Auschwitz

was the largest German concentration and extermination camp and has become a symbol of the Holocaust. More than one million Jews and many tens of thousands of political prisoners from Poland, prisoners of war from the Soviet Union, Sinti and Roma were murdered in Auschwitz.

While from 1940 to early 1942 the Auschwitz I main camp ("Stammlager") was primarily a concentration camp for the internment of political prisoners from Poland and Soviet prisoners of war, from March 1942 the Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp was built as the center of the systematic extermination of European Jews. In addition, the Monowitz camp and several dozen other subcamps were part of the Auschwitz camp complex.