Auschwitz – Birkenau
In this photo report we will take a trip to the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland. In April 1940 there was the order of the SS leaders to build a concentration camp to quickly overcome the prisoners’ imprisonment. Auschwitz was chosen as a sorting center because it is well connected to a sector with Germany and far from the Polish population centers, Birkenau means birch forest and this was preferred to others because it could better hide the extermination facilities. Not all the deportees suffered direct death, while others worked as slaves for some time, until the inevitable death by illness. This harassment lasted until January 1945, when a Soviet troop accidentally arrived at Auschwitz and discovered hell.
Foto 1 - AUSCHWITZ – BIRKENAU
Auschwitz was the main sorting center for the holocaust that took place between 1940 – 1945, where an indecipherable number of human beings lost their lives.
Foto 3 - AUSCHWITZ – BIRKENAU, la camerta
One of the dormitories where the internees are crammed.
These resided in conditions of inhuman overcrowding and were forced to sleep in four even in five on each wooden bed.
Foto 5 - foto 6 – AUSCHWITZ – BIRKENAU
Between 1942 and 1943 an impressive control system was built to permanently discourage attempts to escape.
The central concentration camp has just been added, a grid consisting of a triple electrified barbed wire fence. Who manages to pass the first time does not pass beyond the second, to which a voltage of about 10,000 volts was applied.
FOTO 7 – AUSCHWITZ – BIRKENAU, le valigie dei prigionieri
Objects of various kinds, suitcases, shoes, orthopedic prostheses, glasses, but also brushes.
Foto 9 – AUSCHWITZ – BIRKENAU, il numero di matricola
The names of the deportees are replaced by matriculation numbers, tattooed on the left forearm, on the thigh or on the chest, in order to make them devoid of identity.
Foto 11 - foto 12 – AUSCHWITZ – BIRKENAU,
This was too expensive, so the gas cameras were introduced in which the attack of zyklon B pebbles was stipulated and killed, which in contact with the air produced a lethal gas that in 20 minutes under atrocious suffering killed in a shot only a lot of people. These pebbles are soaked with hydrogen cyanide, attention thrown from the outside into the openings in the ceiling.
Foto 13 – AUSCHWITZ – BIRKENAU, Forni crematori
A few steps from the bedrooms the crematoria ovens and once killed the main corpses burned in the crematoria ovens about three or four bodies at a time.