Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi concentration camps. Located in southern Poland, it took its name from the nearby town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz in German), situated about 50 kilometers west of Kraków and 286 kilometers from Warsaw. Following the Nazi occupation of Poland in September 1939, Oswiecim was incorporated into Germany and renamed Auschwitz.

     
The camp complex consisted of three main camps: Auschwitz I, the administrative center; Auschwitz II (Birkenau), an extermination camp or Vernichtungslager; and Auschwitz III (Monowitz), a work camp. There were also around 40 satellite camps, some of them tens of kilometers from the main camps, with prisoner populations ranging from several dozen to several thousand.

An unknown, but very large, number of people were killed at Auschwitz. The camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, testifed at the Nuremberg Trials that three million had died there. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum revised this figure in 1990, and new calculations now place the figure at 1.1–1.6 million, about 90 percent of them Jews from almost every country in Europe. Methods of killing people at Auschwitz included, primarily, gassing with Zyklon-B; systematic starvation, lack of disease prevention, individual executions and so-called medical experiments accounted for the rest.

Attractions at Auschwitz-Birkenau:
Nazi concentration camps

Location
City:  Oswiecim
Country: Poland
 
   
 
 
 
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Some of this entry uses material from the Wikipedia article "Auschwitz-Birkenau", which is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
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