Auschwitz: A History by Sybille Steinbacher

Author:Sybille Steinbacher [Steinbacher, Sybille]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062296191
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-05-21T07:00:00+00:00

MAP 5 Auschwitz II (Birkenau) as of 1944

About 10,000 Soviet soldiers arrived in Auschwitz in October 1941. They were initially housed in a separate part of the parent camp, which was reached through a gate bearing the inscription ‘Russian prisoner of war labour camp’. The supply of Soviet prisoners of war was initially thought to be inexhaustible. For economic and nutritional reasons, hundreds of thousands of them were thus abandoned to starvation. Of a total of 5.7million Soviet prisoners of war, 3.3 million died, 2 million of them by February 1942.

After just a month fewer than half of the Soviet soldiers were left alive. In February 1942 their numbers had fallen to 2,000, and in March 1942 the remaining 945 were transferred to Birkenau. In May 1942, 186 of those prisoners were still alive. When it became clear that Soviet prisoners of war were not going to be supplying the massive numbers of workers expected, Birkenau camp was transformed, in a sequence of decisions that cannot be reconstructed, into an extermination camp.

After the mass deaths of the Soviet soldiers it would seem that Jews were to be brought in as a work-force for the expansive settlement projects ‘in the East’, and sent to Auschwitz–Birkenau in their tens of thousands. In January 1942 Himmler announced the arrival of 150,000 Jews, a third of them women. The plan was not realized in its entirety, but the first mass transports of women occurred in March. Ten blocks in the parent camp, separated off by a wall, served as the women’s camp; at first it fell under the administration of the Ravensbrück camp, where the women had come from. When they were transferred to Birkenau in mid-August 1942, a new women’s camp was set up in sections BIa and BIb (all the areas of the camp had shorthand names consisting of letters and Roman numerals). Some 13,000 women moved into the barracks, by which time around 5,000 had already perished. With the female prisoners the first female warders arrived at the SS site of Auschwitz. Commandant Höss, who did not think the female guards were entirely suitable, ordered an SS man to each position, so that all the main camp, report and command positions in the women’s camp were always filled twice over.

The Birkenau camp remained at first a sub-camp of the much smaller parent camp; in November 1943 it was made an autonomous camp in the wake of the administrative restructuring after Höss’s transfer.

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