Auschwitz Concentration Camps

One of the darkest episodes in the recorded history of mankind was the Nazi effort at systematic extermination of the Jewish race. This notorious act mostly took place in concentration or extermination camps. This paper will analyze the location, infrastructure, conditions, people involved and the brutal nature of three concentration camps- Auschwitz, Treblinka and Chelmno.

1. Auschwitz
Auschwitz occupies history as the location of the highest level of human depravity. Of all the concentration and death camps in history, Auschwitz is argued to have had the most deaths. The Nazi’s killed 960, 000 of close to 1.3 million Jews they had deported to Poland. According to the numbers provided by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Auschwitz was the

It was designed to create inhuman conditions for humiliating and slow murder of prisoners by starvation. After 1942, it took a different form and became a full-fledged extermination camp. Most of the targeted victims were Jews.
Auschwitz II-Birkenau is argued to have had the largest prisoner population of any of the three main camps. It is at Auschwitz II that the first gas chamber was opened in 1942. The Nazis used lethal Zyklon B to kill prisoners in their thousands. Four more chambers were built and they were operational until 1944 when the war was drawing close to the end. According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial museum, an estimated 10,000 laborers are thought to have died there (Auschwitz, n.d.) Once they were judged incapable of work, most were murdered with a phenol injection to the heart.
Auschwitz III-Monowitz became operational in October 1942. Monowitz was used as a base for imprisoned laborers working for IG Farben, a chemical company. Of the three camps, Monowitz was more infamous for prisoner labor than

Unlike the larger extermination camps, Chelmno used mobile gas vans as compared to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka. The gas vans became function on December 8, the same day the mass killings began. It is reported that Chelmno acquired its infamous reputation for bone crushing. Montague notes that the mass killings in Chelmno involved two stages (3). The first stage was experimental killing of mentally and physically disabled patients. After noticing the success of these mass killings, the Nazi’s them went on to the second stage. The second stage involved gas killings of Jews and people considered of lesser humanity like the