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The Birkenau Camp

Electrically charged barbed wire fence around Birkenau camp
In the photo above, you can see the remains of the stoves in the barracks buildings that were either burned, or torn down, at Birkenau when the camp was abandoned on January 18, 1945. In the background on the left is one wooden barrack building still standing in a vast field of chimneys.

The camp was lit by electric lamps at night
The Birkenau camp was opened on October 7, 1941 when the first transport of Soviet Prisoners of War, captured during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, arrived. From October 1941 to February 1942, there were 13,775 POWs brought to Birkenau. Only 92 of them were still alive when the last roll call was taken on January 17, 1945.

Beginning in February 1942, the Birkenau camp became an extermination camp for Jews. The camp covers 425 acres and it had 300 buildings before it was abandoned in January 1945. Today there are 45 brick buildings and 22 wooden buildings still standing at Birkenau.
The overall impression that I got from the Birkenau camp was that it was not built to last. This was a death camp where the Jews were brought to be killed, not to live for a long period of time in the barracks.

Guard Tower along the main road through the camp
The photo above shows a flimsy wooden guard tower. Notice that there is no ladder. There are several of these guard towers, which were added later; they do not show in the photographs taken by the Germans on May 26, 1944.
Close-up of the ruins of a brick barracks stove

The Birkenau camp was divided into sections; each section was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. One section was the Gypsy Family camp where 20,946 men, women and children lived together and did not have to work. According to Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, there were only 4,000 of them left in August 1944 and they were taken on trucks to the gas chamber in Krema V on August 2, 1944 when the Gypsy camp was liquidated.
After the Gypsy camp was liquidated, it was used to house the Hungarian Jews who were brought to Birkenau. Elie Wiesel, the famous author of the book "Night," was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944 on one of the first transports of Hungarian Jews. According to Wiesel's account in his book, the Kapos in charge of the barracks where he stayed were Gypsies.
The photo below shows an interior barbed wire fence around the men's camp, which is in section BIId to the left of the road. The Gypsy camp was in section BIIe, adjacent to the men's camp on the west side.

Fence surrounds the former men's camp at Birkenau
The road on the right in the photo above is an interior road, which runs north and south, at the midway point in the camp. This road starts in the women's camp and extends to the new section called Mexico, which was never finished. The camp was intended to hold 250,000 prisoners when construction was completed.
The photo below shows the same road, which, according to the display there, was a short cut from the selection ramp to the gas chambers in Krema IV and Krema V, located on the north side of the camp. Across the road from the Krema IV building was the Central Sauna where incoming prisoners were registered and processed, beginning in 1943. The prisoners who were gassed immediately upon arrival were not registered.
Camp road was a shortcut to gas chambers IV and V
A display board beside the road shows the famous photo of a woman and her children walking to the gas chamber.

Elie Wiesel, the famous author of "Night," walked with his father along this route after their arrival on a transport train inside the camp in May 1944. It was on this road that Wiesel saw two burning pits, one for children and one for adults. Wiesel witnessed children being thrown alive into the burning pit. Wiesel and his father were spared at the last moment when, only two steps from the burning ditch, they were ordered to turn left and enter the barracks on the west side of this road.

The following quote is from "Night" by Elie Wiesel:
Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load-little children. Babies! Around us, everyone was weeping. Someone began to recite the Kaddish. I do not know if it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves .... Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp .... Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent sky.

The road shown in the photo above ends where it intersects with another road which runs parallel to the main camp road, starting from the SS administration building at the east end of the camp. This road goes past the section of the camp called Mexico, and on to the gas chambers in Krema IV and Krema V. The new section called Mexico was never finished; before the Nazis abandoned the Birkenau camp in January 1945, they took down the wooden barracks buildings in the Mexico section and moved them to the Gross Rosen camp.

Remains of a building in the Mexico section of Birkenau
The photo above shows what is left of the Mexico camp. In the foreground is the spot where a building once stood. You can see the outlines where the barracks buildings were located. In the background are three new houses that have been built near the former camp. When I visited Birkenau in 1998, the entire area of the section called Mexico was filled with brush. In 2005 when this photo was taken, about half of the area of Mexico had been cleared.

The Auschwitz Gas Chamber

2005 photo of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp
The gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp, shown in the photo above, is a reconstruction which was done by the Soviet Union in 1947. The original gas chamber had been converted by the Germans into an air raid shelter in September 1944; the room that visitors see today had been divided into four small rooms and a wash room. In the photo above, you can see the marks on the floor which show where the walls of the small rooms were removed. This YouTube video shows what a tour of this chamber is like today.
Original entrance into Auschwitz gas chamber

The photo above, taken in 1998, shows the original entrance door into the crematorium building at the Auschwitz main camp. This is the door that tourists now enter and it is the door that the victims entered. According to the detailed construction plans for the air raid shelter, the windows shown in the photo were added in 1944. A close-up of the door is shown in the photo below.
Close-up of original entrance door

Filip Müller, a prisoner who worked in the crematorium in the main Auschwitz camp, testified at the Auschwitz trial conducted by the German government at Frankfurt in 1964. A few years later, he wrote the definitive book about the Auschwitz gas chamber, entitled "Eyewitness Auschwitz, Three Years in the Gas Chambers."
The door shown in the photo above was described by Müller, who wrote that after the victims were herded through this door, "two SS men slammed shut the heavy iron-studded door which was fitted with a rubber seal and bolted it."

In his book, Müller described how Max Graebner, the head of the Political Department, a branch office of the Gestapo, which was located next door to the gas chamber building, stood on the flat roof of the building and addressed the victims who had to assemble outside in the yard in front of the door shown above. He would tell the Jews that they had been brought to Auschwitz to work, but first they had to remove their clothing and then enter the building to take a shower, after which they would be given hot soup.
Max Graebner

At first, the victims were driven inside, fully clothed, by SS guards wielding clubs and whips, according to Müller, who was assigned in May 1942 to remove the clothing of the victims after they were gassed in the main Auschwitz camp. The victims had carried their luggage inside with them and Müller described how he ate some of the cheese that he found in a suitcase inside the gas chamber.

Entrance door as seen from inside the building.
The door shown in the photo above opens into a vestibule, which is about 6 x 8 feet in size. The photo below shows the vestibule, as seen from the outside entrance door.
Outside door of gas chamber opens into this vestibule
From the vestibule, there is a door straight ahead, shown in the photo above, which opens into the oven room, and another door on the right, but out of camera range, that opens into a small room which was a "laying out" room when this building was used as a mortuary. When the building was converted into an air raid shelter, the "laying out" room became the "surgery" room; it has a floor drain and was previously furnished with wash basins. According to the Auschwitz Museum, the "laying out" room "was used to store spare gratings" when the morgue was converted into a gas chamber in September 1941.

The photo below shows the door from the vestibule into the laying out room. Inside this room, you can see the door that originally opened into another small room which was used as a washroom. The wash room wall was removed during the reconstruction and the door from the laying out room now opens directly into the reconstructed gas chamber.
Door into the gas chamber was in the "laying out" room

When the morgue room was used as a gas chamber, the laying out room was not used as such and there was no morgue to store the bodies of prisoners who had died from disease or as a result of medical experiments which were done in Block 10 of the main camp. The interior door into the wash room from the laying out room is shown in the background of the photo above.
The photo below shows part of the laying out room in the background with the entrance door into the former washroom in the foreground. When I tried to close this door to take a picture, I found that the door did not swing freely, but was scraping the floor, so I didn't try to move the door for fear of breaking it.

2005 photo of entrance door from the "laying out" room into the washroom
Original Blueprint of crematorium and morgue in Auschwitz main camp
The photo above shows the original blueprint for the Krema I building in the Auschwitz main camp. The morgue, shown on the bottom right of the blueprint, has a door into the oven room and another door into the washroom. The gas chamber was in the same location as the morgue and it did not include the area of the washroom. Note the door from the vestibule into the washroom; this door no longer exists and the area of the former wash room is included in the reconstructed gas chamber.

According to a guide book sold at the Auschwitz Museum, the gas chamber in the main camp was only used from September 1941 to March 1942 and after that, the gassing of the Jews was done in "the little red house" and "the little white house" just outside the Birkenau camp. However, Danuta Czech wrote that the last victims were members of the Sonderkommando, who were gassed in Krema I in December 1942. The ruins of "the little white house," also known as Bunker 2, can be seen behind the Sauna building outside the Birkenau camp.
Filip Müller was among the first Jews brought to Auschwitz; he arrived in April 1942 and began working in the crematorium in the main camp in May 1942. Regarding the gassing of prisoners in the main camp, he wrote that "From the end of May 1942 one transport after another vanished in this way into the crematorium of Auschwitz."

The following quote is from Müller's book, "Eyewitness Auschwitz":
At the same time, the siting of the crematorium in the immediate vicinity of the camp was fraught with danger: there was the distinct possibility that The Secret Matter of the Reich could not remain hushed up forever, notwithstanding its top-secret classification. It was for this reason that the columns of deported Jews were conducted to the 'showers' either at daybreak when the camp inmates were still asleep, or late at night after roll call. On these occasions a camp curfew was declared. To break it meant to risk being shot. For that same reason those of us prisoners who had been forced to participate in preparations for the extermination of Jews as well as in covering up all traces of the crimes were divided into two groups. This was to prevent us from pooling our information and obtaining detailed knowledge of the extermination methods. Prisoners of the second working party, the crematorium stokers, turned up only after we had swept and thoroughly cleaned the yard. By the time they arrived the chamber had already been aired and the gassed were lying there as if they had just fallen naked from the sky.