A policy of a inhumane attitude toward the prisoners, which robbed them of minimal human dignity, minimal living, nutritive and sanitary conditions, ruining their inner spiritual capability, exploiting their bodily power and killing them by various methods, prevailed in all extermination camps. It can even be said that death was developed into an art and an ideal.
As an extreme contradiction to the external world in the Nazi camp system, human life had no value. The lack of supervision enabled staff members of the camps to execute their cruelest tendencies and ambitions and never have to pay for their crimes. The camps were ruled and managed by the SS solely and exclusively and no outer institution was allowed to intervene or supervise. The common denominators between Auschwitz and the other extermination camps are: The Red Army liberated the camp on 27 January 1945. In its five years of existence, Auschwitz, which in 1943 became an imperium containing no less than 44 sub-camps, had altogether 5 different functions: a concentration camp, a slave labor camp, a transit camp, a POW-camp for Soviet Prisoners, and an extermination camp. Many firms, like IG-Farben, Siemens, Krupp, Volkswagen and others had their branches in the area of Auschwitz, employing thousands of slave-prisoners. Parallel to it, from 1941 Auschwitz also became an industrial center, manufacturing for the military and civilian needs of Germany. Thus Auschwitz-Birkenau became the biggest extermination camp in Europe, working in the patterns of a production line. During 1942 the murder took place in two relativly primitive installations ("The Bunkers"), later, in spring 1943, four modern gas chambers and crematories started to operate. The death installations were moved in the beginning of 1942 to Birkenau, which from that year on was the biggest extermination camp of Nazi Germany. In autumn 1941 the main camp, Stammlager Auschwitz, began to function also as the site where the "Final Solution" – the annihilation of the Jewish People - was implemented. Later it expanded and its first sub camp, Birkenau, was built, as a huge POW camp for Soviet Prisoners of War. Auschwitz was established by the Germans in 1940 as a concentration camp for the local Polish population.
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