How Many Poles Died in Auschwitz?

Written by Rory Thornfield

When on June 14, 1940, the first transport of prisoners from Tarnów arrived at the newly established concentration camp, no one suspected that this place would become a symbol of genocide on an unprecedented scale. Over the next five years, approximately 140,000 Poles passed through Auschwitz-Birkenau, of whom about half died as a result of starvation, disease, executions, and mass murder. This was a camp that in its first two years of existence served primarily as an instrument of terror against Polish society.

June 1940 – The Beginning of Tragedy

Seven hundred twenty-eight political prisoners from the prison in Tarnów formed the core of the first transport to the camp that the Germans established on the outskirts of Oświęcim. They were primarily members of the Polish independence underground, social activists, teachers, and people suspected of hostile attitudes toward the occupier. This transport initiated a systematic policy of eliminating the Polish intellectual and political elite.

In the first months of KL Auschwitz’s operation, nearly all prisoners were Poles. The Germans treated the camp as an instrument for pacifying Polish society in the occupied territories. The camp system was based on a brutal work regime, starving prisoners, and systematic executions of those unfit for work or deemed particularly dangerous.

Living conditions from the very beginning were designed to destroy prisoners’ health and will to survive. Barracks lacked adequate heating, there was no running water, and overcrowding reached catastrophic proportions. Prisoners slept several to a bed, which facilitated the spread of infectious diseases. Food rations barely sufficed for survival, and forced labor lasted from dawn to dusk.

During the camp’s first year of operation, thousands of Poles died. The Germans tested various killing methods – shots to the back of the head in the courtyard, medical procedures leading to death, starvation in punishment cells. Auschwitz became a laboratory of terror in which the occupier experimented with the most effective ways to eliminate the population of occupied territories.

Geography of Deportations – Where Prisoners Came From

Transports of Poles to Auschwitz came from throughout the occupied country. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum compiled Memorial Books documenting prisoners’ origins from individual regions – from the Warsaw district approximately 26,000 people were deported, from Kraków 18,000, from Radom 16,000, and from Lublin over 7,000. These numbers show the systematic nature of the operation – the Germans methodically cleared each region of people deemed threatening.

Street roundups were one of the main methods of obtaining prisoners for camps. The Germans blocked streets in Polish cities, stopped all men of working age, and without verifying documents loaded them into transport cars. Some of these people ended up in Auschwitz, where almost certain death awaited them. This method of operation had a dual purpose – obtaining labor and terrorizing the civilian population.

From December 1942, mass deportations from the Zamość region began. The Germans conducted a resettlement operation there that was to transform the region into a German settlement colony. The Polish rural population was deported to camps or sent for forced labor to the Reich. Over 1,300 village residents from this region died in Auschwitz – they were mainly peasants whom the Germans deemed useless for work or dangerous due to alleged connections with partisans.

After the fall of the Warsaw Uprising in October 1944, approximately 13,000 residents of the capital ended up in Auschwitz. These were mainly civilians captured by the Germans during the city’s pacification – women, children, elderly people, and men deemed participants in fighting. This transport was one of the largest single influxes of Poles to the camp in the final period of its operation. Many of them died within the first weeks of their stay in the camp due to exhaustion, disease, and executions.

Killing Methods and Execution Sites

Block number 11, called the Death Block by prisoners, served as a prison within a prison. Here political prisoners awaiting verdicts from summary courts operating within the camp were held. Most of those sentenced were shot in the courtyard between blocks 10 and 11, at the so-called Death Wall. The Germans murdered at least several thousand Poles there – the exact number of victims is unknown because executions were often not registered.

Block 11 also conducted medical experiments on prisoners. SS doctors tested new killing methods, including phenol injections directly into the heart, which caused immediate death. This method was used particularly on sick prisoners deemed unable to continue working. Tens of thousands of Poles died precisely as a result of medical procedures that under the guise of treatment led to death.

The camp gravel pit, located outside the main camp area, was the site of mass deaths of prisoners working in extremely harsh conditions. Work in the quarry required extracting and carrying tons of gravel on minimal food rations. Prisoners often died of exhaustion directly during work, and their bodies were transported to the crematorium. Most victims of the gravel pit were Poles and Polish Jews.

From 1942, when the camp became the central site for the extermination of European Jews, some Polish prisoners were also murdered in gas chambers. This particularly concerned people deemed unable to work – the sick, elderly, children. However, unlike Jews, who were gassed en masse immediately upon arrival, most Poles died gradually as a result of camp conditions, work, and systematic executions.

Evolution of Prisoner Structure

Until mid-1942, Poles constituted the absolute majority of Auschwitz prisoners. The situation changed after the Wannsee Conference, when the camp was incorporated into the system implementing the „final solution to the Jewish question.” From that moment, transports of Jews from all over Europe began arriving, and the proportion of Polish prisoners systematically decreased. Nevertheless, deportations of Poles continued uninterrupted until the camp’s evacuation in January 1945.

The change in prisoners’ national structure affected the hierarchy within the camp. Polish prisoners who survived the first years often held functional positions in the camp administration – they were kapos, block clerks, camp workshop workers. This position gave them better chances of survival but was also associated with the moral dilemma of complicity in the terror system. Some Polish prisoners used their positions to help fellow prisoners, others became executioners in SS service.

In the war’s final months, as the Wehrmacht withdrew westward, prisoners evacuated from camps in territories occupied by the Red Army were brought to Auschwitz. Among them were also Poles from camps in the Eastern Borderlands and the General Government. Camp overcrowding reached a critical point – thousands of prisoners died daily from disease, hunger, and exhaustion.

According to estimates by Piotr Setkiewicz of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, approximately 70,000 Poles died in this camp. This number includes both victims registered in official camp documentation and about 10,000 people murdered without registration – these people were killed immediately upon arrival or in circumstances not documented by camp administration. The actual number of victims may be higher because many documents were destroyed by the Germans before the camp’s evacuation.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rory Thornfield

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Rory's grandfather left behind a wartime diary filled with accounts of a minor Burma skirmish that history books never mentioned. Reading it, Rory realized: behind every famous battle are dozens of forgotten struggles, each with its own human drama.

His preferred topics: The overlooked corners of military history – secondary campaigns, shadow battalions, local conflicts that never made headlines. From medieval sieges to twentieth-century expeditions, he focuses on the soldiers, not the generals. The people who faced impossible choices and carried those experiences forever.

Rory strips away the romanticism without losing respect for those who served. He combines tactical analysis with personal stories, examining human endurance and moral complexity rather than celebrating warfare. His writing is balanced, thoughtful, and deeply researched.

Outside work, Rory visits forgotten battlefields (now quiet farmland), photographs war memorials nobody tends anymore, and interviews veterans' families.