‘Hell on Earth’: Who were the victims killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz?

“The sky was red, and the air smelled like burned meat. I didn’t understand it then, but my mother told me it was people. People like us.” — Ceija Stojka, Auschwitz survivor

Eighty years ago, the Soviet Red Army liberated survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi extermination camp in the Silesian region of southern Poland. The arrival of the Allies gave the world its first real glimpse of the horrors of the camp — even though there is evidence that British and American intelligence agencies knew of the industrial-scale killings in Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps.

More than one million people, the vast majority of them Jews, were murdered at the Auschwitz camp, which operated from May 1940 until its liberation on January 27, 1945 – now observed as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in honour of the victims. Other victims included the Roma, Polish political prisoners, homosexuals, communists, Soviet prisoners of war and disabled people.

We look back at what happened at Auschwitz, the way different categories of victims were treated, and the testimonies of some of the survivors.

What were the different German internment and death camps?

The Nazis, driven by their ideology of racial supremacy and territorial expansion, established more than 44,000 camps that served a range of purposes across Germany and its occupied territories from 1939 to 1945.

This vast network was known as the “Lager”, where between 15 and 20 million people were imprisoned or killed. It included concentration camps for “undesirable” ethnic groups and political prisoners; labour camps where enslaved prisoners carried out industrial or agricultural work, including for German firms such as the IG Farben chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate and the Krupp engineering company; transit camps for holding detainees before deportation to other camps; and six extermination camps where people were taken to be murdered.

Auschwitz was a complex that had many of these types of camps. It was also the largest of the Nazi death camps. People were sent to Auschwitz from transit camps across Europe and from labour camps if they were deemed unfit to work. Some were sent from Auschwitz to other locations to be used for forced labour elsewhere.

What was Auschwitz used for?

After the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, they converted Auschwitz, an army barracks, into a set of more than 40 camps, of which Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau were the two most significant facilities. Auschwitz became a central part of the Final Solution, the German plan for the genocide of Jews.

Auschwitz handled up to 90,000 prisoners at any one time. Inmates carried out various duties within the camp, such as cleaning, administrative work, supervising other inmates or performing the grim task of pulling bodies out from gas ovens, removing any gold teeth and women’s hair, and burning bodies. They were also marched off to do hard labour in outside locations such as factories, quarries and farms, where inmates would work by day and return to their camps at night.

Auschwitz was also a site for medical experiments and pseudo-scientific research, using the inmates as guinea pigs. Dr Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death”, was infamous for his horrific experiments at Auschwitz, particularly on twins and individuals with physical anomalies.

These experiments involved injections of chemicals into the eyes to attempt to change eye colour, deliberate infection with diseases to study immune responses and the dissection of one twin after death to compare with the surviving sibling.

In mass sterilisation programmes targeting minorities such as the Roma and people with disabilities, victims underwent forced exposure to radiation targeting reproductive organs, injection of caustic chemicals into the uterus or testicles and surgical sterilisation without anaesthesia.

Who was held at Auschwitz and what happened to them?

Jews made up 90 percent of the victims of Auschwitz while other groups were also sent to the camp. Each was targeted for specific reasons, and life in the camp differed significantly depending on the group to which prisoners belonged.

Jews

“It is not possible to sink lower than this. No human condition is more miserable than this.” — Primo Levi, Italian Jewish chemist, author, and Auschwitz survivor

Jews were the principal target of the Holocaust and the worst sufferers – by far – of Nazi brutalities. Between 1939 and 1945, some six million Jews were murdered across Europe. They were gassed, shot, or starved and worked to death.

Of those murdered, nearly 1.1 million Jews were killed at Auschwitz alone – about 85 percent to 90 percent of the camp’s victims – making it the deadliest Nazi extermination camp.

Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz faced some of the harshest and most brutal conditions of all the prisoner groups. The Nazi racial ideology targeted Jews for extermination above all others.

In his 1947 memoir, Survival in Auschwitz (If This Is a Man), Primo Levi described how he was immediately subjected to the “selection” process on arriving at the camp in January 1944. Those who failed the fit-to-work test deemed unfit for labour were sent to the gas chambers. In all, 75 to 80 percent of Jewish deportees were immediately sent to the gas chambers on arrival.

Jews had to live in overcrowded barracks, with as many as 1,000 prisoners crammed into spaces designed for 400. They received minimal food rations, leading to starvation and extreme malnutrition. Sanitation was almost non-existent, with limited access to water or latrines, leading to rampant disease.

Levi, on arrival stripped of his personal belongings, shaved, tattooed and given a uniform, was assigned to gruelling forced labour, enduring starvation, freezing temperatures, disease and the constant fear of death. “We had to move like automatons,” he wrote, “following orders mechanically, to avoid attracting attention and punishment”.