The Hitlerite concentration camp Auschwitz-Brzezinka (Auschwitz-Birkenau), located in the south of Poland, it was decided to leave untouchable as a place of grief for the whole world. On the territory of the infamous concentration camp, where “racially and biologically alien” elements — Jews, Gypsies, and representatives of many other peoples — were subjected to ruthless total destruction, a museum complex dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Nazi regime operates.
The exact number of those who were tortured, shot, poisoned in gas chambers, who died of starvation, illness, excessive work, or as a result of painful medical experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele was not established, since during the Soviet offensive the documentation of the concentration camp was destroyed, and most of the prisoners were driven to west to the death march. According to most researchers, in 1941-1945, about 1.3 million people died in the largest Nazi extermination camp
The location of the concentration camp was chosen by the small Polish city of Auschwitz, renamed Auschwitz. The town had good rail links, allowing you to send a huge number of people here from all over Europe. The road to death for hundreds of thousands of innocent people was the railway line leading to the Auschwitz concentration camp (photo below).
In April 1940, Rudolf Hess, on the orders of the Führer, set about creating an extermination camp. Then the Auschwitz concentration camp received the first prisoners - Poles, who became forced builders. About a year later, according to Himmler’s decree, the construction of the second section of the extermination camp (Birkenau or Auschwitz II) began. Here, through the efforts of the demons of National Socialism, the most inhuman and degrading conditions of stay were created, terrible weapons of mass extermination of people — gas chambers and a crematorium — were found.
Soon, the Auschwitz concentration camp replenished with the third section - a complex of forced labor camps (Auschwitz III). It was in Auschwitz on the gallows that the camp commandant of Hess, the leader of the daily extermination of people, was destined to say goodbye to life. But before he became a participant in the Nuremberg trials, where he told the world about the superior possibility of human understanding, the sophisticated technique of massacres carried out in the largest of all known camps.
It is difficult to determine what feelings such gloomy exhibits evoke among visitors to the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum: the Aubwitz-made cast-iron inscription “Arbeit macht frei” - the cynical slogan “Work makes you free”; a four-meter-high barbed-wire fence through which current was blown; block number 10 - the place where Nazi savage doctors conducted experiments on people; The “executive wall”, where prisoners were shot; crematorium; barracks. After all, the Auschwitz concentration camp is not only a place where human values ​​were violated under the influence of a crazy idea.
Prisoners of the monstrous death camp managed to resist and escape. These barracks witnessed the upsurge of the human spirit and self-sacrifice, when one prisoner gave his life for another or selflessly courted a weakened, doomed to death, comrade.
Auschwitz-Birkenau is not only a monument to the triumph of victims over the executioners, but also a very serious warning to humanity.