The First Prisoners of Auschwitz

On This Day in History: May 20

Auschwitz. The name is instantly recognizable, sending shivers down the spine of anyone possessing a modicum of humanity. Truth is stranger than fiction, and also more terrifying. This was not a solitary house of horrors, but 22 of them, an assembly line of death that revealed the depths of depravity to which our species is capable of sinking.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 20, 1940--

Located 30 miles southwest of Kraków, Auschwitz had been a Polish Army barracks. Germany invaded Poland the previous summer and had been on a spree of arresting a variety of Polish citizens ever since. Psychotic douchebag motherfucking piece of elephant excrement Heinrich Himmler, known as the “architect of the Holocaust,” approved the location as a concentration camp in April of 1940, and on May 20 the first 30 prisoners arrived.

The first to arrive were “career criminals” who were made into functionaries to handle the administrative tasks of running the camp, so fewer SS (fucking Nazis) were needed on staff. And these were some sadistic shitweasels. A month later when Polish inmates began to arrive, the functionaries were anything but kind. These first 30 prisoners killed many of their fellow inmates.

By the spring of 1941, over 10,000 prisoners were housed in Auschwitz, most of them Polish. At first it was resistance fighters, anti-Nazis, intellectuals, and politicians sent to the camp. However, once Hitler declared his “Final Solution” to “the Jewish question” the place was transformed into a death camp.

It became a death camp because it was conveniently centralized in the Germans’ conquered territories as well as close to rail lines for the transport of the doomed, and the fucking Nazis were all about efficiency in their mass murder.

Not everyone was immediately murdered. If you could work, they’d work and starve you to death for the war effort rather than use gas. The camp grew in size during the war, and during its operation at least 1.1 million human beings were exterminated behind its walls, almost a million of them Jewish. There was also horrific medical experimentation by Josef Mengele. He earned the nickname “Angel of Death” and was never brought to justice for his myriad crimes.

As the Soviet Red Army closed in toward the end of 1944, the Germans began to destroy the evidence of what they’d done, burning records and buildings alike. What followed was the “Auschwitz death march” of 60,000 prisoners to other camps farther away from the advancing Soviets. Those who survived the march were put on trains destined for camps in Germany.

When the Soviets entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they found 7,600 sick and starving prisoners who had been left behind, along with piles of corpses. Holocaust denial is illegal in sixteen European countries, including Poland, as well as in Israel. The fact that such laws are necessary is yet another condemnation of our species.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.