An hour and a half from Kraków by bus lies Auschwitz. “Auschwitz” was a large number of camps, most of them slave labor camps.
The first Auschwitz camp was an ex-Polish military garrison. At first blush it’s rather underwhelming. Maybe 20 acres in size and 30+ brick buildings. Like Dachau, it has a “work sets you free” sign — “Arbeit macht frei.”
Wire and towers:
There are displays in several of the buildings. Glasses, luggage, pots/pans, children’s shoes, prosthetics; all gathered from the prisoners.
It was here, Auschwitz I, where the Nazi “doctors” experimented on prisoners.
There was a small “shower” where some prisoners were gassed, Zyklon-B, and, a crematorium.
But, as I say, seemingly underwhelming. Millions killed? Here?
No, here — Auschwitz II Birkenau, about 2 miles from Auschwitz I:
This place has scale. Over 400 acres. Hundreds of buildings. An assembly line of “showers” and crematoriums. The SS puts the throughput of each crematorium at over 2,000 per day.
Scale:
The “sorting yard.” Trains arrived, cattle cars unloaded, those fit for work kept, those unfit — Zyklon B. Sometimes, when there was no immediate need for workers, the entire train would be sent to the gas chambers.
The gibbet where the SS commander was hanged. There are two ways to hang someone. There’s the drop method, where the body drops through the scaffolding breaking the neck. (Evidently there’s a bit of science to doing it properly. If the drop is too short, the neck doesn’t snap, and, if the drop is too long, you can decapitate the condemned. A good executioner needs to know the height and weight of the condemned in order to calculate how long the rope, and, thus, the drop should be.)
The second way is to simply “string them up.” In this method the person strangles to death rather than dying from a broken neck. A far more gruesome fate. The SS commandment was strangled.
