Auschwitz, Fußnoten

Auschwitz today stands like hardly any other place for the mass murder carried out by the German National Socialist regime. Public perception of Auschwitz usually centres on the former camp grounds that are now preserved as the museum and memorial. Yet Auschwitz was not a single place, but a vast and complex system of camps, factories, mines and agricultural sites in which mass murder, forced labour and industrial production were closely interconnected. The project follows these sites in the present, asking what remains of a system whose physical structures have largely disappeared.

The Auschwitz System

Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Upper Silesia became a central area of German rule and economic exploitation. Across the region, hundreds of thousands of people – Jews, prisoners of war and civilian forced labourers – were subjected to forced labour under violent conditions. Established in 1940, the concentration camp at Auschwitz developed within this system into a complex comprising the Stammlager, the extermination camp at Birkenau and dozens of subcamps and associated sites.

Beyond the Memorial

After 1945, the Auschwitz Memorial was established on part of the former camp grounds. As the central global icon of Holocaust remembrance, Auschwitz is overwhelmingly associated with the preserved museum grounds of Auschwitz I (the former main camp) and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Yet the Auschwitz complex extended far beyond these memorialised spaces into a dispersed network of forced labour camps, industrial production sites and agricultural facilities. Many of these locations remain difficult to locate, minimally marked, inaccessible, or entirely absent from public awareness.

Silent Footnotes

The photographs focus on these places outside the memorial grounds. They show sites that are often difficult to recognise as former places of persecution: a landscape, a building, a road, a fragment of infrastructure or an empty space. Silent footnotes in the collective memory of Auschwitz.