Auschwitz and the Polish Prisoners

Auschwitz was built to hold Poles. When Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of a concentration camp in the town of Oświęcim in occupied Poland in April 1940, the intended prisoners were Polish political detainees , members of the resistance, intellectuals, priests, former military officers, and anyone the occupation authorities classified as a threat. The first transport to Auschwitz arrived on 14 June 1940: 728 Polish political prisoners transferred from Tarnów prison. For more than a year, Auschwitz was primarily a camp for Polish prisoners, and Poles remained the largest national group in the camp until mid-1942, when the deportation of Jews from across Europe began on a massive scale.

The early camp and Polish prisoners

In the first two years of Auschwitz’s existence, the camp’s primary function was the incarceration and killing of Polish political prisoners. The regime was one of deliberate murderous brutality. Prisoners were subjected to forced labour in the gravel pits and construction sites at a pace designed to kill within weeks. Beatings, executions, and medical experiments were routine. The first mass execution at Auschwitz took place on 22 November 1940, when 348 Polish prisoners were shot. By the end of 1941, before the construction of the Birkenau extermination complex had begun, thousands of Polish political prisoners had already been killed.

The first use of Zyklon B gas at Auschwitz was not on Jews. On 3 September 1941, SS personnel conducted an experimental gassing on approximately 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick Polish prisoners in the basement of Block 11. The results satisfied the camp authorities that mass murder by gas was operationally feasible, and the decision was taken to construct purpose-built gas chambers.

The total Polish death toll at Auschwitz

The precise number of Polish non-Jewish victims at Auschwitz is difficult to establish with certainty because of incomplete records and the deliberate destruction of documentation by the SS before liberation. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum estimates that between 64,000 and 75,000 Polish non-Jewish civilians were killed at Auschwitz, making them the second largest victim group after the approximately 1.1 million Jewish victims. Poles were killed by shooting, by starvation, by overwork, by disease, by phenol injections to the heart, and eventually by gassing.

Polish prisoner resistance at Auschwitz

Polish prisoners were among the most active participants in resistance activities at Auschwitz. The underground resistance organisation within the camp was founded by Polish military officers in 1940. Polish prisoner Witold Pilecki voluntarily allowed himself to be arrested and sent to Auschwitz in order to organise resistance and gather intelligence about the camp’s operations. His reports, smuggled out of the camp, were among the earliest detailed accounts of the mass murder at Auschwitz to reach the Polish government in exile and the Western Allies.

The operational record

The operational record on Auschwitz and the Polish Prisoners is documented in the surviving administrative records of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, in the postwar work of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the subsidiary postwar museums and archives at the various camp sites, in the testimony recorded at the postwar judicial proceedings, and in the substantial body of survivor and perpetrator testimony produced over the postwar period.

The record establishes the operational character of the installation during the wartime period, the operational scale of the killings, the identities of the principal perpetrators, the operational technologies that were deployed, and the consequences of the installation for the surviving Jewish and non-Jewish prisoner populations. The aggregate record stands as the primary source for the academic understanding of the camp in the wider context of the wartime killing programme.

See also

Sources

  • Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1987
  • Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Yale University Press, 1996
  • Geoffrey P. Megargee and Martin Dean, eds, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 to 1945, multi-volume, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Indiana University Press, 2009 onwards
  • Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994