Auschwitz, the largest concentration camp complex, west of Krakow in Poland, became a primary symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust. The Nazis established the camp in the early 1940s for Polish prisoners and later expanded it to include a death camp. The killing centre at Auschwitz-Birkenau began operations in March 1942.
On arrival, Jews went through selections supervised by Nazi doctors on the ramp, such as the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. Those deemed unable to work were murdered by poisonous gas immediately after selection. Others were used as slave labour with an average life expectancy of 3 months. The assembly-line style mass murder in Auschwitz-Birkenau resulted in the killing of 1 million Jews.
The entire camp was ringed with electric fencing, guard towers and machine guns, making escape almost impossible. The Jewish Czech prisoner, Rudolf Vrba (who later taught at the University of British Columbia) together with 3 other prisoners, escaped from the camp in 1944 and provided the world with the first detailed eyewitness account of Auschwitz.