were extermination camps in Poland, set up to efficiently murder large numbers of Jews. Some were slave labor camps, where prisoners were starved and worked to death. A few were transit camps, where families were gathered and held pending deportation to the extermination or labor camps. The six extermination camps in Poland, responsible for the mass murder of about three million Jews—half of the six million Holocaust victims—were the following : (1) Auschwitz-Birkenau (September 1941–January 1945), more than 1 million killed; (2) Belzec (March 1942–November 1943), more than 600,000 killed; (3) Chelmno (December 1941–Summer 1944), 152,000 killed; (4) Majdanek (July 1941–October 1943), 60,000 to 80,000 killed; (5) Sobibor (March 1942–December 1943), 250,000 killed; and (6) Treblinka (1941–November 1942), more than 800,000 killed. The following twelve camps are described in detail here because they are mentioned in the stories told in this book. Five of the twelve were partially or wholly extermination camps—from which there was no hope of return. Auschwitz (Extermination and Concentration Camp; Poland, west of Kraków, near what is now Oświęcim): The Auschwitz Concentration Camp complex, opened May 26, 1940, was the largest of its kind established by the Nazi regime. The huge complex encompassed three camps: (1) Auschwitz I, built in 1940; (2) Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, built in 1941; and (3) Monowitz, or Auschwitz III, built in 1942. More than a million Jews died at Auschwitz between September 1941 and January 1945, some from starvation or disease but most from mass execution by poison gas. At the height of the war, trains arrived at Auschwitz frequently with transports of Jews from virtually every country in Europe occupied by or allied with Germany. Above the entrance gates was a sign with the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes One Free), intended to create the impression that Auschwitz was a labor camp rather than a death camp. Transports arrived from 1942 to the end of summer 1944. Newly arrived prisoners at Auschwitz underwent “selections” by SS personnel . Those who were judged unfit for forced labor—that is, anyone who was not an able-bodied young adult; in other words, the majority of the prisoners—were sent immediately to the gas chambers, which were disguised as shower rooms to deceive the victims. On October 7, 1944, several hundred prisoners slated for disposal at Crematorium IV at Auschwitz-Birkenau rebelled after learning that they would be killed. During the uprising, the prisoners killed three guards and blew up the crematorium 276 Extermination and Concentration Camps and adjacent gas chamber using explosives that had been smuggled into the camp by Jewish women who had been assigned to forced labor in a nearby armaments factory. Only a few of the prisoners escaped. The Nazis killed all of the remaining prisoners who had been involved in the rebellion. The women who had smuggled in the explosives were publicly hanged in January 1945. In November 1944, as the Allies advanced through Europe and Germany seemed more likely to lose the war, SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered gassings to stop and a “clean-up” operation to begin, to conceal traces of the mass murder. In January 1945, to remove witnesses to their cruelty, the Nazis evacuated fifty-eight thousand prisoners from the Auschwitz complex and forced them to march westward toward other camps (see death marches in Glossary). The Nazis left behind about seven thousand sick or incapacitated prisoners too weak to march, who were not expected to live for long. Few of them were still alive when Soviet forces arrived to liberate the camp. The site of the camp remains today as a museum and archive preserved by the Polish government. Bergen-Belsen (Concentration Camp; northwest Germany, near Hannover): In 1943 Bergen-Belsen was converted from a detention camp into a concentration camp. During the winter of 1944–45, tens of thousands of prisoners from other camps arrived at Bergen-Belsen on foot after agonizing death marches (see death marches in Glossary). The camp could not accommodate so many prisoners, and all basic services— food, water, and sanitation—collapsed, leading to the outbreak of disease. The young German Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were among the many prisoners who died in March 1945 as the result of a typhus epidemic. BergenBelsen...

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