Auschwitz, Dachau

 

Weekly Bulletin | Welcome & Contact Information | Business On-Line
School | Early Care Center | CCD | Youth | Safe Environment | Altar Servers | Organizations | Pilgrim Virgin
 Clergy Bios | Alumni | History & Pictures | Works of Art | Links | Home

Back to the History Page

Auschwitz

All over the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Holocaust. It was established by the Nazis in 1940, in the suburbs of the city of Oswiecim which, like other parts of Poland, was occupied by the Germans during the Second World War. The name of the city of Oswiecim was changed to Auschwitz, which became the name of the camp as well.

Over the following years, the camp was expanded and consisted of three main parts: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz. It also had over 40 sub-camps. At first, Poles were imprisoned and died in the camp. Afterwards, Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, and prisoners of other nationalities were also incarcerated there. Beginning in 1942, the camp became the site of the greatest mass murder in the history of humanity, which was committed against the European Jews as part of Hitler's plan for the complete destruction of that people. The majority of the Jewish men, women and children deported to Auschwitz were sent to their deaths in the Birkenau gas chambers immediately after arrival. At the end of the war, in an effort to remove the traces of the crimes they had committed, the SS began dismantling and razing the gas chambers, crematoria, and other buildings, as well as burning documents.

Prisoners capable of marching were evacuated into the depths of the Reich. Those who remained behind in the camp were liberated by Red Army soldiers on January 27, 1945. A July 2, 1947 act of the Polish parliament established the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the grounds of the two extant parts of the camp, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

จจจจจ

Dachau

Dachau was established in 1933 as a concentration camp for political prisoners after the civil rights accorded Germans under their constitution were suspended.  Theodore Eicke became commandant of the concentration camp and developed an administrative organization and a detailed set of rules that would later be applied to all concentration camps.

The first prisoners were political opponents of the regime: communists, social democrats, members of the trade unions and a few members of the conservative and the liberal parties. Also, the first Jewish prisoners were imprisoned in Dachau because of their political beliefs. In the following years new groups of prisoners were deported to Dachau: Jews, Catholics, Homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah  Witnesses, Clergymen and others. After the November pogroms in 1938, the so-called "Crystal Night," more than 10,000 Jews were brought to Dachau.

Citizens of Austrian, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union France and others were imprisoned at Dachau as the Germans advanced across various continents.  The German prisoners quickly became the minority with the Polish prisoners the largest national group.  Over 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 countries were imprisoned in Dachau.

From 1942, a network of subsidiary camps and work detachments were established in which over 30,000 prisoners worked almost exclusively for the German armaments industry.  During the war the Dachau concentration camp became a place of mass murder.   In addition, a large number of prisoners were misused by SS doctors for medical experiments such as high altitude experiments, cooling and freezing experiments, a series of malaria experiments and others.

There were 30,000 registered deaths in the Dachau concentration camp. Additionally, thousands who were not registered were murdered in Dachau through starvation, sickness, exhaustion, degradation, beating, and torture.

In1942 a gas chamber was built in the Dachau concentration camp to augment the killings by  firing squad, hanging and through injections., but inexplicably, it was not used.  It was located within the new crematorium, a larger building whose construction with four ovens became necessary when the first crematorium, which had only one oven, proved inadequate.
As the Allies advanced on concentration camps they were evacuated.  At Dachau, on April 27, 1945, approximately 7,000 prisoners were sent on a march towards the Alps in the south.  The next day most of the SS abandoned the camp. On April 29, 1945, Dachau was liberated by units of the US Army.  Prior to the attempt at evacuation before liberation, there were more than 67,000 Dachau concentration camp prisoners. Half of them were in the main camp at Dachau, the remainder in the subsidiary camps and work detachments.

 

Back to the History Page