Auschwitz - how to get there?

a couple of lads from work come from a village near by and ive ridden back with them a couple of times :thumb talking to some of the older local residents is very thought provoking
 
You are a bit late.

you asked how to get there, but you need to time travel if you wish to get there for free.
Back in 1940, there were many ways to get there, all free.
The easiest and most popular method was to be Jewish. Worked very well.
If that didn't suit you, being a Gypsy was also a very good way of getting there.
If neither of the above options turned you on, you could have tried being a Priest or a Nun. Not a guaranteed method, but worked well of you stood up and told the truth.
Living in Germany, and sharing a few crusts of bread with a Polish worker who had not been fed for 3 days worked well for a friend's mother. She spent a month there. Free lodgings but food was not included.

These special offers to all in the Third Reich were due to be extended to all of the residents of Russia when the people there joined the Reich, so plans were made for their accommodation in 1941, when the management started to double the size of the holiday camp. If, when you enter, you turn right and walk to the edge, you will see the foundations of the proposed extension, which was going to double the number of chalets available.
In 1942, the extension was abandoned when the European tour ran into logistical and manpower problems on the eastern part of the gig.
The entire site was beautifully landscaped from the outside, with weeping willows planted all round. The entrance had beautiful lace curtains on all of the windows, and these were changed daily by the grateful residents.
Later owners of the holiday camp removed all of the weeping willows at the front of the camp, leaving it stark and ugly, so if you wish to see what the front looked like, you should walk straight to the back of the camp past 2 of the crematoria, and look through the barbed wire fences put there to keep the locals out.
You will see the remaining weeping willows all along the rear fence.

If you really wish to get a flavour of the joys of living there, and I suggest you do so before going, get a copy of Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyl.
Failing that, try The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer.

Myke
 
Mrs. H and I went there a couple of months ago by train.
We stayed at Andel's hotel which is very modern and next to the railway station.
There is a coach that picks up from several hotels every morning to go to Auschwitz and it was very simple to join the tour which is the way we did it.
The coach has a film that you view en route and the price also includes a guide when you get to Auschwitz and the trip also includes Birkenau.
Our guide was very very good, spoke perfect English and was passionate about his subject.
We left at something like 8:30 in the morning and got back to the hotel mid afternoon.
Would recommend both the hotel and the coach option.
 
I went there in 2005 and stayed in the Hotel Poland, just on the edge of the old centre of Krakow. At the time it was a hilariously ramshackle left-over from communist times. We stayed in an apartment overlooking the old town with terrible beds, dodgy windows and a great atmosphere. The centre of Krakow is superb and well worth a visit in daytime as well as by night.

It took about an hour to ride from central Krakow to Auschwitz 1. After the visit there we went on to Birkenau, which takes about 10 minutes by motorcycle from camp 1. Camp 3 was the site of the medical experiments and is not open to visitors. I think 'Canada' is long destroyed, although I'm not 100% on that one.

The visit made a huge impression on me and I wrote it up here http://www.mylovelyhorse.org.uk/s/a-b.html.

Cheers

m
 
Bergen Belsen in well worth a visit ... not far from Hanover / Ruhrgebiet
Post WWII the Germans let it go back to forest. It has a very thought provoking visitors centre - most who dies there were victims of typhoid

This is how it looked in the early sixties:

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There was no visitor centre there then. When I next visited in the latter half of the seventies, it had a visitor centre.

I understand Bill's comment. I also understand the thinking behind the information and visitor centre and that less than twenty years after the events such things probably weren't required but it the place had a greater impact before the information boards etc started popping-up.
 
Re Bergen Belsen I will post some pictures later

BTW - the visitor centre was only build when Reagan said he wanted to visit... Kohl was spurred into action ...
 
Re Bergen Belsen I will post some pictures later

BTW - the visitor centre was only build when Reagan said he wanted to visit... Kohl was spurred into action ...

There was a museum and visitor centre at the entrance in 1976 or 77.
 
worth a stop in Dresden too on the way back or a day trip if you're nearby :thumb2
 
There was a museum and visitor centre at the entrance in 1976 or 77.


A straight wiki filtch ...
However, for a long time remembering Bergen-Belsen was not a political priority. Periods of attention were followed by long phases of official neglect. For much of the 1950s Belsen "was increasingly forgotten as a place of remembrance".[25] Only after 1957 large groups of young people visited the place where Anne Frank had died. Then after anti-Semitic graffiti was scrawled on the Cologne synagogue on Christmas 1959, German chancellor Konrad Adenauer followed a suggestion by Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress and for the very first time visited the site of a former concentration camp. In a speech at the Bergen-Belsen memorial Adenauer assured the Jews still living in Germany that they would have the same respect and security as everyone else.[27] Afterwards, the German public saw the Belsen memorial as a primarily Jewish place of remembrance. Nevertheless, the memorial was redesigned in 1960/61. In 1966 a document centre was opened which offered a permanent exhibition on the persecution of the Jews, with a focus on events in the nearby Netherlands - where Anne Frank and her family had been arrested in 1944. This was complemented by an overview of the history of the Bergen-Belsen camp. This was the first ever permanent exhibit anywhere in Germany on the topic of Nazi crimes.[27] However, there was still no scientific personnel at the site, with only a janitor as permament staff. Memorial events were only organized by the survivors themselves.

In October 1979, the president of the European Parliament Simone Veil, who was herself a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, came to the memorial for a speech which focused on the Nazi persecution of Roma and Sinti. This was the first time that an official event in Germany acknowledged this aspect of the Nazi era.

In 1985 international attention was focused on Bergen-Belsen when the camp was hastily included in Ronald Reagan's itinerary when he visited West Germany after a controversy about a visit to a cemetery where the interred included members of the Waffen SS (see Bitburg). Shortly before Reagan's visit on May 5, there had been a large memorial event on occassion of the 40th anniversary of the camp's liberation, which had been attended by German president Richard von Weizsäcker and German chancellor Helmut Kohl.[28] In the aftermath of these events the parliament of Lower Saxony decided to expand the exhibition center and to hire permanent scientific staff. In 1990 the permanent exhibition was replaced by a new version and a larger document building was opened.

Only in 2000 did the Federal government of Germany begin to financially support the memorial. Co-financed by the state of Lower Saxony, a complete redesign was planned which was intended to be more in line with contemporary thought on exhibition design.[29] On April 15, 2005 there was a ceremony, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the liberation and many ex-prisoners and ex-liberating troops attended.[30][31] In October 2007 the redesigned memorial site was opened, including a large new Documentation Centre and permanent exhibition on the edge of the newly redefined camp, whose structure and layout can now be traced. Since 2009 the memorial has been receiving funding from the Federal government on an ongoing basis.[32]
The Jewish Memorial at the site of the former camp, decorated with wreaths on Liberation Day, April 15, 2012.

The site is open to the public and includes monuments to the dead, including a successor to the wooden cross of 1945, some individual memorial stones and a "House of Silence" for reflection. In addition to the Jewish, Polish and Dutch national memorials, in December 2012 a memorial to eight Turkish citizens who were killed at Belsen was dedicated.[33] [34]
 
Like I said, nothing there in 63 when I first visited and an exhibition-cum-visitor centre by 1976/7.

A straight wiki filtch ...
In 1966 a document centre was opened which offered a permanent exhibition on the persecution of the Jews, with a focus on events in the nearby Netherlands - where Anne Frank and her family had been arrested in 1944. This was complemented by an overview of the history of the Bergen-Belsen camp. This was the first ever permanent exhibit anywhere in Germany on the topic of Nazi crimes.

No doubt it was given a spruce up and extended since then and especially for the visit of Ronnie.
 
So when you visited in the 60's Mike were there any of the buildings, railways and stuff thats there today? I hear what Fanum says and don't doubt it's true, have always thought I may go and see for myself one day and would really like to know what it is I'm looking at. Is it genuinely old buildings, railways, carridges, signage etc or is it as some suggest a reconstruction job?

If it's the later then I think I may give it a miss and regret I am unable to see it as you did on your first visit.
 
My father-in-law was in the 51st Highlanders and was a POW in Stalag XXA near Thorn (modern day Torun) and in January 1945 along with many thousands of other POWs *walked* the best part of 1000km through the depth of winter for about six weeks eventually ending up at Stalag XIB in Fallingbostal which was right next to the Bergen Belsen camp.

Fallingbostal was turned into a British Army camp after the war.

I did a trip visiting many of the Todeslagers (six death camps, all of which are in Poland, of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor etc), some of the Konzentrationslager (concentration camps) and many of the Stalags, Oflags and so forth (POW camps). I also visited Torun and found the satellite POW camp where Hubert spent the war at Graudenz (modern day Grudziądz). As in the account linked above, Hubert eventually flew back to the UK in the bomb bay of a Lancaster bomber.

Auschwitz had three camps. The original Auschwitz-I with the brick buildings was a Konzentrationslager. Auschwitz II-Birkenau was a Todeslager, and Auschwizt III-Monowitz was an Arbeitslager (slave labour camp) producing synthetic rubber for IG Farben.
 
So when you visited in the 60's Mike were there any of the buildings, railways and stuff thats there today? I hear what Fanum says and don't doubt it's true, have always thought I may go and see for myself one day and would really like to know what it is I'm looking at. Is it genuinely old buildings, railways, carridges, signage etc or is it as some suggest a reconstruction job?

If it's the later then I think I may give it a miss and regret I am unable to see it as you did on your first visit.

I think Mike was talking about having visited Belsen in the 60's, not Auschwitz

The main buildings in Auschwitz, the dormitories etc are all still original (I think) and the commandant's twee little house is there still, replanted with the neat flowerbeds that it apparently did have, which casts a shocking contrast to the lines of barbed wire and atmosphere of the rest of the place.

The dormitories and medical blocks now house displays...some of huge piles of hair, spectacles, boots, prosthetics and other things that were taken as a recycling process from the people at Birkenau.....there are also large photographs of some off the people they 'processed', with a D.O.B, name, age at death and town of origin.....that's very very powerful as you move between rooms, seeing the faces and the ages.:(
 
Jim,

As Bill says, my early sixties visit was to Belsen. At that time the railway spur that served the CZ was still there. It was bit of a tramp to the site of the camp.

In the area of the camp there was only the long mounds with a low granite wall around the bases. Each had a number carved into the blocks; an estimate of the number of bodies bulldozed into the lime slaked pits.

There was a newish memorial wall with an obelisk that marked the position of the crematorium. On the wall were inscriptions in every language you can imagine.

One of the things about Belsen, that I think is unusual, if not unique, is the mounds over the pits. Every other camp that I've visited has no trace of the dead in such an obvious way.
 
i know it's not what you are looking for , but , natzwiller 30 clicks s-west of strasbourg .

http://www.struthof.fr/en/home/

and the roads are good . and it's not over-visited .

I'd second that. The original "hospital", cell block and crematorium is still there. All the original huts were in danger of collapse so were pulled down but the entrance, the fences and the layout are original.

There's a replica hut that serves as a museum. The visitor centre near the car park is worth missing as it's a general overview of the war and not specific to Natzweiller.

It was part of the Nacht und Nebel (night and fog) programme but some SOE agents were held there, plus four female SOE members were executed quite horribly there.

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It wasn't an extermination camp it was a place where prominent prisoners "disappeared".
 
Looks like I'll be booking the trip for february half term as other trips need to be booked elsewhere - thanks for all the advice offered, its all been really useful :)
 
This is a timely thread for me too - I've booked for my daughter and me to go in April as well. Flying by Easyjet, staying in Krakow for 3 nights. Looking forward to it!
 


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