Kazimierz and Auschwitz

Today we toured Kazimierz, Cracow's former Jewish Quarter. Once a separate town dating back to the 14th century, it was nearly destroyed by Nazis during World War II. Today this historic district is undergoing a renaissance as a Bohemian enclave; its splendid synagogues and churches have been restored. We visited one of Poland's oldest synagogues with one of the oldest surviving Jewish cemeteries that was not destroyed by the Nazis, and Oscar Schindler's factory as it remains today.

Auschwitz was originally intended to serve as a concentration camp and a place of slow death for Polish political prisoners an other Poles. In later years, however, it gradually became the main center for the systematic murder of those the Nazis considered human vermin, namely, Jews and Gypsies. The Nazis' pseudoscientific theories on the superiority of the Aryan race condemned more than a million people to die in this one place alone.
The first prisoners to be sent to Auschwitz, a group of 728 Polish political prisoners (including a handful of Jews), arrived in Auschwitz from Tarnow on June 14 1940. The first large group sent to Auschwitz from outside Poland was a transport of Czechs. This was in June 1941. Soviet prisoners of war started arriving a month later (immediately after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union), and groups from Yugoslavia in September 1941-initially men, but by July 1942 women as well. Among the latter were uniformed women partisans who demanded to be treated as prisoners of war and refused to have their heads shaved.
Within a few months of the Wannsee conference of January 1942, when the plan as to how to proceed with the murder of the Jews of Europe was presented-the "Final Solution of the the Jewish Question"-Auschwitz became the main camp to which Jews were sent to be murdered. The first known transport composed entirely of Jews arrived the very next month, and such transports continued to arrive from all over occupied Europe until November 1944.
Very few photographs of the Jewish prisoners survive, as the Jewish people were killed as soon as they arrived off the cattle trains. Auschwitz was the only camp to tattoo numbers on the arms of its victims.
Auschwitz was the largest Nazi German concentration camp and death camp. In the years 1940-1945, the Nazis deported at least 1,300,000 people to Auschwitz:
1,100,000 Jews
140,000-140,000 Poles
23,000 Roma (Gypsies)
15,000 Soviet prisoners of war
25,000 prisoners from other ethnic groups
1,100,000 of these people died in Auschwitz, approximately 90% of the victims were Jews. The SS murdered  the majority of them in the gas chambers.