33. The Hell on Earth That Was Auschwitz
Auschwitz was a complex of over 40 Nazi concentration camps, chief among them the “main camp” or Auschwitz I, and Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were exploited as slave labor, toiling in horrific conditions and often worked to death. Most arrivals, however, were sent straight to the gas chambers for extermination soon as they disembarked from the trains.
From 1942 to late 1944, freight trains packed with prisoners arrived at Auschwitz, where most perished. Of roughly 1,300,00 sent to the camp, about 1,100,000 died. Most were Jews – of 960,000 sent, 865,000 were gassed on arrival. Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp where the Sondkerkommando toiled, was where most of the mass murder took place.