14th November 1941
K.L. Auschwitz

The text to the left of the senders address reads...

Auschwitz Concentration Camp

The following instructions must be observed in correspondence with prisoners:

1.) Every prisoner in preventive detention may receive and send two cards per month from their relatives. Letters to prisoners must be written legibly in ink and may only contain 15 lines on one page. Only normal-sized letterhead is permitted. Envelopes must be unlined. Only 5 stamps of 12 pfennigs each may be enclosed in a letter. Anything else is prohibited and subject to confiscation. Postcards have 10 lines. Photographs may not be used as postcards.

2.) Money transfers are permitted.

3.) Please ensure that the exact address, consisting of: Name, date of birth, and prisoner number, is written on the items. If the address is incorrect, the mail will be returned to the sender or destroyed.

4.) Newspapers are permitted, but may only be ordered through the post office of K.L. Auschwitz.

5.) Parcels may not be sent, as prisoners can buy anything in the camp.

6.) Requests for release from protective custody to the camp administration are not permitted.

7.) Speaking permits and visits by prisoners in concentration camps are generally not permitted.

The camp Kommandant

[Note camp Kommandant at this time of the envelope above was SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss]

Auschwitz Concentration Camp

Auschwitz or Oświęcim, was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager) in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labour camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of sub-camps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish question.

After Germany initiated World War II by invading Poland in September 1939, the Schutzstaffel (SS) converted Auschwitz I, an army barracks, into a prisoner-of-war camp. The initial transport of political detainees to Auschwitz consisted almost solely of Poles (for whom the camp was initially established). For the first two years, the majority of inmates were Polish. In May 1940, German criminals brought to the camp as functionaries established the camp's reputation for sadism. Prisoners were beaten, tortured, and executed for the most trivial of reasons. The first gassings—of Soviet and Polish prisoners—took place in block 11 of Auschwitz I around August 1941.

Construction of Auschwitz II began the following month, and from 1942 until late 1944 freight trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to its gas chambers. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million were murdered. The number of victims includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 others.[8] Those not gassed were murdered via starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments.

At least 802 prisoners tried to escape, 144 successfully, and on 7th October 1944, two Sonderkommando units, consisting of prisoners who operated the gas chambers, launched an unsuccessful uprising. After the Holocaust ended, only 789 Schutzstaffel personnel (no more than 15 percent) ever stood trial. Several were executed, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss. The Allies' failure to act on early reports of mass murder by bombing the camp or its railways remains controversial.

As the Soviet Red Army approached Auschwitz in January 1945, toward the end of the war, the SS sent most of the camp's population west on a death march to camps inside Germany and Austria. Soviet troops liberated the camp on 27th January 1945, a day commemorated since 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the decades after the war, survivors such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, Elie Wiesel, and Edith Eger wrote memoirs of their experiences, and the camp became a dominant symbol of the Holocaust. In 1947, Poland founded the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, and in 1979 it was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Auschwitz is the site of the largest mass murder in a single location in history.

Source: Wikipedia (2025)

Contact Brief History to inform us of additional information regarding this page