Members of various ethnic, religious or sexual groups and minorities were victims of the racist policies of the Third Reich. In Birkenau, 21,000 members of the Roma and related Sinti communities were registered. Disease, starvation and later their planned extermination meant that only one in seven of them made it out alive after the camp’s liquidation.

An unusually high mortality rate was also recorded among the approximately 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war brought to the camp. Some of them, in particular political officers, were not registered but were sent to their deaths straight away. Only a few of the 12,000 registered survived. The prisoners of war brought to Auschwitz after the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 were subjected to torture, assigned to the hardest labour and treated worse than other groups of prisoners, with the exception of the Jews. Their situation began to gradually improve from mid-1942, when the Germans needed more hands to work. Initially, registered Russian prisoners of war were given a number on scraps of cloth to sew onto their uniforms. However, it turned out that many were dying and the others were taking parts or whole garments together with the numbers from the dead, which caused confusion in the camp registers. Hence the idea of tattooing the numbers on the left side of the chest. Only later, from the spring of 1942, did the Germans start systematically tattooing numbers on the left forearm of all registered prisoners.

Around 400 “Bible Students”, whom we would now call Jehovah’s Witnesses, were also deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They ended up in the concentration camps because of their deep commitment to their beliefs. They refused not only military service, but even work in the armaments industry, which was punishable in the Third Reich. They had the possibility of regaining their freedom in exchange for a written renunciation of their religious principles. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, no one signed such a document.

It is extremely difficult to ascertain exactly how many homosexuals were sent to the camp. According to Bogdan Piętka of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, there may have been 77. Jacek Lachendro points out that German researcher Rainer Hoffschildt puts the number at over 130. The inaccuracies are due to the ambiguous marking of this category of prisoner. Some received pink triangles signifying imprisonment under the paragraph condemning homosexuals, but there were also those who might have received red triangles intended for political prisoners or green triangles signifying criminals. In contrast, historians’ research suggests that these people were among the most mistreated groups.

The podcast was produced as part of the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański Eastern Europe College project funded by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Public task financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland within the grant competition “Public Diplomacy 2022”.  The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the official positions of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.