Auschwitz III Concentration Camp Memorial

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Overview: Monowitz (also known as Monowitz-Buna, Buna and Auschwitz III) was a Nazi concentration camp and labor camp (Arbeitslager) run

Photographed By Andrew Ruppenstein, April 19, 2024

2. Auschwitz III Concentration Camp Memorial - wide view

by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland from 1942–1945, during World War II and the Holocaust. For most of its existence, Monowitz was a subcamp of the Auschwitz concentration camp; from November 1943 it and other Nazi subcamps in the area were jointly known as "Auschwitz III-subcamps" (KL Auschwitz III-Aussenlager). In November 1944 the Germans renamed it Monowitz concentration camp, after the village of Monowice (German: Monowitz) where it was built, in the annexed portion of Poland. SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Heinrich Schwarz was commandant from November 1943 to January 1945.

The SS established the camp in October 1942 at the behest of IG Farben executives to provide slave labor for their Buna Werke (Buna Works) industrial complex. The name Buna was derived from the butadiene-based synthetic rubber and the chemical symbol for sodium (Na), a process of synthetic rubber production developed in Germany. Other German industrial enterprises built factories with their own subcamps, such as Siemens-Schuckert's Bobrek subcamp, close to Monowitz, to profit from the use of slave labor. The German armaments manufacturer Krupp, headed by SS member Alfried Krupp, also built their own manufacturing facilities near Monowitz.

Monowitz held around 12,000 prisoners, the great majority of whom were Jews, in addition to non-Jewish criminals and political prisoners. The SS charged IG Farben three Reichsmarks (RM) per day for unskilled workers, four (RM) per hour for skilled workers, and one and one-half (RM) for children.

Photographed By Andrew Ruppenstein, April 19, 2024

3. Auschwitz III Concentration Camp Memorial - plaques on plinth

On one side of the plaque are two plaques, the left one indicating that an urn with a mix of earth and ashes from Auschwitz is interred therein, while the one on the right indicates that the memorial was built with the aid of the State and City of Paris, with the artist involved being Louis Mitelberg (aka TIM), and Gilbert Clementi being the foundry person, and Marcel Schmit doing marble.

The camp contained an "Arbeitsausbildungslager" (labor education camp) for non-Jewish prisoners viewed as not up to par with German work standards. The life expectancy of Jewish workers at Buna Werke was three to four months; for those working in the outlying mines, only one month. Those deemed unfit for work were gassed at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

Primo Levi, author of If This Is a Man (1947), survived Monowitz, as did Elie Wiesel, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book Night (1960), who was a teenage inmate there along with his father.

Excerpt: To reduce ‘commuting’, IG Farben had the Auschwitz III-Monowitz concentration camp built on the southern edge of the factory complex in 1942, necessitating the clearance and demolition of the existing village of Monowice. The IG Farben complex was completed in January 1945. A total of 35,000 Jewish prisoners worked on its construction, of whom more than 20,000 died in the process.

Excerpt: After repeated memos and complaints, SS-Obersturmbannführer Gerhard Maurer, who was responsible for the employment of concentration camp prisoners, traveled to Oświęcim on February 10, 1943. He promised IG Farben the prompt supply of another thousand prisoners, and the

Photographed By Andrew Ruppenstein, April 19, 2024

4. Auschwitz III Concentration Camp Memorial - closeup

systematic “exchanging” of those no longer capable of hard labor at the factory. More than 10 thousand prisoners fell victim to selection during the period that the camp was in operation. They were taken to the hospital in the main camp, where most of them were killed by lethal injection of phenol to the heart, or to Birkenau, where some were liquidated after so-called “re-selection” in the BIIf prison hospital or—in the majority of cases—murdered immediately in the gas chambers. More than 1,600 prisoners other prisoners died in the hospital in Monowice, and several dozen were shot at the construction site or hanged in the camp. Summing up these figures and adding several hundred known victims in the Buna labor detail, a total of about 10 thousand Auschwitz concentration camp prisoners thus lost their lives as a result of working for IG Farben.

Photographed By Andrew Ruppenstein, April 19, 2024

5. Auschwitz III Concentration Camp Memorial - detail

Photographed By Andrew Ruppenstein, April 19, 2024

6. Auschwitz III Concentration Camp Memorial - detail