A slogan above the entrance to Auschwitz reads ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, or ‘Labor Makes You Free’. The same message was written on the gates at Dachau, another concentration camp in Germany. The grim irony is, of course, that slave labor was a way of life – and death – in the camps. Able-bodied men and women were made to toil under horrific conditions, many of them to their demise. Their captors, on the other hand, made huge returns, with Auschwitz generating a profit equivalent to around $200 million today Looking at Auschwitz nowadays, the bare, functional design of the buildings conveys a sense of the methodical approach the Nazis took to sending the hundreds of thousands of prisoners to their deaths, especially as time went by. Designed with ruthless efficiency, the gas chambers and crematoria that came later stand as testament to the systematic way in which vast numbers of people were murdered. Yet even building the camp was deadly. The task initially fell to 10,000 Russian POWs. Six months later, only 200 of those men remained alive. The piles of personal possessions – which no doubt once belonged to the prisoners and others executed at the camp – are perhaps the most poignant mementos of the horrendous events for which Auschwitz will forever be remembered. Everyday articles like these spectacles are so identifiably human, possibly even more so than biological remains like bones and hair. It is now believed that at least 1.3 million people died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but since there are no proper records – and the Nazis destroyed a number of them – the figure could easily be higher. Others estimate that the number killed could be between 2.1 and 2.5 million, while some sources say the figure could be as high as 4 million. Not all the prisoners died in gas chambers. Starvation, disease, exhaustion, individual executions, and subjection to medical experiments were some of the other means by which prisoners were eliminated.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Aug 2013 23:52:46 +0000
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