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The remaining prisoners deemed healthy enough to march were told to assemble into columns and leave Auschwitz. About 7, were left behind as 60, marched. Nazi guards led them through the forests and fields of southern Poland on their way to Germany. The trek was brutal. Some prisoners were stuffed into train cars to complete their journey to Germany; others escaped into the sub-zero temperatures.

Of those forced to walk, some died along the way, though it remains unclear how many were killed over the course of the marches. The only people left behind in the camp were people deemed unfit for labor—those who were too ill or weak. An SS order came down to murder any prisoners who were left, and the SS killed about prisoners in response.

However, order at the camp was breaking down. SS officers began escaping themselves, and the strict hierarchy that had kept prisoners in line disappeared.

Those officers who stayed burned documents in a last-ditch attempt to hide their crimes. Meanwhile, the prisoners who remained huddled in hospital beds and bunks and waited. A few others escaped as the remaining guards fled. A year-old Russian boy, Ivan Dudnik, being rescued from Auschwitz. Yet she never settled back into her pre-war life. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

Share using Email. By Fiona Macdonald 21st October Vogue model, Surrealist muse — and war correspondent. The practical and psychological benefits of gassing were now clear, and the Nazis accelerated towards the "final aim" to which Heydrich had alluded two years before. In October - a month after Czech Jews had assassinated Heydrich in Prague - Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the construction of Belzec, the first of three Polish camps built solely for extermination.

Jewish prisoners built Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, and old medical and SS hands from the T4 programme were enlisted to man the gas chambers and crematoria, with help from Ukrainians who often outdid the Germans for brutality. With the killing houses ready, the Jewish ghettos of Poland could now be emptied. Nazi officials told Jewish elders to organise the orderly evacuation of the miserable, horrendously overcrowded ghettos, so their residents could be "resettled" somewhere to the east.

Fetid cattle trucks took thousands of Jews to the extermination camps each day. Those who survived the journey were again promised resettlement after a hot shower. The guards moved them with maximum, disorientating speed to the "bathrooms". When the door was closed, a simple truck engine pumped its exhaust fumes inside. Some 1. Hitler had created thousands of labour camps since taking power in - the year he opened Dachau near Munich - and major German companies like Volkswagen, Siemens and Daimler all used concentration camp labour.

In , some of these labour camps were infused with the macabre expertise of the "mercy killing" programme, to execute the so-called 'Final Solution' of the Jewish problem. Auschwitz and Majdanek, both in southern Poland, were two such places.

Unimpressed by the carbon monoxide method - which sometimes left doomed prisoners screaming in a locked gas chamber while a faulty motor engine was fixed - Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess found that a pest control chemical called Zyklon B could be an efficient killer in high-enough doses.

It was this prussic acid that asphyxiated more than a million people in Auschwitz, and , more at Majdanek. A death certificate was filed for most of them. It was a typical affectation of a regime that sought to make mass murder a cold matter of duty, science and bureaucracy. Please update your payment details to keep enjoying your Irish Times subscription. Mechanics of murder: how the Nazis killed Mon, Jan 24, , Most Viewed.