The Darkest Side of Auschwitz *Warning HARD TO WATCH JJ

September 1st, 1939. The world changed on that day, not slowly, not gently. It changed with the sound of German soldiers marching into Poland, with the roar of war planes tearing across the sky, with the silence of millions of people who had absolutely no idea what was coming for them. This is not a story that is easy to tell, [music] and it is not a story that is easy to hear, but it has to be told because forgetting is its own kind of crime.

What you are about to hear is the true story [music] of the most organized killing operation in human history. A place where over 1 million people [music] were murdered. A place where the smoke never stopped rising into the sky. A place the whole world now [music] knows by one single name, Auschwitz. Before Auschwitz became a place of death, it was just a small, quiet town in southern Poland.

Its real name was Oswiecim. Nobody special lived there. Nothing unusual ever happened there. It was just an ordinary [music] town. But when Nazi Germany took over Poland in September 1939, this quiet little town caught the attention of the SS, the most feared branch of the Nazi military. They changed the town’s [music] name to Auschwitz.

They wiped away its identity, and they started building something the world had never [music] seen. They chose this location for very specific reasons. It was far away from the rest of the world, hidden deep in rural Poland where nobody would notice. It had strong railway connections, making it easy to bring prisoners [music] from all over Europe.

And there were already old military buildings on the land, so they didn’t have to start from scratch. [music] In May 1940, Rudolf Höss was chosen to lead the camp. He was an SS officer, completely loyal to Hitler, and a man without any mercy [music] inside him. Under his leadership, Auschwitz officially opened on June 14th, 1940, when the first group of 728 [music] Polish prisoners arrived.

Most of them would never leave. Above the entrance gate, iron letters spelled out four words, “Arbeit macht frei.” Work sets you free. It was a lie, the first of many lies. In the beginning, Auschwitz held mainly Polish prisoners, teachers, priests, politicians, resistance fighters, people the Nazis wanted to silence.

But by 1941, the camp began changing into something far more terrifying. In June of that year, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of soldiers were captured almost immediately and the Nazis [music] needed somewhere to put them. Auschwitz expanded quickly. Over 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived between 1941 [music] and 1942.

Most of them did not survive long, but the Soviet prisoners were only the beginning of [music] something much larger. On January 20th, 1942, 15 senior [music] Nazi officials gathered at a beautiful lakeside villa outside Berlin for a secret meeting. Around a table, ate lunch, and in less [music] than 90 minutes, they decided the fate of millions of people.

They planned the complete destruction of every Jewish person living in Europe. They gave this plan a name that hid its true [music] horror behind cold, official language. They called it the final solution. Auschwitz was chosen as one of the main locations where this plan [music] would be carried out. In October 1941, construction began on a massive new [music] section called Auschwitz the second or Birkenau, about 2 miles from the original camp.

It had huge gas chambers [music] built underground and massive furnaces to burn the bodies. Birkenau was not a prison. [music] It was not a work camp. It was a factory designed entirely for killing. Before the Nazis [music] could begin killing on a large scale, they needed to find a method, something fast, something that could be hidden, something that [music] could kill large numbers of people without giving them a chance to fight back.

In August 1941, SS officers locked about 600 Soviet prisoners of [music] war and 250 sick Polish inmates into a sealed basement room. Then they dropped in crystals of a chemical called Zyklon B, pesticide originally made to kill insects and lice. The doors were locked from the outside. [music] In 15 minutes, everyone inside was dead.

SS officers wrote their reports, noted that the method worked well, then they went home. One experiment became the model for everything that followed. >> [music] >> Within months, massive gas chambers were being built at Birkenau. Underground rooms made to look like [music] bathhouses, capable of killing thousands every single day.

The machine was ready to start. I do imagine for a moment [music] felt like to arrive. You have been locked inside a cattle car, normally used to transport [music] animals, three or four days, sometimes even longer. There is no food, there’s no water, there is no light [music] and no space to sit or lie down properly. People around you are sick.

Some have already died during the journey. The smell is unbearable. Children are crying. People are praying quietly. Nobody knows where the train is going, but is waiting at the end of the tracks. And then the train stops. The heavy doors of the cattle car slam open from the outside. Blinding light floods in. Cold air hits your face.

Your dogs barking loudly and guards screaming in German bring everyone to get out immediately and move fast. You stumble out [music] onto a concrete platform. SS officers stand in a long line, some holding whips, others holding the leashes of aggressive dogs. The noise is overwhelming. [music] People are being pushed and shoved in every direction.

Then comes the moment that will decide [music] everything, the selection. An SS officer looks at you for one or two seconds at most. He gives a small wave [music] of his hand, left or right. That is your entire trial. That is your entire judgment. Those sent to the left [music] were babies, young children, pregnant women, old people, anyone who looked too weak to work.

That group made up around 70 to 80% of every transport. They were going to die within hours, though they did not yet know it. Those sent to the right were people who looked strong enough [music] for labor. They would survive a little longer. But surviving at Auschwitz was not the same as being safe.

The people sent to the left were told not to worry. They were told they were going for a shower, nothing to fear, and to remember where they left their bags. Every single word was a lie. The people walked into a large underground room. The ceiling had fake shower [music] heads attached to it. Numbered hooks lined the walls where people were told to hang their clothes.

Signs on [music] the walls, written in multiple languages, told them to fold their belongings neatly and remember their hook number for when they returned. The heavy doors were sealed shut behind them. Hundreds of people stood in the dark room [music] together. Some were confused. Some were beginning to feel afraid.

Some were still trying [music] to reassure their children that everything would be fine. Then, through a small opening in the ceiling, SS guards dropped in the Zyklon [music] B crystals from above. The screaming started almost immediately. People ran to the doors and scratched at the walls with their bare hands. They climbed on top of each other, desperately trying to reach the last pockets of air near the ceiling.

Children called out for their mothers. Mothers held their babies as tightly as they could. It took between 15 and 20 minutes [music] for everyone to die. The strongest always died last, on top of a pile of bodies. The walls had scratch marks cut deep [music] into them. The floor was covered with evidence of the terror that had taken place.

When the gas cleared, a group of prisoners [music] called the Sonderkommando were forced inside. Jewish men given no real choice, do this work or be [music] shot. They removed the bodies, shaved the heads of the dead, and pulled gold teeth from the mouths of victims. The hair was used to make [music] cloth and rope. The gold was melted down and sent to Germany.

The bodies were dragged to the crematoriums, [music] furnaces that burned day and night without stopping. Thick black smoke rose constantly. The smell spread for miles in every direction. At full operation, the [music] gas chambers and crematoriums of Auschwitz could kill and process up to 6,000 people every single day. Not 6,000 losses.

Not 6,000 casualties. 6,000 murders every day. For those sent to the right during selection, life inside Auschwitz was a slow and deliberate [music] destruction of everything that made them human. They were stripped of their clothes, their heads were shaved, their names were taken away. A number was tattooed [music] onto their left arm.

From that point forward, they were no longer people in the eyes of the SS. They were numbers, they were tools, they were resources to be used [music] until they broke completely. The prisoner buildings were originally stables designed for 50 horses. The Nazis forced over 700 people into each one.

Three levels of wooden planks served [music] as beds. There were no mattresses, no pillows, no blankets. In winter, the temperature dropped well below freezing. The roof leaked when it rained. The floors were covered in mud. Rats ran freely through the darkness every night. The food given each [music] day was calculated not to keep them healthy, but to keep them barely alive long enough to be useful.

In the morning, a cup of something bitter, sometimes little more than boiled weeds or grass. At midday, a thin watery soup made from old [music] turnips or rotten cabbage. In the evening, a small hard piece of black bread, sometimes with a tiny amount of margarine. That was everything for the entire day, under 1,000 calories [music] per day.

Meanwhile, prisoners were forced into 12 to 14 hours of very hard [music] physical work every single day in all weather conditions. In freezing winter cold, in burning summer heat, in rain and mud and snow. The Nazis called it extermination through labor. Work the prisoners until their bodies give out, then bring in fresh ones.

Every morning and every evening, prisoners were forced to stand completely still outside for roll call. These roll calls could last many hours. If a single prisoner was unaccounted for, the entire camp stood still. People collapsed and froze to death while standing. People were shot for moving. The guards beat prisoners [music] constantly for walking too slowly, for looking in the wrong direction, for stumbling, for any reason or no reason at all.

Hope was almost impossible to hold. [music] Many chose to end their lives by walking into the electric fences. For some, it [music] felt like the only way to make the suffering stop. In May 1943, a man arrived at Auschwitz who would become one of the most recognized [music] symbols of pure evil in the entire history of the war. His name was Dr.

[music] Josef Mengele. He was well-educated, well-dressed, and known to be calm [music] and polite. He sometimes hummed music to himself while he walked. He smiled at children on the arrival ramp. The prisoners called him the Angel of Death. Mengele had a special interest in twins, believing their study could help create people with features the Nazis considered ideal.

When transports arrived, he walked the platform himself and called out for twins. Those selected were taken to a special block and told they were lucky. They would not go to the gas chambers immediately. What happened to them [music] instead was in many ways worse. Mengele ran hundreds of experiments on these children. He injected chemical dyes directly into their eyes to change [music] the color to blue, causing severe infections and blindness.

He tried to surgically connect twins [music] by stitching their skin and blood vessels together. These children almost [music] always died from infection or blood loss in tremendous pain. When finished with a child, he often killed them with an injection to the heart, then performed autopsies to compare the twins’ organs side by [music] side.

Out of roughly 1,500 pairs of twins brought to him, only around 200 individual children survived. Other doctors were equally cruel. Women were injected with chemicals to destroy their ability to have children. Men were exposed to radiation without [music] warning. Prisoners were deliberately infected with diseases so experimental drugs could be tested on them.

Operations were performed with no pain [music] relief. Almost no one used in these experiments survived. The Nazis believed they had built a system [music] with no witnesses and no way out. The Sonderkommando were killed and replaced every [music] few months. No survivors meant no testimony, no proof.

But some of those men refused [music] to let the truth disappear. Several secretly wrote down everything they witnessed. The number of people [music] killed each day, the way the gas chambers worked, the names and faces of victims they could remember. They buried these notes tightly in metal containers near the crematoriums hoping that one day someone would find them.

After the war, several of these containers [music] were recovered. The notes inside became some of the most important historical evidence of what had taken place [music] at Auschwitz. And then, on October 7th, 1944, something the SS believed [music] impossible happened. The Sonderkommando rose up.

Over months, they had secretly collected small amounts of gunpowder, smuggled piece by piece [music] by Jewish women working in a nearby weapons working in a nearby weapons factory. On that October day, they used it [music] to blow up The SS crushed the uprising fast. Most involved were captured and executed. The four women who smuggled the gunpowder [music] were publicly hanged as a warning, but the explosion had already happened.

And it proved something important. By late 1944, the sound of Soviet artillery could be heard from inside the camp. The Nazis knew the war was ending. They worked frantically to destroy the evidence. Thousands [music] of documents were burned. Crematorium buildings were blown up. Records were destroyed, but history is [music] not so easy to erase.

On January 17th, 1945, the SS began forcing the remaining prisoners [music] out of Auschwitz on foot. Around 56,000 men, women, and children, already [music] starving and barely able to stand, were pushed out through the gates and forced to march westward through deep winter snow toward other camps inside Germany. These became known as the death marches.

Most prisoners had no shoes, [music] no warm clothing, no food. The temperature was far below zero. Those who fell down or could not keep walking [music] were shot immediately where they lay. The roads leading west were lined with frozen bodies half [music] covered in snow. Thousands died before they ever reached the next destination.

On January 27th, 1945, soldiers of the Soviet Red Army entered the gates [music] of Auschwitz. About 7,000 survivors remained, most too sick to have been taken on the march. Around them, soldiers found warehouses with 7 tons of human hair, hundreds of thousands of pieces of clothing, 80,000 pairs of shoes, and entire rooms filled with children’s [music] toys.

And they found the gas chambers, partially destroyed but still standing, still showing scratch [music] marks on the walls. The truth could not be completely erased. The world struggled to understand what had been found at Auschwitz. In 1947, Rudolf Höss, the man [music] who built the camp and personally oversaw the murder of over a million people, was captured, put [music] on trial, and hanged.

His execution took place just a few steps away from the crematorium at Auschwitz, where so many had died. Other SS officers were put on trial at Nuremberg. Some were executed. Some received prison sentences, but many simply walked away and disappeared into ordinary life. Some were even protected by governments during the Cold War years that followed.

In 1947, the Polish [music] government preserved Auschwitz as a museum and memorial. In 1979, it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Not to honor what happened, but to ensure no one could deny that it [music] did, because that is the final battle connected to Auschwitz. Not fought with weapons, fought [music] in memory.

Every survivor who shared their story, every researcher who documented the facts, every person who [music] walks through that gate today and reads those iron words and understands the full weight of the lie they represent. More than 1.1 million people were murdered at [music] Auschwitz. The majority were Jewish.

But among the dead were also Polish civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma people, people with disabilities, and many others. They had names. They had families. They had futures they had imagined for themselves. [music] They were human beings, exactly like you and me. And the only thing we can give them now is to never forget what happened.

Never forget what human beings are capable of doing to each other when hatred is organized, [music] given power, and left unchecked. Never forget the more than 1 million voices that were silenced [music] in that place, because their silence must never become our silence.