To more efficiently kill all Jews living in Europe as part of the Final Solution, Nazi Germany created six specialized extermination camps in occupied Poland. These camps functioned as death factories, where millions of people were shot, hanged, starved, tortured, raped, and poisoned in gas chambers through an assembly-line style of mass murder. Nazi-occupied Poland was selected as the location for these camps because of its large native Jewish population, but Jews from across German-ruled Europe were brought there to be killed.
The first killing center opened in December 1941 near the village of Chelmno, where the Nazis used mobile gassing vans to murder more than 172,000 Jews, Poles, and Roma. Other camps were built with large gas chambers, including Treblinka (about 925,000 victims), Belzec (about 435,000 victims), Sobibor (about 200,000 victims), and Majdanek (about 78,000 victims).
Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest and most notorious extermination camp, was a massive complex with three main sites (Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz) that included concentration, extermination, labor, and satellite camps. It initially began as a camp to detain Polish prisoners, but as Nazi brutality increased, it ultimately became a central site for the genocide of Jews because of its location along important railway lines. Approximately 1.1 million people (including about 960,000 Jews and 74,000 Poles) were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In total, at least 2.7 million Jews were killed in Nazi death camps between 1941 and 1945. These deaths account for nearly half of the 6 million Jewish people killed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.
Jewish prisoners standing at the entrance to the gas chambers in Birkenau (Auschwitz II) at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, date unknown. Photo credit: Yad Vashem #5318/234
A row of ovens at one of the crematoria at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, circa 1943. Photo credit: USHMM #19444
An emaciated Jewish man in the Łódź ghetto awaits deportation to the Chelmno extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, January-May 1942. Photo credit: USHMM #37344
Two canisters of Zyklon B from the Dachau concentration camp clearly marked as poison with a skull and crossbones, circa April 1945. In 1942, the Nazis discovered that using the insecticide Zyklon B was more effective for murdering large numbers of prisoners than other poisons or gases, such as carbon monoxide. Zyklon B was first experimented on Soviet POWs. It subsequently became the preferred poison in most Nazi extermination camps during World War II. Photo credit: USHMM #75047
A Jewish woman walks towards the gas chambers with three young children and a baby in her arms after going through the selection process on the ramp at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, May 1944. Photo credit: USHMM #77217