Bidspirit auction | Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp - Detailed

Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp - Detailed Report by the jurist Jan Sehn, Chairman of the District Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes - Concentration Camp Oświęcim-Brzezinka (Auschwitz-Birkenau) - Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, by the Polish jurist Prof. Jan Sehn - one of the most detailed reports ever written about what took place in Auschwitz. Official Polish legal publishing house (Wydawnictwo Prawnicze), Warsaw, 1957. English edition. A complete copy with the map of the camps. Jan Sehn (1909–1965) was a Polish jurist, investigating judge, and professor. Immediately after the end of the war, he was appointed Chairman of the District Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Kraków. Sehn was the key figure in collecting evidence, examining witnesses, and preparing the legal foundation for the historic show trials held in Poland against Auschwitz war criminals, foremost among them the trial of Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant, and the Auschwitz Garrison Trial. The present book was compiled from the official reports and evidence that Sehn himself collected. The first edition (in Polish) was published as early as 1946 as part of the initial postwar effort to present to the world the magnitude of the atrocities. Immediately after the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army, an intensive investigation began, lasting more than a year and conducted under the direction of Judge Dr. Jan Sehn, a member of the Main Commission. During the investigation, the vast area of the entire Auschwitz camp complex was thoroughly examined. Special committees of experts were established to investigate the ruins of the crematoria and gas chambers in the camp, as well as the pits in which the bodies of those murdered by gas had been burned, which had been destroyed prior to the evacuation of the victims. All documents, plans, and maps found in the camp and its sub-camps, as well as those connected with the camp that were discovered by various means, were examined in detail. Hundreds of witnesses were questioned, both among former prisoners and among the population that had lived in the vicinity of the camp. All investigations were conducted in accordance with court procedures and the provisions of the Polish Code of Criminal Procedure. The results of the investigation carried out by the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland were later used as evidence in two trials before the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in 1947. In the first, Rudolf Höss, the former commandant of Auschwitz, was tried; in the second, 40 former camp officials holding responsible positions were brought to trial. Rudolf Höss and his principal associates were sentenced to death, while other members of the camp staff received various sentences. The book presents a comprehensive documentary, legal, and historical analysis of the structure and operation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, based on the thousands of documents, forensic evidence, and testimonies collected by the Polish Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes. Within this framework, the author traces the development of the complex from a small detention facility for Polish political prisoners in 1940 into a vast extermination center and labor camp that also included Birkenau and Monowitz (Monowitz was one of the three main camps comprising the Auschwitz complex). The text meticulously details the machinery of extermination and the logistics of the transports, from the selection process on the railway platform, through the technical structure and operation of the gas chambers and crematoria, to the systematic and industrial use of Zyklon B gas. Alongside the process of extermination, the book describes the daily life and economic exploitation of the prisoners, who suffered from deliberate starvation, epidemics, forced labor in the service of the German war industry, and frequent internal selections. Another major section is devoted to documenting the cruel and pseudo-scientific medical experiments carried out on prisoners, including women and children, by Josef Mengele and other SS physicians, as well as the methods of punishment and mass executions in Block 11, known as the Death Block, and beside the Black Wall. The author's objective was to prove to the world, in a clear and unequivocal manner, that Auschwitz was not merely a brutal concentration camp, but a carefully planned enterprise and a well-oiled state mechanism whose purpose was genocide. Throughout the book are shocking photographs documenting the atrocities of the camp - horribly tortured prisoners, the bodies of the victims, camp facilities, as well as facsimiles of documents recording the SS orders for punishment and murder in the camp, a folding table of prisoner markings, and a large folding map of the layout of the Nazi concentration camps. On the front endpaper is the ownership stamp of Benson Chertok of Schloss Jühnde,