ISSUED FOR THE PHILATELIC EXPO IN 1975 IN OSWIECIM
The Auschwitz concentration camp (German: Konzentrationslager
Auschwitz) was a network of concentration and extermination camps
built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by
Nazi Germany during World War II. It was the largest of the German
concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I (the Stammlager or
base camp); Auschwitz II–Birkenau (the Vernichtungslager or
extermination camp); Auschwitz III–Monowitz, also known as
Buna–Monowitz (a labor camp); and 45 satellite camps.
Auschwitz had for a long time been a German name for Oswiecim, the
town by and around which the camps were located; the name
"Auschwitz" was made the official name again by the Germans after
they invaded Poland in September 1939. Birkenau, the German
translation of Brzezinka (= "birch tree"), referred originally to a
small Polish village that was destroyed by the Germans to make way
for the camp.
Auschwitz II–Birkenau was designated by the Reichsführer-SS
Heinrich Himmler, Germany´s Minister of the Interior, as the place
of the "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe". From
early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the
camp´s gas chambers from all over Nazi-occupied Europe. The camp´s
first commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified after the war at the
Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died there
(2.5 million gassed, and 500,000 from disease and starvation), a
figure since revised to 1.3 million, around 90 percent of them
Jews. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000
Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, some 400 Jehovah´s
Witnesses and tens of thousands of people of diverse nationalities.
Those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced
labor, infectious disease, individual executions, and medical
experiments.
On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a
day commemorated around the world as International Holocaust
Remembrance Day. In 1947, Poland founded a museum on the site of
Auschwitz I and II, which by 2010 had seen 29 million
visitors—1,300,000 annually—pass through the iron gates
crowned with the infamous motto, Arbeit macht frei ("work makes
free").
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