Video: 'Auschwitz Concentration Camp - Documentary'

(Friday, June 14, 1940; during The Holocaust, part of World War II) — The first large shipment of prisoners — 728 Polish resistance members — arrived today at the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland.

Of the 728 prisoners who arrived today, only 20 were Jews as the mass deportations of Jews had not yet begun.

These early arrivals had been preceded by a tiny contingent of recidivist criminal prisoners, who had been brought in to help run the new camp. They were initially housed in a building at the site that had formerly belonged to the Polish Tobacco Monopoly.

Auschwitz was one of six “dedicated” death camps, and from the time it began operating until its liberation, on Jan. 27, 1945, it is estimated that up to 1.3 million people, some 90 percent of them Jews, were murdered there.