The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum & Memorial Site, The Former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp: The History of the Institution of Memory and Its Operating Principles, by Franciszek Dąbrowski PhD

(For historians, professors, college students, and interested adults.)

The author is with the Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw, Poland, and the War Studies University, Warsaw, Poland. It appeared in the Institute of National Remembrance’s Review in February 2020. The image above is from the first page of Dąbrowski’s article and shows the location of the Auschwitz complex, which was located in Reichsgau Oberschlesien (Imperial District of Upper Silesia). The paragraphs below are excerpted from the first three pages of the article.

The museum and memorial site located at the former, concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was established in 1947 as the Oświęcim-Brzezinka State Museum. In 1999 the museum was renamed as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau). In 1979 the sites in the museum’s custody—the remains of the concentration camps Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau—were registered on the UNESCO World Heritage list as the “Auschwitz Concentration Camp”. In 2007 the name on the list was revised to “the Former Nazi German Concentration and Extermination Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau”. These changes were made to eliminate any erroneous identification of the German concentration and extermination camps as “Polish camps”.

The mission of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is, in accordance with the still-valid Act of 1947, “to preserve the camp for all time as a monument to the martyrdom of the Polish nation and other nations” (Auschwitz Act 1947 §1). The language of the act was appropriate for its time, but in fact it set the Museum a very difficult task: to preserve, maintain and keep open to the public the huge complex of buildings making up the largest German concentration camp and extermination centre. Currently, the Museum’s responsibilities cover the remains of the concentration camp (Auschwitz & Auschwitz II-Birkenau)—almost 150 buildings covering an area of about 170 hectares—and the remains of the destroyed barracks, gas chambers, crematoria and other sites. The Konzentrationslager (KL) Auschwitz III Monowitz and the numerous KL Auschwitz sub-camps and other buildings scattered throughout Upper Silesia (usually at mines and factories, where the prisoners performed slave labor) are outside of the Museum’s remit.

The concentration camp was established by the Germans in the Polish part of Silesia, which they occupied in 1939 (and was then incorporated into the Reich as part of the German province of Upper Silesia, within the limits of the Katowice region, Regierungsbezirk Kattowitz, Reichsgau Oberschlesien), and became known by the German name for the town of Oświęcim: Auschwitz. Similarly, the German names given to the villages incorporated into the camp— Brzezinka (Birkenau) and Monowice (Monowitz)—became the formal terms for its other parts: Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Auschwitz III-Monowitz. The camp, located on the edge of the historic town of Oświęcim, was separated from the surrounding area by a so-called Interessengebiet; so the camp and the area of interest were inaccessible even to the regular German authorities, not to mention the Polish civilian population, and the whole of the continually expanding complex remained under the control of the SS. The Auschwitz camp was launched in April 1940, and like the other concentration camps it was subject to the SS’s Inspectorate of Concentration Camps (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager), that was subordinate to the SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, and after 1942 to the SS’s Main Office of Economic Management (SS-Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt, SS-WVHA). The concentration camp at Auschwitz was originally designated as a place for the liquidation of the “leadership class” of the Polish nation and society. (German: Führungsschicht: the broad sense of this concept included all kinds of workers in the Polish administration, teachers, local activists, social and political activists, professionals, academics, clergy, officers, intellectuals, etc.). The establishment of the camp meant that it rapidly grew in size and significance due to its location in a well-urbanized region with many industrial plants, the site of a major railway junction (which was significant even before World War I, when Oświęcim was ruled by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy), that allowed good communication with the other territories of occupied Poland, Germany, the Protectorate of Bohemia & Moravia, Slovakia and Hungary.

Over the next few years, the camp gained and changed functions, becoming one of the main tools of German occupation policy in Poland, and then in Central and Eastern Europe. The camp received political prisoners from occupied Poland, from the Protectorate of Bohemia & Moravia, and from the ghettoes of almost all of Europe, Soviet prisoners of war captured by German forces on the eastern front, victims of German pacification and counter-insurgency actions conducted in Poland and Belarus (including many children), activists of the French resistance deported during the “Nacht und Nebel” actions, and civilian residents captured and deported from Warsaw during the 1944 Rising. The camp became—next to the death camps at Chełmno, Sobibór, Bełżec and Treblinka—one of the main sites for the planned and mechanized extermination of European Jews and Roma. The majority of the Jews who had been deported to the camp from the ghettos of occupied Poland, Theresienstadt Ghetto, the internment camps in France, Holland and Belgium, and those deported from Slovakia, Greece, Yugoslavia and Hungary (see Piper 2000, pp. 9–62, 217–231) were murdered in the camp’s gas chambers. Apart from the isolation and liquidation of political prisoners and the mass murder of Soviet, Jewish and Roma prisoners, the camp was also intended to serve as a significant element of the Third Reich’s war machine. Thousands of prisoners were sent to work as slave labor in a network of sub-camps (Nebenlager), located primarily near coal mines and factories, and at the Auschwitz III-Monowitz camp, where a large chemical plant was built. Not only was the prisoners’ work valuable for the Germans but the deportees’ personal belongings (mostly from those who were killed immediately after arriving at the camp) were sorted and sent for reuse in the Reich; the hair of those killed was used to produce fabrics and slippers for sailors on submarines, and the gold teeth bolstered the Reich’s budget. Many prisoners in Auschwitz were used as “human material” for a variety of pseudo-medical experiments, aimed inter alia at testing methods for the mass sterilization of women and men, and verifying the effectiveness of vaccines and drugs for infectious diseases, as well as pseudo-anthropological research.