New Investigation Being Opened Into Auschwitz Crimes

Polish authorities have ordered a new investigation into the crimes against humanity committed at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. The Germans murdered an estimated 1.5 million people at Auschwitz, located near Krakow, until the Red Army libereated the camp late in January 1945. 

The crimes committed at Auschwitz were central to Nazi Germany's plans to create lebensraum in Eastern Europe - to be done mostly at the expense of the Slavic and Jewish people, though hundreds of thousands of Roma and other peoples characterized as "sub-human" were also murdered. On June 21, 1941, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, ordered planning to begin for a massive demographic reorganization of Eastern Europe, including the territories of the western Soviet Union. Professor Konrad Meyer authored the subsequent plan labeled Generalplan Ost. Meyer's genocidal plan, approved by Himmler and Heydrich, foresaw removing at least 31 million people from Poland, Belorussia, the Ukraine, and the Baltic States. Generalplan Ost established the horrifying scope to the planned annihilation of Eastern Europe's people; especially Eastern Europe's Jewish and Slavic people. The Generalplan Ost predated the latter and infamous Wansee Conference, outlining the Jewish Holocaust, by over six months.

The Generalplan Ost represented more than just sheer genocidal destruction. The plan also envisioned a massive outlay of capital to build infrastructure, industry, cities, and agriculture in the eastern territories. Himmler planned on spending the enormous sum of 67 billion Reichsmarks, or more money than Germany invested in rearmament from 1930-1939. According to Himmler, in the summer of 1942 at a top level SS meeting, the labor necessary for this massive construction plan would be slave labor. Himmler, seeking to cast his arguments with a positive economic spin, argued slave labor would help lower costs by as much as 40 percent. Himmler's slaves would be organized into work camps, worked to the death, and comprising hundreds of thousands of people selected from the occupied lands based upon their work capabilities. As a result the German camp system would feature a two-tiered approach with "death camps" and "work camps", although some death camps (such as Auschwitz) maintained a dual role of both "death" and "work" camp. For the most part the Jew was destined for elimination, often right off the bat, with the Slav scheduled to be the primary slave laborer for building the National Socialist Empire.