Foreword

Nothing has epitomised man's inhumanity to man more than the Holocaust. - 'the crime of the millenniums' wrote German magazine Der Spiegel.

Up to 20,000 people a day were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The crematorium devoured one and a half million bodies, 90 per cent of them Jewish. Poles, gypsies and homosexuals were also murdered there.

Other extermination camps competed - at Chelmno, 360,000 Jews were murdered in 16 months, Sobibor 250,000 in 12 months, Treblinka 700,000 in 12 months. A total of six million Jews were gruesomely killed just because they were born of the Jewish faith.

Anti-Semitism existed in Germany and other European countries for hundreds of years. However, it was only with the growth of the National Socialist Party in the 1930's and Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany that it was used as a policy by a major political party. The Jewish race was seen as the enemy of the German people and a sub-human element, which had to be eliminated.

From the early 1930's, the Jewish people we subjected to a steadily rising scale of violence and humiliation; a decree in 1933 excluded them from commerce and subjected them to wearing a yellow star.

In 1941 the 'Final Solution' policy was announced with the aim of eliminating the 11 million Jews of Eastern Europe. The camp and crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau was built to accommodate this, because the crematorium at Auschwitz was not liquidating fast enough.

As the allies were approaching on 18 January 1945 the order was given to evacuate the camp. Thousands of prisoners who were too weak to march were shot. The SS guards unsuccessfully tried to blow up the gas chambers to hide the evidence.

Auschwitz was the first camp to be liberated. On 27 January 1945, the 107th infantry division of the Russian army marched into the camp. The soldiers found around 700 emaciated survivors and a pyre of bodies, which had been burned out in the open, because there was not enough room in the ovens.

The Holocaust ended with the liberation of the camps in 1945.