As many as 200 SS personnel could still be alive and, perhaps, brought to justice, albeit some 70 years after the fact. The Polish government also wants the world to remember that Germans ran the camps inside Poland.
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A Polish historian at a state-run institute has posted a comprehensive list of Nazi SS commanders and guards at the Auschwitz concentration camp in hopes that some may still be brought to justice, and to serve as a reminder that the camp, while located in Poland, was nonetheless run by German officials.
The state-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) said the Auschwitz Garrison list was compiled from archives in Poland, Germany, Austria, the United States and, to a lesser extent, Russia, where access to archives is severely limited.
The men who led Nazi Germany
The German National Socialist Workers' party profoundly affected the course of 20th-century world history with their ideology, propaganda and crimes. Who were the key leaders of the movement?
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Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945)
As Hitler's Propaganda Minister, the virulently anti-Semitic Goebbels was responsible for making sure a single, iron-clad Nazi message reached every citizen of the Third Reich. He strangled freedom of the press, controlled all media, arts, and information, and pushed Hitler to declare "Total War." He and his wife committed suicide in 1945, after poisoning their six children.
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Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
The leader of the German National Socialist Workers' Party (Nazi) developed his anti-Semitic, anti-communist and racist ideology well before coming to power as Chancellor in 1933. He undermined political institutions to transform Germany into a totalitarian state. From 1939 to 1945, he led Germany in World War II while overseeing the Holocaust. He committed suicide in April 1945.
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Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945)
As leader of the Nazi paramilitary SS ("Schutzstaffel"), Himmler was one of the Nazi party members most directly responsible for the Holocaust. He also served as Chief of Police and Minister of the Interior, thereby controlling all of the Third Reich's security forces. He oversaw the construction and operations of all extermination camps, in which more than 6 million Jews were murdered.
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Rudolf Hess (1894-1987)
Hess joined the Nazi party in 1920 and took part in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, a failed Nazi attempt to gain power. While in prison, he helped Hitler write "Mein Kampf." Hess flew to Scotland in 1941 to attempt a peace negotiation, where he was arrested and held until the war's end. In 1946, he stood trial in Nuremberg and was sentenced to life in prison, where he died.
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Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962)
Alongside Himmler, Eichmann was one of the chief organizers of the Holocaust. As an SS Lieutenant colonel, he managed the mass deportations of Jews to Nazi extermination camps in Eastern Europe. After Germany's defeat, Eichmann fled to Austria and then to Argentina, where he was captured by the Israeli Mossad in 1960. Tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity, he was executed in 1962.
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Hermann Göring (1893-1946)
A participant in the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Göring became the second-most powerful man in Germany once the Nazis took power. He founded the Gestapo, the Secret State Police, and served as Luftwaffe commander until just before the war's end, though he increasingly lost favor with Hitler. Göring was sentenced to death at Nuremberg but committed suicide the night before it was enacted.
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The historian Aleksander Lasik, working through the institute and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial, is posting more than 8,500 entries. It is based on a list that Lasik compiled over more than 30 years of archival research.
"The world justice system has failed and I'm doing what a historian should do: expose the responsible individuals as war criminals," Lasik said.
He estimates that as many as 200 former death camp guards could still be alive.
IPN chief Jaroslaw Szarek described the project as a response to historically false representations of Auschwitz as a "Polish death camp."
"We are showing the personnel and showing who the SS men were," he said.
Lasik's full database has more than 25,000 names of guards from various German-run camps. He said the list is not complete and that he continues his research.
The online database of Auschwitz commanders and guards is written in Polish, German, and English. Most entries include the suspects' place and date of birth, nationality, education, military service and party affiliation - some include photos.
As one example, the entry for Rudolf Hoess, the camp's commander from 1940-43, has a photocopy of his death sentence, which was handed down by a court in Krakow, Poland, in 1947.
The dates of service at Auschwitz are being verified pending publication.
Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff said publishing the names is "very important and the right thing to do" and can have "practical implications" if Nazi crime investigators in Germany are unaware of some of the names.
From 1940-45 it is estimated that Nazi Germans killed some 1.1 million people at the death camps that they operated in occupied Poland.
About 1 million of the victims were European Jews, while 75,000 were Poles, some 21,000 were Roma and approximately 15,000 were Soviet prisoners of war.
