The Residence of Death - Auschwitz II - Birkenau

The memorial at the end of the train line, Birkenau Concentration Camp, Poland, looking back to the 'Gate of death'

The site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi death came in Oswiecim, is best known place of martyrdom and destruction in the world. This camp has become a symbol of the Holocaust, of genocide and terror, of the violation of basic human rights and of what racism anti-Semitism, xenophobia, chauvinism and intolerance can lead to. The name of the camp has become a sort of cultural code defines the most negative interpersonal relations. It is a synonym for the breakdown of contemporary civilisation culture. 
 
The Nazis created many different kinds of camps in occupied Europe, but Auschwitz has become the best known of them all.
 
The Nazis sent to Auschwitz at least 1,100,000 Jews from various European countries, nearly 150,000 Poles mostly political prisoners, approximately 23,000 Roma from several European countries, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 25,000 prisoners of other nationalities - Czech, French, Yugoslavian, Russian and Ukrainian.
 
The SS founded the origins of the Auschwitz concentration camp in the spring 1940. It was similar to those that already existed in Nazi Germany. The direct reason for its establishment was the fact mass arrests of the poles had filled the existing prisons to overflowing. The German police authorities then suggested that a camp be set up so to hold the people have been arrested. A special commission began searching for a suitable site. The final choice fell on a pre-war barracks complex 20 buildings located on the outskirts of the small Polish city of Oswiecim. In the first weeks of of the occupation, this part of Polish territory was incorporated within the borders of the Third Reich, and the Polish name was changed to Auschwitz.
 
In June 1940 the Gestapo sent the first transport 728 political prisoners there from prison in Tarnow. They were Poles and more than a dozen of them were Polish Jews. In mid 1941, they began sending not only Poles but also the prisoners of other nationalities there, from countries occupied by the third Reich. These transports also contained Jews who had been arrested during various operations aimed at the population of the occupied countries. For instance lawyers and judges of Jewish origins were sent to the camp as members of the Polish intelligentsia.
 
   
The Auschwitz camps were liberated on 27 January 1945, over four and a half years after their creation.