Introduction Pretend you are a prisoner living at Auschwitz. You get the minimum amount of food that a body needs to survive, you sleep on a mattress filled with human hair, and everyday all you can think about is whether or not it will be your last day to live. This was the life of prisoners living at Auschwitz; the death and work camp combined. If you were sent to Auschwitz it was very doubtful that you would be leaving. Camp History In the early 1940s the SS sent a commission to Oswiecim, a Polish town which in German translates to Auschwitz, to check out whether or not a barracks built during WWI could be used as a concentration camp. At first the report was negative but when Rudolf Hob, a Nazi officer, went on April 18th and 19th, 1940, it was approved. On April 27th, 1940 Heinrich Himmler, also a Nazi officer, ordered the establishment of Auschwitz. On May 4th, Hob was put in commandant of Auschwitz. (Death Camps) At first Auschwitz was just intended to be a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners and other Polish people, but it didn’t stay that way for long. The first prisoners sent to Auschwitz were 728 Polish politicians that came from Tarnow on June 14th, 1940. The first large group from outside of Poland sent to Auschwitz was a group of Czechs in June 1941. Soviet prisoners started coming immediately after the invasion of the Soviet Union. (Death Camps) On January 20th, 1942 the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was discussed at the Wannsee Conference where fifteen high-ranked German government officials and Nazi party members met in a Berlin suburb, Wannsee. Himmler attended this conference along with Reinhard Heydrich. The first thing discussed was to inform and secure support from all the people that wouldl be taking part in the “Final Solution” such as government ministries and other agencies. The other topic discussed was how they were going to inform everybody that Hitler himself was the one who told Heydrich that he and the RSHA must coordinate the operation. In later years, diaries were found stating that Hitler personally ordered the mass extermination during a regional governors meeting in the chancellery. The “Final Solution” was the mass murder of all the European Jews in a clean sweep. (USHMM) Within a few months after the conference Auschwitz became one of the main camps Jews were sent to in order to be exterminated. The first known transport entirely of Jews was a month after the conference. They continued through November 1944. (Death Camps) Layout of Camp Auschwitz needed to be expanded in order to provide the mass murder of Jews and slave labor. In the beginning Auschwitz 1 had 20 buildings, but by 1942 there were 28 two-story buildings. Also that year Auschwitz 2 (Auschwitz-Birkenau) was beginning to be built two miles away from Auschwitz 1. Auschwitz 3 (Buna Monowitz) was also opened and it consisted of a large synthetic oil and rubber factory. The three camps combined became the largest extermination facility. It was made up of gas chambers, the actual camps, 45 sub-camps, and mines in the Sudetenland and Upper Silesia. (Death Camps) The prisoners at Auschwitz were transported there by trains in freight cars or cattle trucks from all over the Nazi occupied Europe areas. The train ride would last for days and they weren’t supplied with bathroom facilities or anything to eat or drink. At first the trains would arrive at the old ramp one kilometer southeast from the gate entrance. In May 1944 the railway was specially made to extend to Auschwitz 2. Most of the people that were sent in the transports were murdered in the gas chambers upon arrival, and their names never showed up in the camp records. This made it more difficult to determine exactly how many died from these transports. If the SS thought a person was fit for work they weren’t murdered immediately, but instead were used as slaves. Each prisoner was given a pair of striped clothing and a prison number. In 1943 prisoners started getting tattooed with their number usually on the left forearm. More than 400,000 people of all ethnic groups were given numbers. Half died, and few lived more than six months due to starvation, disease, labor, beatings and torture, or execution: shooting, hanging, or gassing. (Death Camps) At Auschwitz 1 the prisoners were housed in one-story barracks that were originally used for the horses in the Polish army. When the number of inmates went up another story was added to each barrack. At first prisoners had to sleep on the floor, but later on two