{"id":94,"date":"2012-02-21T20:50:49","date_gmt":"2012-02-22T02:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/?p=94"},"modified":"2012-03-18T12:58:00","modified_gmt":"2012-03-18T18:58:00","slug":"this-week-in-the-war-19-25-february-1940-arbeit-macht-frei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/?p=94","title":{"rendered":"This week in the War, 19–25 February 1940: Arbeit macht frei"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>On Wednesday 21 February 1940, with the concurrence of SS-Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler, work began to convert\u00a0a former army barracks\u00a0in the small Polish town of Oswiecim—or, to\u00a0use its German name: Auschwitz—into a concentration camp. The famous ‘Arbeit macht frei’<\/em> (‘Work will make you free’) sign over the main gate dates from the site’s early history as a labour camp for captured Polish resistance fighters. Rudolf Hoess was the first commandant and Josef Kramer (who was later commandant of Belsen and nicknamed ‘the Beast’) was Hoess’s second-in-command. Hoess spent much of his adult life as either a prisoner—in 1923 he received a lengthy prison\u00a0sentence for murder—or as a jailer, since, after his release through a general amnesty, he joined the SS and served at Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps before moving to Auschwitz.<\/span><\/p>\n

As commandant of Auschwitz, Hoess\u00a0had the opportunity\u00a0to develop his murderous talents to a level unheard of in modern times. At the Nuremberg trials, he confessed to establishing large-scale extermination facilities\u00a0 at Auschwitz and signed an affidavit in which he\u00a0estimated a death toll of 3,000,000, mostly due to gassing. The author and journalist, William L. Shirer, provides a chilling account in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich<\/em> (Pan, 1964). Hoess finally stood trial in Poland and was hanged at Auschwitz in April 1947.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday 21 February 1940, with the concurrence of SS-Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler, work began to convert\u00a0a former army barracks\u00a0in the small Polish town of Oswiecim—or, to\u00a0use its German name: Auschwitz—into a concentration camp. The famous ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (‘Work will … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,13,12,14],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-war-ii","tag-auschwitz","tag-himmler","tag-hoess","tag-kramer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":343,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions\/343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}