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Barbed wire, watch towers, brick buildings… most of us can picture Auschwitz in our minds. But here’s more on how the largest Nazi death camp came to exist.
In April 1940, the commander of the SS, Himmler, ordered the expansion of a former army barracks in Oswiecim west of Krakow in southern Poland. A place named Auschwitz in German.
In June 1940, the first group of polish prisoners were brought there. A year later, 11,000 people had been transported to the camp.
By early 1941, Himmler asked for it to be enlarged, ordering the construction of a second camp in the neighbouring village of Birkenau.
At first it was built for prisoners of war. But within a few months, Birkenau, or Auschwitz 2, was designated a death camp for Jews from western and central Europe. The mass extermination began in 1942.
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