Powerful Pictures That Influenced Humanity
Inside an Auschwitz gas chamber
Auschwitz was a group of concentration camps run by Nazi Germany during World War II. There were three large camps at Auschwitz and 48 smaller ones. Auschwitz was the main camp, which held prisoners from 1940-1945. Auschwitz (Birkenau) was the largest extermination camp during the Holocaust. The Auschwitz camps were in a town in Poland called Oświęcim. (“Auschwitz” is the German name for “Oświęcim.”) . The Schutzstaffel (SS), led by Heinrich Himmler, ran the death camps and concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
No one knows exactly how many people were sent to Auschwitz, or how many died there. However, historians estimate that between 1940 and 1945, the Nazis sent at least 1.3 million people to Auschwitz. About 1.1 million of these people died or were killed at Auschwitz. This picture represents one of the darkest times in humanity – hurting people just for being from a certain race.