Unseen photos of the first transport of Polish citizens to Auschwitz in 1940 discovered

Auschwitz-Birkenau, near the town of Oswiecim, in then-occupied Poland

Auschwitz-Birkenau was a concentration and extermination camp used by the Nazis during World War II.

The camp, which was located in Nazi-occupied Poland, consisted of three main sites.

Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a combined concentration and extermination camp, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp, with an additional 45 satellite sites.

Auschwitz was an extermination camp used by the Nazis in Poland to murder over 1.1 million people, most of them Jews.

Birkenau became an important part of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ as they sought to rid Europe of its Jewish population.

An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Since 1947 it has served as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which was placed on the World Heritage List by Unesco in 1979.

Treblinka, near a village of the same name, outside Warsaw in Nazi-occupied Poland

Unlike other camps, where some Jews were assigned to forced labor before being murdered, almost all of the Jews brought to Treblinka were immediately gassed.

Only a select few—mostly young, strong men—were spared instant death and instead assigned to maintenance work.

The death toll at Treblinka was second only to Auschwitz. In just 15 months of operation – between July 1942 and October 1943 – between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were murdered in the gas chambers.

Extermination stopped in the camp after an uprising in which about 200 prisoners escaped. About half of them were killed soon after, but 70 are known to have survived to the end of the war

Belzec, near tThe station of the same name in Nazi-occupied Poland

Belzec operated from March 1942 to the end of June 1943. It was built specifically as an extermination camp as part of Operation Reinhard.

Polish, German, Ukrainian and Austrian Jews were all murdered there. In all, about 600,000 people were killed.

The camp was dismantled in 1943 and the site was disguised as a fake farm.

Sobibor, near the village of the same name in Nazi-occupied Poland

Sobibor is named after the nearest train station, where Jews disembarked from overcrowded wagons, unsure of their fate.

Jews from Poland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the Soviet Union were killed in three gas chambers fed by the deadly fumes of a large petrol engine from a tank.

An estimated 200,000 people died in the camp. Some estimates put the number at 250,000.

This would make Sobibor the fourth largest extermination camp in terms of death toll after Belzec, Treblinka and Auschwitz.

The camp was about 50 miles from the provincial Polish capital of Brest-on-the-Bug. The official German name was SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor.

Prisoners began a heroic escape on October 14, 1943 in which 600 men, women and children managed to cross the camp fence.

Of those, only 50 managed to evade capture. It is unclear how many crossed into Allied territory.

Chelmno (aka Kulmhof), in Nazi-occupied Poland

Chelmno was Nazi Germany’s first camp built specifically for extermination.

It operated from December 1941 to April 1943 and then again from June 1944 to January 1945.

Between 152,000 and 200,000 people, almost all of them Jews, were murdered there.

Majdanek (also known simply as Lublin), built on the outskirts of the city of Lublin in Nazi-occupied Poland

Majdanek was initially intended for forced labor, but was converted into an extermination camp in 1942.

It had seven gas chambers and a wooden gallows where some of the victims were hanged.

In total, as many as 130,000 people are said to have died there.