Video: 'The 100 Deadliest Days of the Holocaust Begin... - WAH 039 - July 1942, Pt .2' (Himmler at Auschwitz, July 17-18, 1942, at 2:28)

(Friday, July 17, 1942, late afternoon Central European Summer Time; part of The Holocaust, during World War II) — Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Germany’s Minister of the Interior, began a two-day visit to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp today in Nazi-occupied Poland, his second and final visit to the facility that would witness the murders of 1.3 million people, about 90 percent of them Jewish, through 1945.

Video: 'The World at War: Genocide: 1941-1945 (20 of 26)' (Himmler's visit to Auschwitz in July 1942 at 26:51)

Also on this very day, two convoys of Jews arrive from the Dutch transit camp of Westerbork, which had opened its doors on July 1, 1942 — 1,303 men and 697 women in total. Of them, 52 men and 397 women are gassed immediately.

Their deaths were witnessed by Himmler, who was making his second (and final) visit to Auschwitz to meet Rudolf Höss, commandant of the camp since May 4, 1940.