Auschwitz and Birkenau

A pictorial history of the two Nazi-German World War II concentration camps in Poland, featuring rare photographs from wartime archives. Auschwitz and Birkenau were separated from each other by about a forty-five-minute walk. Auschwitz was adapted to hold political prisoners in 1940 and evolved into a killing machine in 1941. Later that year a new site called Birkenau was found to extend the Auschwitz complex. Here a vast complex of buildings was constructed to hold initially Russian POWs and la