Nazi Germany established Auschwitz in 1940 outside the Polish city of Oświęcim, a region annexed to the Third Reich after the invasion of Poland. The first camp, Auschwitz I, occupied former Polish army barracks. German authorities initially used it chiefly to imprison Polish political prisoners and members of groups targeted for repression. Prisoners faced forced labor, starvation, beatings, medical experiments, executions, and deliberately lethal living conditions. The camp soon became the center of a much larger system serving both political terror and racial persecution.

Construction of Auschwitz II-Birkenau began in 1941 near the displaced village of Brzezinka. It was designed for enormous numbers of prisoners and developed into the largest killing center used in the Holocaust. Following the Nazi decision to murder Europe’s Jews, deportation trains arrived from across the continent. SS doctors and officials selected many arrivals for immediate death in gas chambers using Zyklon B. Others were registered for forced labor, though hunger, disease, violence, and further selections killed vast numbers. Auschwitz III-Monowitz and numerous subcamps supplied prisoner labor to German industries.

At least 1.1 million people were murdered in the Auschwitz complex. About one million were Jews. The victims also included Poles, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, and people of other nationalities and targeted groups. Prisoners resisted in many ways by preserving evidence, sharing food, practicing faith, sabotaging work, escaping, and organizing underground networks. In October 1944, members of the Sonderkommando forced to work around the crematoria attacked SS guards and damaged a crematorium at Birkenau. The revolt was suppressed and its participants killed.

As the Soviet army approached in January 1945, the SS evacuated tens of thousands of prisoners on deadly marches and attempted to destroy evidence, including crematoria and records. Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on January 27, finding several thousand sick and exhausted prisoners. Survivors’ testimony, captured German documents, photographs, ruins, and material objects established the scale and methods of the crimes. The camp became central evidence in postwar trials and in the historical study of Nazi occupation, forced labor, genocide, and the Holocaust.

Poland created the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 1947 on the grounds of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Preservation has required difficult choices because barracks, ruins, personal belongings, documents, and the landscape itself are evidence of mass murder rather than conventional monuments. UNESCO inscribed the site in 1979. Auschwitz-Birkenau now serves as a cemetery, memorial, museum, research center, and place of education. Its interpretation centers the victims and survivors while confronting the administrative, technological, ideological, and human processes that made systematic murder possible.