ARBEIT MACHT FREI 'Work Makes You Free'
Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and following the Soviet invasion on 17 September 1939
the country was divided between the two invading powers. The original Auschwitz camp was the site
of Pre-War Polish barracks, but was adapted as a concentration camp. The first people to be sent there
were Polish: dissidents, intellectuals, musicians, performers; doctors, basically anyone with influence and
who were regarded as a threat to the new Nazi regime governing that part of Poland, and included a
proportion of Polish Jews. Work was never intended to set anyone free: prisoners would die from overwork,
starvation and disease, sometimes after just two months in the camp.
Later Auschwitz I would be the site of the first gas chamber and crematorium in the whole Auschwitz
complex. Its appearance with brick-built blocks and trees was perhaps more 'friendly' than what was
to be built later at Auschwitz II, or Auschwitz-Birkenau. But friendly it was not, with watch towers and
electrified fences, torture chambers and areas of execution, and later the gas chamber and crematorium.