the quest for racial purity - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Unlike the Operation Reinhard camps, but like other concentration camps that had
gas chambers, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp staff used Zyklon B gas for mass murder.
Trains brought Jews almost daily to Auschwitz-Birkenau from Germany itself and virtually
every German-occupied country. Prisoners arriving at the camp were sentenced to one of
two fates: immediate death or brutal labor under conditions that were frequently lethal.
On the basis of selections often casually made when a transport arrived, the SS staff sent
the sick, the elderly, pregnant women, and children directly to the gas chambers; healthy-
looking male and female prisoners were brought into the camp as forced laborers.
Jewish women, children, and the elderly (left) await deportation at the railroad station in Köszeg,
a small town in northwestern Hungary. köszeg, hungary, may 1944. ushmm, courtesy of magyar
nemzeti muzeum torteneti fenykeptar
Registered in more or less the same fashion as the inmates of other concentration
camps, Auschwitz prisoners had their heads shaved and were issued ragged, striped camp
uniforms. They also—unlike other camp inmates—had a number tattooed on the left fore-
arm, a practice initiated at Auschwitz because the camp authorities could not maintain pace
in record keeping with the number of deaths and wanted to be certain that the dead could be
identified even if the bodies were quickly stripped of their prisoner uniforms. Indeed, tens
of thousands perished because of the unbearable living and working conditions. They were
packed into bunks in barracks that barely provided shelter, they received little to eat, and
they were punished by long hours of physically exhausting labor.
the destruction of european jewry | 149