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Women of Peace and Those Sided the Wrong of World War II

Khalid Elhassan November 20, 2020 32 min

World War II - Italian resistance movement — Women of the resistance in Italy. Wall Street Journal

33. The Hell on Earth That Was Auschwitz

Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz in 1944, being selected for the gas chambers or work. Yad Vashem

Auschwitz was a complex of over 40 Nazi concentration camps, chief among them the “main camp” or Auschwitz I, and Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were exploited as slave labor, toiling in horrific conditions and often worked to death. Most arrivals, however, were sent straight to the gas chambers for extermination soon as they disembarked from the trains.

From 1942 to late 1944, freight trains packed with prisoners arrived at Auschwitz, where most perished. Of roughly 1,300,00 sent to the camp, about 1,100,000 died. Most were Jews – of 960,000 sent, 865,000 were gassed on arrival. Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp where the Sondkerkommando toiled, was where most of the mass murder took place.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.