“The opposite of truth is not a lie – it’s forgetting.” — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Auschwitz began as an old-fashioned prison. It was never initially conceived as an industrialized murder site. Yet it became mankind’s most infamous murder factory consisting of three distinct camps with separate administrations and functions. Rudolf Vrba was a rare survivor of all three places:

Konzentrationlager Auschwitz 1 – Stammlager (Main Camp)
Konzentrationlager Auschwitz 2 – Birkenau
Konzentrationlager Auschwitz 3 – Aussenlager (“External Warehouse”)

Today, Auschwitz is a global tourist destination where you can visit vestiges of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau). Lesser-known, but largest by far in terms of its geographical size, was Auschwitz III, an industrial complex known as the Buna-Werke or Monowitz (a German variation for the village of Monowice). Now barely recognizable, its once-massive presence has been obviated by urban sprawl. This original map of Auschwitz III, including the area where slave labour was used, was created from two separate maps by this website’s designer, Sharon Jackson.

Research outlined herein was prepared in May of 2025 for the release of the first volume of a Rudolf Vrba biography, Holocaust Hero: The Life & Times of Rudolf Vrba (Firefly Books, 2025) by Alan Twigg. 

The Genesis

As Nazism spread like a cancer beyond Germany and Austria, mass arrests of the local population in southwestern Poland were deemed necessary to maintain control. By 1939, prisons in Upper Silesia and the Dabrowa Basin were full. The Nazis knew more arrests would be necessary to stem the rise of an intensifying resistance movement.

To alleviate the over-crowding of prisons, the Nazis formed a commission headed by SS-Oberführer Arpad Wigand to address the problem. In January 1940, SS-Oberführer Richard Glücks, the newly appointed director of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, subsequently sent a small delegation, led by SS-Sturmbannführer Walter Eisfeld, to inspect an abandoned Polish military barracks. Eisfeld found a derelict wooden shell near the fork of the Vistula and Sola Rivers, at the village of Oświęcim, about twenty miles southeast of Katowice. According to the most notorious Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss, during statements he made during his Warsaw war crime trial, the disused barracks at Oświęcim were deemed uninhabitable by Glücks.

Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler consequently ordered inspections to be made beyond the immediate Osweicim vicinity. Himmler had only promoted Glücks to the post of Concentration Camps Inspector on November 15, 1939 after Glücks’ boss, Theodor Eicke, had become field commander of the SS Division Totenkopf. The situation changed on January 25 when Himmler accepted a contrary, favourable report on the Oświęcim barracks by SS-Gruppenführer von dem Bach-Zelewski, whereupon Glücks opted to contradict his earlier report. Glücks conceded those former barracks at Oświęcim could be adapted as a “quarantine camp” whereby Polish prisoners could be detained temporarily until they could be sent to concentration camps inside Germany. Glücks had an “almost unbelievable fear” of Himmler, according to Höss, and was therefore motivated to give Himmler the answer he most wanted to hear.

Another commission, this time headed by SS-Hauptsturmführer Höss, visited Oświęcim in mid-April and submitted a favourable report that speculated that a camp at Oświęcim could detain 10,000 prisoners. Consequently, Himmler gave an order on April 27 for Höss and five SS men to go to the site and commence preliminary construction. He was designated as the Commandant of Konzentrationslager Auschwitz on May 4, 1940.

•

Gerhardt Palitzsch

Escorted by the notorious sadist Rapportführer Gerhard Palitzsch, the first thirty prisoners arrived at Oświęcim, renamed Auschwitz, on May 20, 1940. These prisoners were not Jews. They were convicted German criminals from the Sachsenhausen prison camp in Oranienburg, 22 miles north of Berlin. Accorded green triangles on their tunics and serial numbers from 1 to 30 — but no tattoos — these criminals would soon be designated as camp disciplinarians whose chief occupation would be to oppress and terrify the other prisoners in order to maintain order in the camp.

Prisoner #1 at Auschwitz was Bruno Brodniewicz, soon to be nicknamed “The Black Death.” He was camp elder in the Gypsy section of Auschwitz and then he worked in four satellite camps and ended up in Bergen-Belsen where he was reputedly lynched by inmates as soon as the camp was liberated in April 1945. “Brodniewicz was a beast,” said fellow Green kapo Willi Brachmann [according to Hermann Langbein], “He was king of the camp. What he ordered had to be done.”

On June 14, 1940, a transport of 728 Polish political prisoners arrived from Tarnów, in southeastern Poland, and received the next set of prisoner numbers from 31 to 758. Among them would be the first person to escape from Auschwitz, prisoner #220, a Pole named Tadeusz Wiejowski. Born in Kołaczyce in 1914, Wiejowski was a professional shoemaker. Disguised as a village labourer, he escaped on July 6, 1940 when he accompanied members of the Polish resistance movement who were hired as local “civilian workers” for the nascent site. He remained in hiding in his hometown for more than a year before he was apprehended in the autumn of 1941. According to the Auschwitz Museum, he was not identified as an escapee from Auschwitz during interrogation but was shot soon afterwards.

In the aftermath of Wiejowski’s first escape, camp officials soon enforced an edict of collective responsibility — sometimes killing one-tenth of those associated in any superficial way with the escapee. Beatings and torture became commonplace for those had any dealings or friendships with an escapee or a would-be escapee. As a result, the Polish underground, inside and outside the camp, soon adopted a policy of not assisting in escape attempts until 1943 — by which time camp authorities had stopped punishing families of escapees as well as their comrades in the camp. Only after someone did manage to successfully escape, would the Polish underground assist.

The Auschwitz administration also saw fit to evict most of the Polish population in the surrounding area, without compensation, and allotted their homes, in some cases, to the families of SS guards. The eviction of Poles within a “Zone of Interest” (Interessengebiet) for approximately 40 square kilometres around the camp served to limit the probability of success for any escape attempts simply because most of the local inhabitants were now Nazi loyalists.

By mid-1940, the Auschwitz staff was bolstered by the arrival of 100 SS men, plus officers and SS-Obersturmführer Josef Kramer from Mauthausen. Later dubbed the Beast of Belsen, Kramer would ascend the ladder of tyranny to become Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau (May-to-November, 1944) and Bergen Belsen (December 1944-April 1945) before he was hanged in December of 1945.

Initially, neither Auschwitz nor its spin-off Auschwitz-Birkenau were conceived for the mass murder of Jews.

The first major infusion of captives in the Auschwitz-Birkenau compound consisted of 10,000 Soviet prisoners in the autumn of 1941. After they were installed in rudimentary conditions, only a few hundred of those Soviet soldiers would be alive after five months. During this period, experiments to murder Soviet captives with Zyklon B commenced, overseen by the ambitious Auschwitz commander Höss.

Józef Paczynski, a Polish political prisoner at Auschwitz, witnessed some of Höss’ initial murder experiments to kill Soviet POWs with the use of Zyklon B near Höss’ office headquarters at Auschwitz I: “I went into the attic. I stood on a crate. I lifted a roof tile and I could see everything that was going on right there in front of me. They were very polite with those people, very polite. ‘Undress, pack your things here, this here, that there …’ Then an SS man climbed onto the flat roof of the building. He put on a gas mask, opened a hatch, and dropped the crystals in.”

The Little Red House or Bunker I where the first gassing experiments took place.

Similar experiments were conducted with more secrecy at a cottage outside the camp known as the Little Red House, or Bunker 1, where windows and doors were replaced by bricks. A second nearby structure called the Little White House was built for more gassing experiments. It was this converted house, called Bunker 2, that would be used to impress Himmler with the gassing procedure during his two-day visit in July 1942. Hence, the genesis for the mass murder of Jews on a daily basis at Auschwitz-Birkenau occurred with non-Jewish victims. “It was most important that the whole business of arriving and undressing should take place in an atmosphere of the greatest possible calm.”

Meanwhile, Nazi leaders beyond Poland had significant roles to play in the development of the Auschwitz complex.

The Little White House or Bunker II from a contemporary photograph. Construction in foreground.

Heinrich Himmler, one of Hitler’s earliest followers, had pursued a degree in agricultural at the Technical University of Munich. He wished to develop land beyond the prison camp as a farming zone (Gutsbezirk) for experiments in farming, livestock raising and fish breeding. The so-called Architect of Terror made his first of three visits to Auschwitz on March 1, 1941, resulting in formalized plans to expand the overall complex by June of 1941.

Reinhard Heydrich, as the chief of the Reich Main Security Office, named Auschwitz and officially intended for it to house prisoners who were “not serious offenders.” Auschwitz II (Birkenau) would be for “more serious offenders, but still capable of being educated and reformed.” As early as 1940, Heydrich envisioned an offshoot for Auschwitz I before he was assassinated in Prague on June 5, 1942.

There were three separate camps at Auschwitz — for slave labor, for genocide and for industry. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring worked in concert with IG Farben and other major German companies from 1940 onwards to develop synthetic fuel oil and synthetic rubber for the war effort. As early as January 1941, a member of the IG Farben board, the German chemist Otto Ambros, had commenced the planning process that determined Dwory, near Oswiecim, as the site for a massive chemical works built by slave labor. This was the scheme that gave rise to Auschwitz III.

The local Polish populations of Babice, Broszkowice, Brzezika, Budy, Harmeze and Rajsko were therefore evicted or killed for the “Buna-Werke”construction as of April of 1941. Auschwitz III, or Monowitz, would occupy about half of its projected area in 1942 and the site would reach its maximum size by the summer of 1943.

•

The Gate as Vrba woould have seen it in 1942. Note the upside down B, done on purpose by the prisoners.

The remaining 945 Soviet POWs in Auschwitz I were transferred to the crude beginnings of the “Brzezinka camp,” later known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, on March 1, 1942. Meanwhile, preparations were made at the main camp for ten blocks to be set aside the for Women’s Section (Frauenabteilung) to handle the simultaneous arrival of two contingents: 999 tough, female German prisoners from the Ravensbruck prison and 999 frightened, young Jewish women and girls from Slovakia (eastern Czechoslovakia) who arrived via the internment camp at Poprad.

Both groups were accorded serial numbers from 1 to 1998. It was almost a month later, on April 27, when 127 Polish women, all deemed political prisoners, were added to the female Auschwitz population, with numbers from 6784 to 6910. It was not long after that Rudolf Vrba arrived in Auschwitz I on June 30. He came face-to-face with Heinrich Himmler during the latter’s second visit to Auschwitz, July 17–18, 1942 when Himmler witnessed the new gassing procedures for mass murder as well as the construction progress at Buna, aka Auschwitz III.

The Final Solution was not set in motion during the first two years of Auschwitz’ existence. It was only officially launched when until Hitler convened a meeting in a fashionable Berlin suburb, at 56/58 Am Grossen Wannsee, on January 20, 1942. While Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich were the chief strategists for industrialized annihilation of Europe’s Jews, a relative underling named Adolf Eichmann recorded the minutes.

Administratively, the decision to officially split Auschwitz into three camps was made by SS-WVHA chief Oswald Pohl on November 11, 1943.

Rudolf Vrba escaped to finally effectively blow the whistle on the Holocaust — making it undeniable — in April of 1944. These words at the end of the first Rudolf Vrba biography are being written in March of 2025. “The world of cruelty is on the rise. The world of virtue is collapsing. The bravery of Rudolf Vrba is a shining example of how we must proceed — with valour and determination and truth.”

SOME OF THE NUMBERS

How much historians differ

Rudolf Vrba kept this simple graph to remind himself how people behind desks in universities could know more about Auschwitz than he did.

Rudolf Höss, the longest serving Auschwitz commander, estimated the overall death toll at Auschwitz was three million, in a 1946 affidavit. This figure aligned with Rudolf Vrba’s somewhat lower estimate of 2.5 million. But these two men on opposing sides were merely eyewitnesses to genocide. How could they know?

Always wary of being accused of exaggeration, historians have tended to whittle down death toll estimates. Vrba was unimpressed by Raul Hilberg (1926–2007) whereas Sir Martin Gilbert (1936–2015) eventually became his close friend. The Final Solution (1953) by Gerald Reitlinger (1900–1978) was significant because it first alerted Vrba to how many Hungarian Jewish lives were saved by his co-authorship of the Vrba-Wetzler Report (within the Auschwitz Protocols).