
Around one in six Jews killed in the Holocaust died in Auschwitz.[195] By nation, the greatest number of Auschwitz's Jewish victims originated from Hungary, accounting for 430,000 deaths, followed by Poland (300,000), France (69,000), Netherlands (60,000), Greece (55,000), Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (46,000), other camps (34,000), Slovakia (27,000), Belgium (25,000), Germany and Austria (23,000), Yugoslavia (10,000), Italy (7,500), and Norway (690).[6] Fewer than one percent of Soviet Jews murdered in the Holocaust were killed in Auschwitz; German forces had already been driven from Russia when the killing at Auschwitz reached its peak in 1944.[196] Of the 400 Jehovah's Witnesses who were imprisoned at Auschwitz, 132 died there.[197]
Blitzkrieg tactics often affected civilians in a way perceived by some to be negative — sometimes intentionally, and sometimes not. Whereas more traditional conflict resulted in a well-defined, slow moving front line, giving civilians time to be evacuated to safety, the new approach did not provide for this luxury. As a result, civilian casualties, as a percentage of the total, increased substantially. Furthermore, in the total war doctrine, civilians were explicitly targeted (as in the Allied bombing of Dresden), in an effort to break the morale of the citizenry of a country in order to frustrate attempts at production, and ultimately support for the cause over which the war was fought.
Despite the horrible conditions, prisoners in Auschwitz managed to resist the Nazis, including some instances of escape and armed resistance. In October 1944, members of the Sonderkommando, who worked in the crematoria, succeeded in killing several SS men and destroying one gas chamber. All of the rebels died, leaving behind diaries that provided authentic documentation of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz.
In October 1941, work began on Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, located outside the nearby village of Brzezinka. There the SS later developed a huge concentration camp and extermination complex that included some 300 prison barracks; four large so-called Badeanstalten (German: “bathhouses”), in which prisoners were gassed to death; Leichenkeller (“corpse cellars”), in which their bodies were stored; and Einäscherungsöfen (“cremating ovens”). Another camp (Buna-Monowitz), near the village of Dwory, later called Auschwitz III, became in May 1942 a slave-labour camp supplying workers for the nearby chemical and synthetic-rubber works of IG Farben. In addition, Auschwitz became the nexus of a complex of 45 smaller subcamps in the region, most of which housed slave labourers. During most of the period from 1940 to 1945, the commandant of the central Auschwitz camps was SS-Hauptsturmführer (Capt.) and ultimately SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieut. Col.) Rudolf Franz Hoess (Höss).
It has been argued that blitzkrieg was not new; the Germans did not invent something called blitzkrieg in the 1920s and 1930s.[109][151] Rather the German concept of wars of movement and concentrated force were seen in wars of Prussia and the German wars of unification. The first European general to introduce rapid movement, concentrated power and integrated military effort was Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years' War. The appearance of the aircraft and tank in the First World War, called an RMA, offered the German military a chance to get back to the traditional war of movement as practised by Moltke the Elder. The so-called "blitzkrieg campaigns" of 1939 – circa 1942, were well within that operational context.[109]
There was "practically no resistance" in the ghettos in Poland by the end of 1942, according to Peter Longerich.[305] Raul Hilberg accounted for this by evoking the history of Jewish persecution: as had been the case before, appealing to their oppressors and complying with orders might avoid inflaming the situation until the onslaught abated.[306] Henri Michel argued that resistance consisted not only of physical opposition but of any activity that gave the Jews humanity in inhumane conditions, while Yehuda Bauer defined resistance as actions that in any way opposed the German directives, laws, or conduct.[307] Hilberg cautioned against overstating the extent of Jewish resistance, arguing that turning isolated incidents into resistance elevates the slaughter of innocent people into some kind of battle, diminishes the heroism of those who took active measures to resist, and deflects questions about the survival strategies and leadership of the Jewish community.[308] Timothy Snyder noted that it was only during the three months after the deportations of July–September 1942 that agreement on the need for armed resistance was reached.[309]
Romania implemented anti-Jewish measures in May and June 1940 as part of its efforts towards an alliance with Germany. Jews were forced from government service, pogroms were carried out, and by March 1941 all Jews had lost their jobs and had their property confiscated.[169] After Romania joined the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, at least 13,266 Jews were killed in the Iași pogrom,[170] and Romanian troops carried out massacres in Romanian-controlled territory, including the Odessa massacre of 20,000 Jews in Odessa in late 1941. Romania also set up concentration camps under its control in Transnistria, where 154,000–170,000 Jews were deported from 1941 to 1943.[169]
Measuring 270 by 490 metres (890 ft × 1,610 ft), the camp was larger than Auschwitz I. By the end of 1944, it housed 60 barracks measuring 17.5 by 8 metres (57 ft × 26 ft), each with a day room and a sleeping room containing 56 three-tiered wooden bunks.[58] IG Farben paid the SS three or four Reichsmark for nine- to eleven-hour shifts from each worker.[59] In 1943–1944, about 35,000 inmates worked at the plant; 23,000 (32 a day on average) died as a result of malnutrition, disease, and the workload.[60] Deaths and transfers to Birkenau reduced the population by nearly a fifth each month;[61] site managers constantly threatened inmates with the gas chambers.[59] In addition to the Auschwitz inmates, who comprised a third of the work force, IG Auschwitz employed slave laborers from all over Europe.[62] When the camp was liquidated in January 1945, 9,054 out of the 9,792 inmates were Jews.[63]

The origins of blitzkrieg are in some doubt: if it existed, who contributed to it, whether it was part of German war strategy from 1933–1939. There has been a great deal of debate about whether it existed as a coherent military strategy. Many historians[who?] now think that blitzkrieg was not a military theory and the campaigns conducted by the Germans from 1939 to circa 1942 (with the exception of Operation Barbarossa) were improvised, rather than being based on a particular military strategy. Blitzkrieg had been called a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) but many writers and historians have concluded that the Germans did not invent a new form of warfare but applied new technologies to traditional ideas of Bewegungskrieg (manoeuvre warfare) to achieve decisive victory.[109]


Мощные стены, колючая проволока, платформы, бараки, виселицы, газовые камеры и кремационные печи показывают условия, в которых нацисты осуществляли свою политику геноцида в бывшем концентрационном лагере смерти Аушвиц-Биркенау (Освенцим) – крупнейшем в Третьем Рейхе. Исторические исследования говорят, что 1,5 млн. человек, среди которых большинство составляли евреи, подвергались пыткам и умерщвлялись в этом лагере, – месте, ставшем в ХХ в. символом человеческой жестокости по отношению к себе подобным.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest Nazi extermination and concentration camp, located in the Polish town of Oswiecim, 37 miles west of Cracow. One sixth of all Jews murdered by the Nazis were gassed at Auschwitz. In April 1940 SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of a new concentration camp in Oswiecim, a town located within the portion of Poland that was annexed to Germany at the beginning of World War II. The first Polish political prisoners arrived in Auschwitz in June 1940, and by March 1941 there were 10,900 prisoners, the majority of whom were Polish. Auschwitz soon became known as the most brutal of the Nazi concentration camps.
That month, Himmler ordered the evacuation of all camps, charging camp commanders with "making sure that not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy".[239] Beginning on 17 January, 56,000–58,000 Auschwitz detainees—over 20,000 from Auschwitz I and II, over 30,000 from subcamps, and two-thirds of them Jews—were evacuated under guard, largely on foot, in severe winter conditions, heading west.[240][241] Around 2,200 were evacuated by rail from two subcamps; fewer than 9,000 were left behind, deemed too sick to move.[242] During the marches, camp staff shot anyone too sick or exhausted to continue, or anyone stopping to urinate or tie a shoelace. SS officers walked behind the marchers killing anyone lagging behind who had not already been shot.[234] Peter Longerich estimates that a quarter of the detainees were thus killed.[235] Those who managed to walk to Wodzisław Śląski and Gliwice were sent on open freight cars, without food, to concentration camps in Germany: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Dora-Mittelbau, Ravensbruck, and Sachsenhausen.[243]

As you walk about the camp it is not difficult to picture the squalor and anguish that victims had to endure. The living accommodation tended to be built like makeshift barns. There were no foundations, and little defense against the elements. Unsurprisingly, inmates were plagued by ill-health - the bitterness of the Polish winter must have been unbearable.
Oskar Schindler was born April 28, 1908, in the city of Svitavy [Zwittau], in the Sudetenland, now part of the Czech Republic. The eldest of two children, Oskar’s father, Hans Schindler, was a farm-equipment manufacturer, his mother, Louisa, was a homemaker. Oscar and his sister, Elfriede, attended a German-language school where he was popular, though not an exceptional student. Forgoing the opportunity to attend college, he went to trade school instead, taking courses in several areas.
After 1942, the economic functions of the camps, previously secondary to their penal and terror functions, came to the fore. Forced labor of camp prisoners became commonplace.[182] The guards became much more brutal, and the death rate increased as the guards not only beat and starved prisoners, but killed them more frequently.[186] Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("extermination through labor") was a policy—camp inmates would literally be worked to death, or to physical exhaustion, at which point they would be gassed or shot.[187] The Germans estimated the average prisoner's lifespan in a concentration camp at three months, due to lack of food and clothing, constant epidemics, and frequent punishments for the most minor transgressions.[188] The shifts were long and often involved exposure to dangerous materials.[189]

As for Schindler's wife Emilie, who also played a huge (but publicly understated) role in saving hundreds of Jews during World War II, she continued to live in Argentina, scraping by with the help of the Schindler Jews and the government of Argentina. Towards the end of her life and in failing health, she asked to live her remaining days in Germany. Although a home was secured for her in Bavaria in the summer of 2001, she would never live in it. Soon after she became critically ill and died on October 5, 2001 in a Berlin hospital. She was just shy of her 94th birthday.


Living standards were not high in the late 1930s. Consumption of consumer goods had fallen from 71 percent in 1928 to 59 percent in 1938. The demands of the war economy reduced the amount of spending in non-military sectors to satisfy the demand for the armed forces. On 9 September, Göring as Head of the Reich Defence Council, called for complete "employment" of living and fighting power of the national economy for the duration of the war. Overy presents this as evidence that a "blitzkrieg economy" did not exist.[133]
In 1988, West Germany allocated another $125 million for reparations. Companies such as BMW, Deutsche Bank, Ford, Opel, Siemens, and Volkswagen faced lawsuits for their use of forced labor during the war.[463] In response, Germany set up the "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" Foundation in 2000, which paid €4.45 billion to former slave laborers (up to €7,670 each).[465] In 2013, Germany agreed to provide €772 million to fund nursing care, social services, and medication for 56,000 Holocaust survivors around the world.[466] The French state-owned railway company, the SNCF, agreed in 2014 to pay $60 million to Jewish-American survivors, around $100,000 each, for its role in the transport of 76,000 Jews from France to extermination camps between 1942 and 1944.[467]



Following the camp's liberation, the Soviet government issued a statement, on 8 May 1945, that four million people had been killed on the site, a figure based on the capacity of the crematoria and later regarded as too high.[184] Höss told prosecutors at Nuremberg that at least 2,500,000 people had been murdered in Auschwitz by gassing and burning, and that another 500,000 had died of starvation and disease.[185] He testified that the figure of over two million had come from Eichmann.[186][d] In his memoirs, written in custody, he wrote that he regarded this figure as "far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive possibilities."[188] Raul Hilberg's 1961 work, The Destruction of the European Jews, estimated that up to 1,000,000 Jews had died in Auschwitz.[189]
Uprisings broke out in some extermination camps. The few remaining Jews kept alive to dispose of bodies and sort possessions realised the number of transportees was reducing and they would be next. Civilian uprisings occurred across Poland as mainly young Jews, whose families had already been murdered, began to resist Nazi oppression. With reports of rebellion and mass murder in the British press, the situation in the camps could no longer be be ignored.

This is the true story of one remarkable man who outwitted Hitler and the Nazis to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other during World War II. It is the story of Oscar Schindler who surfaced from the chaos of madness, spent millions bribing and paying off the SS and eventually risked his life to rescue 1200 Jews in the shadow of Auschwitz. In those years, millions of Jews died in the Nazi death camps, but Schindler's Jews miraculously survived.
As was the case in other camps, the primary form of voluntary music-making in Birkenau was singing.  Due to its size and international composition, there were inmates from all over Europe whose voices survivors remembered.  Prisoners sang to comfort one another, to build solidarity and to express resistance.  The former inmate Kitty Hart remembered that

Who knew actor Ralph Fiennes would be so possessive of his Voldemort role from the Harry Potter movies? After all the hours sitting in a makeup chair, putting on a bald cap, and making his nose disappear day after day, you’d think Fiennes would be ok with never playing this evil character again—especially considering that he almost turned down the role in the first place. But it seems that the character really grew on the two-time Oscar nominee. As Screen Rant reports, Fiennes has made it clear that if Voldemort is ever needed in a future film, he's ready to come back.
The hair of 12 year-old Lili had not been cut since her early childhood. When she and her family were forced to leave their home in Târgu-Mureş and move to the ghetto, Lili’s mother, Rivka, knew she would not be able to care properly for her daughter’s hair in the ghetto. Chopping off Lili’s two long, beautiful braids, she promised that they would be given to the neighbors for safekeeping.Within six weeks, Lili and her mother were murdered at Auschwitz.
The influence of air forces over forces on the ground changed significantly over the course of the Second World War. Early German successes were conducted when Allied aircraft could not make a significant impact on the battlefield. In May 1940, there was near parity in numbers of aircraft between the Luftwaffe and the Allies, but the Luftwaffe had been developed to support Germany's ground forces, had liaison officers with the mobile formations, and operated a higher number of sorties per aircraft.[71] In addition, German air parity or superiority allowed the unencumbered movement of ground forces, their unhindered assembly into concentrated attack formations, aerial reconnaissance, aerial resupply of fast moving formations and close air support at the point of attack.[citation needed] The Allied air forces had no close air support aircraft, training or doctrine.[71] The Allies flew 434 French and 160 British sorties a day but methods of attacking ground targets had yet to be developed; therefore Allied aircraft caused negligible damage. Against these 600 sorties the Luftwaffe on average flew 1,500 sorties a day.[72] On May 13, Fliegerkorps VIII flew 1,000 sorties in support of the crossing of the Meuse. The following day the Allies made repeated attempts to destroy the German pontoon bridges, but German fighter aircraft, ground fire and Luftwaffe flak batteries with the panzer forces destroyed 56 percent of the attacking Allied aircraft while the bridges remained intact.[73]

Although the prisoners deployed at Emalia were still subject to the brutal conditions of the Plaszow concentration camp, Schindler intervened repeatedly on their behalf. He used bribes and personal diplomacy both for the well-being of Jews threatened on an individual basis and to ensure, until late 1944, that the SS did not deport his Jewish workers. In order to claim the Jewish workers to be essential to the war effort, he added an armaments manufacturing division to Emalia. During the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in March 1943, Schindler allowed his Jewish workers to stay at the factory overnight.