![]() The Germans decided to establish a vast prisoner-of-war camp in Upper Silesia, for the many Soviet soldiers who had been taken captive. The second development occurred with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. As the construction of the factory progressed, a small labor camp was set up next to it, which was later called “Auschwitz III”. The SS agreed to supply the corporation with cheap labor to build the factory and later to man it. Farben decided to establish a huge factory there for the production of synthetic rubber and fuel. In early 1941, the Petro-Chemical Corporation I.G. In the course of 1941, there were two developments that contributed to the dramatic increase in the scope of German activity at Auschwitz. ![]() This was the first concentration camp to be set up in Poland, and the first prisoners were brought there in June of the same year. The Germans established the first camp at Auschwitz in the spring of 1940, on a site previously serving as a barracks for the Austro-Hungarian artillery in Upper Silesia. The plans included detailed drawings of the gas chambers and the crematoria. ![]() These plans were used by the contractors to present the project, and to carry out the construction work. The plans were drawn up by SS draftsmen, prisoners with a technical background who were employed by the planning offices, and civilian draftsmen. In the course of the planning phase, hundreds of technical drawings of the different construction sites and the buildings to be erected on them were produced by the different offices and companies involved in the project. What started as a single camp with 22 buildings in 1940 became a complex of 3 main camps and 40 sub-camps. The Auschwitz complex was not built overnight. This was a major construction project that lasted years and was never completed. A number of organizations and companies were involved in the building process, as well as thousands of workers, both German and foreign. Research scholars at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum estimate that approximately 1.1 million people were murdered in Auschwitz, of whom a million were Jews. The Auschwitz camp complex has become a universal symbol of the Holocaust. “There is a place on earth that is a vast desolate wilderness, a place populated by shadows of the dead in their multitudes, a place where the living are dead, where only death, hate and pain exist.” Architecture of Murder The Auschwitz-Birkenau Blueprints
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