auschfits

[Aa01]

I was recently watching a documentary on bbc2 about Auschfits (excuse my spelling), explaining that the camp was originally intended as sum sort of place where raw materials wer to be excavated. Iz this true?, as i find this intruiging

[bernardo]

Yes - Auschwitz (spelling) was part of the network of extracting raw materials (coal etc) from the land to contribute to the national economy.  This was done partly with the use of slave labour from political prisoners in the concentration camps.

 

Auschwitz did not become a mass-extermination camp until about 1942, when the decision was made by the Nazi government to kill all the Jews in Germany and in the occupied areas.

 

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the initial attitude towards how the Jewish "problem" should be "solved" was that they should be gradually excluded from society, marginalised, deprived of their property and expelled.  The process of expelling Jews from the occupied areas (to America, Britain, Palestine, Switzerland or wherever) gradually became more and more difficult because the countries which received Jewish refugees put more and more restrictions on the numbers accepted, and put conditions on accepting only those who had wealth and could support themselves or contribute to the economy.  These restrictions came into being because the Nazis wanted to strip the Jews of all their wealth and possessions before expelling them.

 

These factors gradually produced a vicious spiral which meant that there were gradually fewer and fewer possible "solutions" of what should be done with the jews, and eventually led to the simplistic decision that they should all be killed rather than expelled.  This is why the extermination programme did not start until the 1940s, and the concentration camps were used for re-settlement and forced labour for a number of years before the extermination began.

[Philtaz]

A second camp was built roughly a mile and a half from Auschwitz.  It was called Birkenau.  Between the two camps it is estimated that 1.1 million people died there. 1 million of them were Jews.  Approximately 900,000 were gassed in Birkenau.

[Sludge]

Above the gate at Auschwitz is the motto "Arbelt Macht Frei". Because of the terrible transporting of people by cattle trucks it was not until they saw this motto (it was known to everybody) did they know that they had been brought to Auschwitz. The majority then suffered the awful realisation that they would be leaving as smoke. There are five barracks there marked A - E. In the summer of 1944 a train came every four hours day and night. So many people were being gassed (4000 every 15 minutes) that the crematorium could not cope. 
You refer to manufacturing in German concentration camps, and I hope that the following may be of interest to you.

[Sludge]

Above the gate at Auschwitz is the motto "Arbelt Macht Frei". Because of the terrible transporting of people by cattle trucks it was not until they saw this motto (it was known to everybody) did they know that they had been brought to Auschwitz. The majority then suffered the awful realisation that they would be leaving as smoke. There are five barracks there marked A - E. In the summer of 1944 a train came every four hours day and night. So many people were being gassed (4000 every 15 minutes) that the crematorium could not cope. 
You refer to manufacturing in German concentration camps, and I hope that the following may be of interest to you.

[Sludge]

As Philtaz tells you there was an equally dreadful camp at Birkenau. At first a subsidiary of Birkenau and later an establishment in its own right was another camp called Dora-Nordhausen. This was an extensive series of underground mines in the southern Hartz mountains with a rolling prisoner population of 12000 and its own crematorium and was where all of the German rockets were manufactured under the control of von Braun. Wernher von Braun (1912�1977) was one of the most important rocket developers and champions of space exploration during the period the 1930s to the 1970s. . He lead the �rocket team� which developed the V�2 ballistic missile for the Nazis during World War II.The V�2 rocket was the immediate antecedent of those used in space exploration programs in the United States and the Soviet Union. A liquid propellant missile extending some 46 feet in length and weighing 27,000 pounds, the V-2 flew at speeds in excess of 3,500 miles per hour and delivered a 2,200-pound warhead to a target 500 miles away. All V-2 production was in the mines, tunnels and concentration camp at Dora where more than 20,000 people died  through execution, starvation, and disease. Before the Allied capture of the V�2 rocket complex, von Braun surrendered 500 of his top rocket scientists, along with plans and test vehicles, to the Americans. For fifteen years after World War II, von Braun worked with the U.S. Army in the development of ballistic missiles. In 1960 he transferred from the Army to the newly established NASA to build the giant Saturn rockets. Wernher von Braun was director of NASA�s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief designer of the Saturn V launch vehicle that propelled the Americans to the Moon. 
 
  
 
 
   
 
                  
   
 
 
  

[Sludge]

In answer to a question I posted the following in another section of Answerbank but it fell on stoney ground there. I therefore reproduce it here in the hope that it adds something of interest:-

 

The Dora concentration camp (also known as Dora-Mittelbau, Dora-Nordhausen or Nordhausen) was in central Germany in the southern Harz Mountains. It was originally a subcamp of Birkenau, then of Buchenwald. It was enclosed by an electrified barbed-wire fence with a crematoria located in the north of the camp. In October 1944, the SS made Dora an independent concentration camp. Allied air raids obliged the Germans to  construct of an underground production facility at Dora to produce Weapons of Retaliation (Vergeltungswaffen - V-2 rockets). Prisoners in Dora were thereafter kept mostly underground, deprived of daylight and fresh air, were forced to dig vast unstable tunnels and imprisoned in the unstable tunnels. The mortality rate was higher than at most other concentration camps. Dora-Mittelbau had a rolling prisoner population of at least 12,000. In May 1944 I had to go to Dora to assist in identifying two 6 stone live hairless skeletons who had total amnesia. They were two young service women colleagues. Some of the SS guards were held in captivity nearby. Those I saw looked well fed and normal. All wore Swastika armbands.