Auschwitz

Auschwitz I was opened in April 1940 as a quarantine facility for Polish prisoners and later became the Auschwitz Poland complex's primary camp and administrative headquarters. The first 30 Polish captives arrived here on May 20, 1940, while the first group of Polish political prisoners arrived on June 14, 1940. Following the implementation of Hitler's final solution, it became an extermination site, complete with a gas chamber, crematorium, bathhouse, laundry, and Barrack 10. These structures are still on display at the Auschwitz Museum, whereas the original prisoner reception area of Auschwitz I has been changed into the museum's visitor reception centre.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau, whose construction began in October 1941, was located three kilometres from Auschwitz I in Brzezinka. It was opened in March 1942 and used as the facility for the extermination of Jews. It was the largest camp in the Auschwitz Poland complex and was divided into ten divisions with electrified barbed-wire fences separating them. It also comprises four crematoriums, numerous gas chambers and body cellars. There were about 40 smaller subcamps that housed slave labourers. Approximately 90% of the victims of the Auschwitz concentration camps died in Birkenau, 90% of them were Jews.

Known as the KL Auschwitz III subcamp or the Monowitz concentration camp, it was the first concentration camp in Poland financed and erected by private industry. Opened in 1942, it received its first group of convicts on October 30, 1942, and was the largest of Auschwitz's subcamps. Monowitz began as a barrack camp for slave workers working at IG Farben and other companies but quickly evolved into the headquarter of the industrial sub-camps. Despite better conditions than other Auschwitz concentration camps, arduous labour took its toll on the captives, who died in the sub-camp hospital or were murdered on the spot. Visitors' entry is not permitted to the Monowitz and other subcamps.