The barrack on your left is the Birkenau penal company. On the right you see its courtyard.
“The penal company was created in early August 1940, originally for Catholic priests and the few Jews who were in Auschwitz at the time. Later, any prisoner could be sent there. The majority were Poles, although there were also Jews, Germans, and, in 1944, Soviet POWs. “
The Birkenau penal company became a punitive unit established in June 1942 within the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, specifically designed to punish female prisoners. The majority of these inmates were Polish and Jewish women, though some Germans were also included.
Isolation and Labor: Prisoners were completely isolated from the rest of the camp population and subjected to the hardest labor, including dredging mud, clearing ponds, and demolishing buildings.
Abuse: They faced continual beatings by SS guards and prisoner functionaries.
Notable Atrocities: In October 1942, German female functionary prisoners killed approximately 90 Jewish women from France under the pretext of suppressing a mutiny.
The women’s penal company operated until July 1944, when the entire unit was transferred to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. This transfer effectively ended their specific punishment at Birkenau, as they were integrated with other prisoner blocks rather than remaining in isolated penal status.
This Block was not heated. It is obvious that people in such conditions fell to illness in wholesale numbers. Until 1943 it was not permissible to take sick people from the penal company into the hospital. Deprived of medical assistance, the seriously ill were doomed to death in Block 6. However the greatest percentage perished at the hands of the block leader. He would line up the prisoners by a wall, hit them in the jaw with his fist, or alongside the head, smashing their heads against the wall. All photos and videos are Copyright Alan Jacobs and Remember.org.