Bunker No. 2

The current state of Bunker No. 2 - the second provisional gas chamber. At times, the bodies of those who had been murdered were burned in the area visible in the background.

Bunker No. 2 When larger Jewish transports were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in mid-1942, the Nazis began using - in addition to the already operational gas chamber in Krematorium I - two provisional gas chambers set up in farmhouses belonging to people who had been expelled from the village of Brzezinka. Jewish men, women, and children, as well as Polish political prisoners selected by physicians in the camp hospital, were killed with poison gas in Bunker No. 2, which was also known as "the little white house" (because of the color of the plaster covering its walls). The bunker contained four provisional gas chambers. It operated from 1942 until the spring and summer of 1943, when four new buildings with gas chambers and crematorium furnaces came into use in Birkenau concentration camp. In the period when the Germans needed additional gas chambers for the destruction of the Jews deported from Hungary in 1944, they temporarily put Bunker No. 2 back into operation.