By 1941, the Nazi war machine was running at full steam with its main objective referred to righteously by the leaders of Third Reich as "The Final Solution:" the complete annihilation of the Jewish race. KL Auschwitz I had become overcrowded with prisoners, as had other concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler made a decision to expand the Nazi killing machine at Auschwitz by building a second camp in the neighboring town of Brzezinka (renamed Birkenau by the Germans). Tapping the free resource of camp prison labor, the SS built KL Auschwitz II Birkenau. Himmler proudly declared that it was a state of the art death camp using the finest of Nazi technology and organization. 2,000,000 human beings perished at KL Auschwitz II from 1941-1944. 1.5 million of them were Jews. In the photograph above, you can see the famous railway tracks the Nazis built into the death camp. Here thousands of Jews and other prisoners would be shipped in daily. Here SS doctors would make an arbitrary decision: those who are fit to work to the left. They would "live." While elderly, the sick, the handicapped, and young children would be corraled to the right, where they would meet their final moments in the gas chamber.

In 1945 the Russian army was quickly advancing on the Germans from the east. The SS knew the war was lost, and in their retreat they complied with a general order by Himmler to dynamite the camps to destroy the evidence of Nazi war crimes. Herein lies an interesting paradox: why would the Nazis destroy the death machine that they built. Was this an admission that they were committing an act that was immoral, and that they would be judged so in the eyes of the world? The SS was unable to destroy everything before the Russians liberated KL Auschwitz I-II in the spring of 1945. Above you see what is left of a Nazi gas chamber. The brick chimney that is still standing was used to drop pellets of Cyclon B gas into the airtight room packed with hundreds of victims.

Pellets of Cyclon B gas, a key ingredient in the Nazi death machine. Cyclon B was produced by the German firm "Degesch," whose profits from sales of the gas from 1941-1944 exceeded 300,000 German Marks ($500,000 U.S.). The heirs of this fortune are still alive today. In Auschwitz alone, from 1942-1943, 20,000 kilograms (nearly 20 tons) of Cyclon B was used. At the tribunal of camp commandant Rudolph Hoss, Hoss testified that 5-7 kg of the poison was needed to kill around 1,500 people, and that the killing took 15 minutes. When the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, piles of empty cans, as well as a number of containers still full of the deadly crystals were found in the camp warehouses. Hoss was captured by the Red Army and, following his trial in Poland, was sentenced to death by hanging on the very same gallows at Auschwitz where he supervised the hanging of thousands of prisoners.

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