A Sign over the entrance to the camp read:

ARBEIT MACHT FREI, which means "Work Makes One Free". It's kind of Ironic because opposite part of it is  true. Labor became another form of genocide that the nazi called "EXTERMINATIONTHROUGH WORK".

DEPORTATIONS

In the months following the Wannsee Conference, the Nazi regime continued to carryout their plans for the "Final Solution." Jews were "deported"-- transported by trains or trucks to six camps, all located in occupied Poland: Chelmno,Creblinka,Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz- Birkenau, and Majdanek-Lublin.

The Nazis called these six camps "extermination" camps". Most of the deportees Are immediately murdered in large groups by poisonous gas. The Nazis changed gassing as their preferred method of mass murder  because they saw it as "cleaner" and more "efficient" than shooting. Gassing also spared the killers the emotional stress many mobile killing squad members had felt shooting people face to face. They were located near major rail road lines, following trains to transport hundreds of thousands of people to the killing sites.

Many of the victims were deported from nearby ghettos, some as early as December 1941, even before the Wannsee meeting. The SS began in earnest to empty the ghettos, however, in the summer of 1942. In two years' time, more than two million Jews were taken out of the ghettos. By the summer of 1944, few ghettos remained in eastern Europe.

At the same time ghettos ere being emptied , masses of Jews and Roma (Gypsies) were transported from the many distant countries occupied or controlled by Germany, including France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Hungary, Romania, Italy, North Africa, and Greece.

The deportations required the help of many people and all branches of the Germans government. The victims in Poland were already imprisoned in ghettos and totally under German control. The deportation of Jews from other parts of Europe , however, was a far more complex problem. The German Foreign Ministry succeeded in pressuring most governments of occupied and allied nations to assist the Germans in the deportation of Jews living in their countries.

Those who had been selected to die were led to gas chambers. In order to prevent panic, camp guards told the victims that they were going to take showers to rid themselves of lice. The guards instructed them to turn over all their valuables and to undress. Then they were driven naked into the "showers." A guard closed and locked the steel door. In some killing centers, carbon monoxide was piped into the chamber. In others, camp guards threw "Zyklon B" pellets down an air shaft. Zyklon B was a highly poisonous insecticide also used to kill rats and insects.

Usually within minutes after entering the gas chambers, everyone inside was dead from lack of oxygen. Under guard, prisoners were forced to haul the corpses to a nearby room, where they removed hair, gold teeth, and fillings. The bodies were burned in ovens in the crematoria or buried in mass graves.

Many people profited from the pillage of corpses. Camp guards stole some of the gold. The rest was melted down and deposited in an SS bank account. Private business firms bought and used the hair to make many products, including ship rope and mattresses.

The mobile killing units acted swiftly, taking the Jewish population by surprise. The killers entered a town or city and rounded up all Jewish men, women, and children. They also took away many Communist party leaders and Roma (Gypsies). Victims were forced to surrender any valuables and remove their clothing, which was later sent for use in Germany or distributed to local collaborators. Then the killing squad members marched their victims to open fields, forests, and ravines on the outskirts of conquered towns and cities. There they shot them or gasses them in gas vans and dumped the bodies into mass graves.

On September 21, 1941, the eve of the Jewish New Year, a mobile killing squad entered Ejszyszki, a small town in what is now Lithuania. The killing squad members herded 4,000 Jews from the town and the surrounding region into three synagogues, where they were held for two days without food or water. Then, in two days of killing, Jewish men, women, and children were taken to cemeteries, lined up in front of open pits, and shot to death. Today there are no Jews in Ejszyszki. It was one of hundreds of cities, towns, and shtetls whose Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. The rich culture of most of these Jewish communities was lost forever.

The killing squads murdered more than a million Jews and hundreds of thousands of other innocent people. At Babi Yar, near Kiev, about 34,000 Jews were murdered in two days of shooting. Only a few people in the general population helped their Jewish neighbors escape. Most people were afraid that they too might be killed.

Prisoner Reception: The Sauna

This is where prisoners selected for slave labor were processed. Often people would have to wait outside naked in any weather. Here they would have to give up all their remaining possessions: money, jewels, even wedding rings and photos. In short, the prisoner was left with only one possession, his or her body. In this building planned humiliation was performed on the confused and terrified new arrivals. Men and women were forced to stand on stools, in a room crowded with people while heads, armpits and other intimate parts of one's body were shaved by male prisoners and where numbers were tattooed in each arm. It is also where prisoners already in the camp were deloused., this because of the raging typhus epidemics. After liberation at Bergen-Belsen, former Auschwitz and Birkenau prisoner Adolph Gawalewicz said to British Army personal during a personal DDT session: "It's not going to work. Even the Germans couldn't get rid of the lice!"

This is the right side of the little wood. People were made to wait here for what they had been told was a disinfecting shower. The ruins in the distance are those of the gas chambers and ovens of Krematorium V, their actual destination. A fence blocked their view but the screams of those further along the Nazi destruction line could be heard. 

This photo was taken by an SS photographer. It is part of an album discovered after liberation by a female prisoner. Most people create family albums containing photos of their children, wives, husbands, mementos of places visited... Evidently this SS photographer was proud of the work he and his comrades were doing. The people in the photo had only just been brought from the trains where they had been crammed in cattle cars with no food, water or sanitation. Look closely at them, these were the people the Nazis considered dangerous. Not long after this photo was taken they were gassed, and their bodies burned