The camp is surrounded by double-cordoned, formerly electrified barbed wire fencing. Now gone, one can easily imagine the tramping of SS boots, the shouts of guards, and barking of their attack dogs.

Once Mengele's assistant rounded up 14 pairs of Gypsy twins during the night. Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table and put them to sleep. He then proceeded to inject chloroform into their hearts, killing them instantaneously. Mengele began dissecting and meticulously noting each and every piece of the twins' bodies.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz 2-Birkenau

five thousand to seven thousand or more inmates, many infected with typhus or dysentery, without any real opportunity to care for their personal hygiene, shared this latrine at any given time.

At the edge of the camp lies the Crematory; a small nondescript structure built into the ground. It remains as it was, complete with gas chamber, iron body carts, and furnaces.

Crematorium chimney

Main Camp

Execution wall block 10

Kommandant Hoess’ House

After his capture, trial, and having been sentenced to death, Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss was hanged on April 16, 1947, on this spot near Crematory I. "History will mark me as the greatest mass murderer of all time," Höss wrote while in prison, along with a detailed memoir about Auschwitz.

basement hallway and adjacent cells now stand dimly lit and deathly still; haunted by the memory of their former occupants, the starved and the tortured

This is the main entrance to Birkenau as viewed from the unloading ramp.

A street in the camp

Roll call area

These wooden-framed buildings, which at one time numbered hundreds and were originally designed as horse stables, each housed eight hundred or more inmates.

The gate leads to a road that separated camp sections BIIc and BIId.

This wagon and others like it were used to collect and haul the dead to the Crematories.

Entrance to gas chamber

This pond contains the ashes of thousands of people who were killed in Crematory IV,