Calm reigns behind the barbed wire of the Auschwitz I camp, where the brick barracks erected by the Nazi occupiers line up, seven months after the beginning of the occupation of Poland, in April 1940. The country - which made up part of the Allies - falls first in WWII. Its territory was occupied by Nazi Germany in the West, the USSR in the East and its resistant government then went into exile in London. The small town of Oswiecim, then in the west of the country, is directly attached to the Third Reich. It was there that Himmler decided to use the barracks of the Polish army to initially imprison political prisoners. Then the camp expanded, to include four gas chambers commissioned in 1943. In all, 1.1 million people, the vast majority of them Jews,were killed in what represents the height of Nazi barbarism.
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In these times of pandemic, the Auschwitz-Birkenau National Museum installed on the premises only welcomes the public
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