The Gate

European Photo Trip #2: Krakow, Poland. Day trip to Auschwitz.

The entrance gate that prisoners called the "Gate of Death" was located in the main SS guardhouse building. Trains carrying deportees entered here after May 1944 on the railroad spur that extended into the camp.

Auschwitz II (Birkenau) is the camp that people know simply as "Auschwitz". It was the site of imprisonment of hundreds of thousands, and the murder of over one million people, mainly Jews.

The camp's main purpose, however, was not internment with forced labor (as Auschwitz I & III) but rather extermination. For this purpose, the camp was equipped with 4 crematoria with gas chambers; each gas chamber was designed to hold up to 2500 people at one time.

Large-scale extermination started in Spring 1942.

Text sources: auschwitz-muzeum.oswiecim.pl , Wikipedia