Making of ‘KZ Auschwitz, Gateway’ (by Stanisław Mucha, 1945), 2015

The story behind the photograph…

On 1 January 1945, Polish photographer Stanisław Mucha (1895–1976) captured a view of the railway entrance to a concentration camp. Established in 1940, the original camp was located on the outskirts of the city of O´swi˛ecim, which was annexed to the Third Reich and renamed Auschwitz; over its almost five years of existence, it was expanded by the Nazis to encompass a number of sub-camps, including Birkenau. Rudolf Höss was its longest-serving commandant. In an affidavit made at Nuremberg on 5 April 1946, he stated: ‘I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000. This figure represents about 70 or 80 percent of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labour in the concentration camp industries; included among the executed and burned were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war…. The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens (mostly Jewish) from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.’ On 16 April 1947, Höss was hanged next to the crematorium of the main Auschwitz camp.