Auschwitz in its early days in view of the latest historical research
dr Igor Bartosik, dr Łukasz Martyniak
Each subsequent anniversary of the arrival of the first transport of Polish political prisoners to KL Auschwitz encourages to review the state of historical research on the origins of the camp. It could seem that after 80 years, there are no new facts to discover or even complement; however, …
It is first of all necessary to emphasize that relatively few documents referring to the origins of KL Auschwitz were preserved. Some of them come from German police agendas from the Silesia region, other are connected directly with the construction department of the camp. Basing on these documents, the book by research staff from the Research Center of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum: Igor Bartosik, Łukasz Martyniak and Piotr Setkiewicz, entitled “The Origins of the Auschwitz Camp in the Light of Source Materials”, was published in 2018.
Thanks to the analysis of several thousand archival documents, with a lot of them unknown so far (including about a hundred discussed in details in the abovementioned publication), several new pieces of crucial information were found, referring to camp origins, decision-making processes leading to its establishment, its initial designs as well as extension stages in the first dozen months of its functioning. What is more, the already present and deeply rooted thinking patterns concerning the early days of KL Auschwitz were verified, present in the media as well as common historical consciousness. The most important ones have been presented below.
1) The Auschwitz camp was established within the premises of former Austrian army barracks
It is not true. In 1916, the government of Austria-Hungary had decided to build an emigration station in the vicinity of Auschwitz, as Oświęcim was called in this way in the period of the Partitions of Poland. This undertaking was connected with migrations due to the First World War. The station had been supposed to consist of brick and mortar buildings as well as wooden residential barracks. The entire infrastructure was complemented with such facilities as a bakery, a hospital, a bath, a chapel and so called “job market” buildings, where manufacturers had the opportunity to gain new workers. Borders moved in connection with the end of warfare as well as the creation of independent Polish state resulted in the idea of an emigration station becoming outdated, but the constructed facilities were relatively quickly used as residential area for Poles – refugees from the Zaolzie region, which in 1919 became the territory of military dispute between the newly revived Polish state and Czechoslovakia. Some facilities were transformed into Polish Army barracks in the early 1920s, and other adapted for the purposes of the factory forming part of Polish Tobacco Monopoly.