COLLECTED CONTENT: The first transport to Auschwitz

14.06.2023

COLLECTED CONTENT: The first transport to Auschwitz

On 14 June 1940, German concentration camp Auschwitz received 728 Poles, its first - save for thirty German criminals who had been brought here to take the positions of kapos - inmates. Initially a detention and elimination facility targeting almost exclusively the Third Reich's enemies from Poland, in time it expanded the scope of its operation, adding extermination of Jews from all over Europe, slave labour benefitting the German industry, large-scale robbery of deportees, and many others.

The first transport to Auschwitz commemoration image

"You came here not to a sanatorium, but to a German concentration camp"

Large-scale German repressions against the Polish nation demanded a large terror facility: in all, 400,000 numbers were issued to the inmates, and some 900,00 were murdered without being registered.

They became numbers from 31 to 758.

Their ordeal ultimately killed most of the first arrivals.

Daily Apocalypse. The first weeks in Auschwitz.

The chances of survival of the people who ended up in KL Auschwitz were slim; the camp was built to eliminate the Third Reich's enemies.

Five of the Auschwitz victims

Auschwitz was not an exception - the German terror machine relied on a dense network of such facilities.