The concentration camp in Auschwitz was abandoned by the Nazis in the closing months of World War Two. Its purpose had been to exterminate the Jewish people and those whom the Nazis saw as other “undesirables”. Death and cruelty were handed out on a scale unimaginable, killing over one million men, women, and children in just four years … at this one camp.
Today, among the remains of Auschwitz, is the ruins of crematoria number 3. This had consisted of a dressing room, a gas chamber disguised as a shower block, and a furnace room to dispose of the bodies afterward.
Those to be killed were led there in their thousands, having been told they were going to be showered and deloused, when in fact they were going to be gassed to death. And the even grimmer reality was this was just one of many extermination camps dotted around German-occupied Europe.