Female prisoners at the women’s prison in Birkenau worked under the same conditions. Polish prisoner Alfred Czeslaw Przybylski recalls: “In the course of digging and building the foundations, the prisoners worked in the fall, in winter and frost, standing waist-deep in water. The labor conditions were appalling, and the death rate of the prisoners was especially high in the winter months. As time went on, they were joined by many Polish and Jewish prisoners. In the early stages, most of the labor involved in preparing the area and the construction itself was carried out by thousands of Soviet prisoners of war who worked under German supervision. The construction was carried out in stages, with the ultimate goal of accommodating some 200,000 prisoners. The camp was built on swampy, exposed terrain. The SS men who worked on the plans, were also active at the building sites, when necessary.” Herta Soswinski, a prisoner who worked as a clerk at the Building Authority, recalls: “The task of the Bauleitung was the overall planning of all the construction works within Auschwitz, including living quarters, medical facilities, crematoria, gas chambers…The Bauleitung was not only responsible for the planning, but also for the labor itself, the allocation of materials and supervision. The Blueprint Office, headed by Hauptscharführer (First Sergeant-Major) Wichmann, was responsible for preparing the construction plans, which were drawn up by SS officers who had studied architecture or engineering, and several prisoners with the appropriate technical training. The building was supervised by the “Central Building Authority of the Waffen SS and Police, Auschwitz, Upper Silesia”, established on 1 October, 1941, and headed by Sturmbannführer (Major) Karl Bischoff. The construction of Birkenau began in October 1941. Built adjacent to the main camp, near the small agricultural community of Brzezinka, this camp was called “Auschwitz II”, better known as Birkenau. The Germans decided to establish a vast prisoner-of-war camp in Upper Silesia, for the many Soviet soldiers who had been taken captive. The second development occurred with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. As the construction of the factory progressed, a small labor camp was set up next to it, which was later called “Auschwitz III”. The SS agreed to supply the corporation with cheap labor to build the factory and later to man it. Farben decided to establish a huge factory there for the production of synthetic rubber and fuel. In early 1941, the Petro-Chemical Corporation I.G.
In the course of 1941, there were two developments that contributed to the dramatic increase in the scope of German activity at Auschwitz. This was the first concentration camp to be set up in Poland, and the first prisoners were brought there in June of the same year. The Germans established the first camp at Auschwitz in the spring of 1940, on a site previously serving as a barracks for the Austro-Hungarian artillery in Upper Silesia. The plans included detailed drawings of the gas chambers and the crematoria. These plans were used by the contractors to present the project, and to carry out the construction work. The plans were drawn up by SS draftsmen, prisoners with a technical background who were employed by the planning offices, and civilian draftsmen. In the course of the planning phase, hundreds of technical drawings of the different construction sites and the buildings to be erected on them were produced by the different offices and companies involved in the project. What started as a single camp with 22 buildings in 1940 became a complex of 3 main camps and 40 sub-camps. A number of organizations and companies were involved in the building process, as well as thousands of workers, both German and foreign. This was a major construction project that lasted years and was never completed. The Auschwitz complex was not built overnight. Research scholars at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum estimate that approximately 1.1 million people were murdered in Auschwitz, of whom a million were Jews. The Auschwitz camp complex has become a universal symbol of the Holocaust. “There is a place on earth that is a vast desolate wilderness, a place populated by shadows of the dead in their multitudes, a place where the living are dead, where only death, hate and pain exist.”