Auschwitz-Birkenau (camp de concentration et centre de mise à mort)

The Auschwitz complex, in Polish Upper Silesia annexed to the Reich, brought together from 1940 a concentration camp (Auschwitz I), a killing center combined with a concentration camp (Auschwitz II-Birkenau) and a slave labor camp (Auschwitz III-Monowitz, linked to the IG-Farben factory). Having become the main extermination center of the « Final Solution », it was the destination of virtually all convoys departing from France. More than a million people, the vast majority of them Jews, were murdered there, most gassed upon arrival. Liberated on 27 January 1945, Auschwitz became the universal symbol of the Shoah.

Sources & resources

• Auschwitz — Tal Bruttmann, 2015
• Les Crématoires d'Auschwitz. La machinerie du meurtre de masse — Jean-Claude Pressac, 1993
• Mémoire Juive & Éducation — Dominique Natanson ↗