THE entrance to Auschwitz, former Nazi death camp, in Oswiecim, with the inscription "Arbeit macht frei" which translates to "work sets your free." AFP
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will honour Holocaust victims on Friday with her first official visit to the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, a Nazi German killing factory where more than 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, perished during World War II.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, part of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” plan of genocide against European Jews, operated in the occupied southern Polish town of Oswiecim between June 1940 and January 1945.
The Nazis set up the camp, originally confined to 20 Polish army barracks buildings holding some 10,000 inmates, to terrorise and subjugate the Polish people, with the educated elite, including members of the clergy, particularly targeted.
Starting in 1941, the Nazis began to further develop their “zone of terror” to include the village of Brzezinka — Birkenau in German — some three kilometres (around two miles) from Auschwitz.
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The Nazis fitted out the extended camp with purpose-built, interconnecting gas chambers and crematoria as they stepped up plans to exterminate Europe’s Jews.
Birkenau was fully operational in 1943, and it was here that most of the 1.1 million people documented to have died at Auschwitz-Birkenau met their fate.
In all, the Nazis killed six million of pre-war Europe’s 11 million Jews.
Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish political prisoners and men and women of religion were also murdered at the camp, some by overwork, starvation and disease, others in the gas chambers of Birkenau.
Many of those who died in the gas chambers went to their deaths immediately after arriving at the sprawling Nazi death complex by train.
SS soldiers would fling open the doors of the train — often cattle cars — after it had stopped, immediately adjacent to the gas chambers with their contiguous crematoria.
