The Auschwitz arrivals unaware of their fate: Unseen photos taken by SS guards reveal fear and confusion on the faces of children and families as hundreds of Hungarian Jews get off trains into Nazi death camp
By Harry Howard, History Correspondent For Mailonline
Their faces etched with fear, Jewish children and mothers carrying toddlers walk unknowingly to their horrendous fate.
These innocent victims were among around 1.1million people murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau, near the town of Oswiecim, in what was then occupied Poland.
The victims at Auschwitz were among 6million Jews who were murdered by Adolf Hitler’s forces between 1941 and 1945. Their lives are commemorated today on Holocaust Memorial Day.
The rare photos taken at Auschwitz by Hitler’s SS guards show not only the arrival of Hungarian Jews at the camp – on rail tracks built specifically in 1944 for the extermination operation – but the long queues as they waited to walk to gas chambers.
In less than three months in the summer of 1944, nearly 400,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered in a ruthless production line system of horror.
The images of are revealed in upcoming book Hitler’s Death Camps in Occupied Poland – Rare Photographs from Wartime Archives, written by military historian Ian Baxter and published by Pen & Sword.
Speaking to MailOnline on what is also the 76th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by Soviet forces in 1945, Mr Baxter branded Auschwitz a ‘factory of death’ and said the camp is a ‘monument and a testimony to the tragedy of what happened.’
‘It is a foundation to the future to warn others of what can happen,’ he added.