Auschwitz and Birkenau, two places the world should never forget

In March 1939 Germany from the west and Russia from the east invaded Poland.  Right away the Germans rounded up all of the politicians and university professors and killed or imprisoned them.  Their first prison or concentration camp was Auschwitz.  The camp was once a military camp for the Polish army.

This is the entrance gate to Auschwitz.  It is located in a Polish town of Auschwitz, not far from the city of Kraków.  It was first used for political prisoners but in 1940 many other kinds of prisoners were brought into Auschwitz.

In the photos below you can see how the camp was made so it was impossible to escape.  There are two sets of electrified barbed wire fences with guard towers 50 meters apart between the fences.  If the prisoner made it past the first fence he or she would be shot by one of the guards in the towers.

The next photo is self explanatory. Read it and let the numbers sink in!

Auschwitz was centrally located in the network of the Nazi concentration camps.  As the war progressed, more and more prisoners were sent to Auschwitz.  

The Nazis built a wall that they used to assasinate prisoners who were arrested for helping the Polish resistance fighters.

This is as it was in the 1940's.

Today it is a memorial to those who died in front of it.

Auschwitz was too small to handle the influx of all the prisoners from the other camps.  Many of the prisoners were gassed and murdered once they reached the camp.  The Germans had the Jewish prisoners build a bigger camp a few miles away to handle the volume of prisoners.  The Germans took over seven Polish towns and had them destroyed to build this camp, Birckenau.  This camp had four large gas chambers.  Each could hold 2,000 victims at a time.

This is the entrance to Birkenau.  You may recognize it from many, many movies made about the holocaust.

Here is a photo of the staging area with prisoners arriving by train.

Here is that same area today.

The prisoners would either go to the left, where they would be held for the gas chambers, to the right to become slave labor, or straight ahead to one of the four gas chambers to be executed right away.

One last photo.

This was the toilet facility for 6,000 prisoners. They could only use them twice a day. Once in the morning and once in the night.  No running water and they had to be shoveled out to be cleaned.

I know this post is a real downer and I didn't get into the real graphics of the life in the camps.  EVERYONE SHOULD SEE THIS AND NEVER FORGET WHAT HAPPENED!