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| - A shrinking number of Holocaust survivors are to return Monday to the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp to mark 75 years since it was liberated on January 27, 1945. More than 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, perished at the killing factory that Nazi Germany built in occupied Poland during World War II. Here are facts about the infamous camp: Auschwitz-Birkenau, part of German dictator Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" plan of genocide against European Jews, operated in the occupied southern Polish town of Oswiecim between June 1940 and January 1945. The Nazis established the camp, originally confined to 20 Polish army barracks buildings holding 10,000 inmates, to terrorise and subjugate the Polish people, with the educated elite, including members of the clergy, particularly targeted. Starting in 1941, the Nazis began to further develop their "zone of terror" to include the village of Brzezinka -- Birkenau in German -- about three kilometres (two miles) from Auschwitz. The Nazis fitted out the extended camp with purpose-built, interconnecting gas chambers and crematoria as they stepped up plans to exterminate Europe's Jews. In December 1942, Poland's then London-based government in exile sounded the first formal alarm that Nazi Germany had begun a campaign of genocide against Europe's Jews. It forwarded a document, titled "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", to the Allies that included detailed accounts of the Holocaust as witnessed by members of the Polish resistance. It was met with disbelief and drew only muted reactions from the international community. Birkenau was fully operational in 1943, and it was here that most of the 1.1 million people documented to have died at Auschwitz-Birkenau met their fate. In all, the Nazis killed six million of pre-war Europe's 11 million Jews. Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish political prisoners and men and women of religion were also murdered at the camp, some by overwork, starvation and disease, others in the gas chambers of Birkenau. Many of those who died in the gas chambers did so immediately after arriving at the sprawling Nazi death complex by train. SS soldiers would fling open the doors of the train -- often cattle cars -- after it had stopped, immediately adjacent to the gas chambers with their contiguous crematoria. The passengers were ordered off and "selected", with able-bodied men and women ordered to one side, to work as slave labour for the Germans, and the elderly, infirm and children to the other -- to die. Victims destined for the gas chamber were herded into underground "changing" rooms where men, women and children were forced to strip naked together -- a final humiliation. They were then crammed into a second underground chamber described as a shower, which the Nazis filled with deadly Zyklon B gas. Their corpses were taken by special lifts to a crematorium above the gas chamber, where they were searched for hidden valuables and gold teeth were extracted. On January 17, 1945, ten days before the Soviet Red Army liberated the camp, the Nazis forced 60,000 prisoners into a "death march" to dozens of Auschwitz sub-camps. Aware of the Soviet advance, Germans then blew up the Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria. On January 27th, the Soviets found 7,000 prisoners, many of them children or elderly people, left by the retreating Nazis to die at the abandoned camp. bur-mas/wai
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