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Auschwitz-Birkenau

  1. The word "Sachsengänger" is derived from Polish slang meaning "going to work." It literally means "people on their way to Saxony."
  2. Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), p. 14.
  3. There is a difference of opinion among historians as to which buildings were later transformed into the Auschwitz concentration camp. These differing opinions are recognized by Saul Friedländer in The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945, p. 716, n. 144. Danuta Czech and the Auschwitz museum have concluded that the military casernes were used for the camp, while Sybille Steinbacher indicates that the buildings of the Sachsengänger camp were those which became the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
  4. Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz, A History (Great Britain: Pinguin Books, 2005), p. 29.
  5. Ibid., p. 51.
  6. Ibid., p. 56.
  7. Ibid., p. 90. Höss recalls in his memoirs that Himmler's decision to build Birkenau as a place of the extermination of Jews came on March 1, 1941, but historians discount this.
  8. Architecture of Murder: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Blueprints, accessed November 9, 2014.
  9. Documents on the Holocaust, pp. 350-351.
  10. Steinbacher, p. 76.
  11. Ibid., p. 76.
  12. Ibid., p. 76.
  13. At first, selections of mass Jewish transports took place sporadically. Only after July 4, 1942 did selection take place regularly. Almost all the mass transports of Jews to Auschwitz after that date were subject to selection.