Around six million people were killed in the concentration and extermination camps set up by Nazi Germany, and Auschwitz-Birkenau was responsible for most of the deaths when, at the beginning of 1943, the SS turned its full energies to the extermination of Jews from all over Europe in "the final solution."
An estimated 1.1 million Jews, 75,000 Poles and 19,000 Romani or gypsies, as well as Soviet prisoners of war, political prisoners and homosexuals, perished within its confines, most within the production line gas chambers, but others through executions, experimentation, starvation or exhaustion, while others committed suicide by throwing themselves on the electrified fences of the camp.
Like most, I had read of the atrocities carried out against not just the Jewish communities throughout Europe, but also prisoners of war, political prisoners, the Romany or gypsy populations and homosexuals, and like most I had been sickened that any human being could inflict such suffering on a fellow human being.



But actually setting foot in the place where such nightmares took place was something different altogether.
Along with 200 young people from schools throughout the central belt of Scotland, including 18 from Fife, teachers, several invited journalists and MPs and staff from the Holocaust Educational Trust's 'Lessons from Auschwitz' project, I was given the opportunity to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau last week.
The pre-visit seminar went some way towards preparing us for what we could expect on the day, but nothing can prepare you for the sheer scale and emotional impact of seeing the camps first hand.



At Auschwitz 1, the original camp which acted as the administrative centre of the whole complex, the most moving experience was walking through the one remaining gas chamber and crematorium still standing, imagining the terror and appalling suffering of those who died within its walls.
Another was seeing the huge mounds of personal belongings including shoes, suitcases, walking aids, baby clothes and even human hair cut from the corpses of the victims, many still in plaits from little Jewish girls, which was made into a stiff material for the collars of German soldiers shirts, piled behind glass like some heartbreaking museum exhibit.
While the impact there was very visual, just a few miles down the road at Auschwitz-Birkenau — the place of the birch trees — the eerie silence surrounding the huge expanse of wood and brick converted stables and barracks, many with only their brick chimneys still standing, used to house thousands upon thousands of mainly Jewish prisoners, was the first thing to hit you.
The gates of Auschwitz 1 bear the slogan 'Arbeit Macht Frei' or work brings freedom, an ironic message to the 70,000 who lost their lives in the first few years after the creation of the camp in May 1940.
Auschwitz, the German name for the Polish town of Oswiecim, was originally set up as a place of mass slave labour where prisoners worked impossible hours to serve the Reich in nearby factories and labour groups.
However as the numbers continued to grow it was decided to build a second camp, which later became an extermination facility, at Birkenau and the railway line, which was extended to run into the camp itself, brought trainloads of Jewish communities from all parts of Europe and as far away as Norway and Greece.
At Auschwitz anyone deemed not to be working hard enough, breaking camp rules or otherwise stepping out of line could be sentenced to horrendous beatings and punishments, many carried out in what became known as Death Block 11.



Here such acts of cruelty as being crammed into small, dark punishment cells where people slowly suffocated due to lack of oxygen, left without food and water for days on end in the starvation cells, or unable to lie down in the standing cells after working for over 12 hours, were carried out.
It was also in the basement of block 11 that the first experiments with Zyklon B cyanide gas were carried out on Russian prisoners of war, in preparation for what was to come later.
Other prisoners were shot at the "death wall" which has been recreated after being pulled down after the war, or hanged in public ceremonies in the camp square after token "hearings".
At Birkenau the images of hundreds of mainly Jewish men and women — children were sent immediately to the gas chambers — crammed like cattle into the draughty, unheated barracks were all to vivid.
Those were only the 25 per cent or so "lucky" ones who were not immediately sentenced to death at the selection ramp when they embarked from the train carriages, even if they survived the journey to the camp which could last up to ten days without food and water.
Walking through the toilet block with rows of holes on wooden planks above several feet deep trenches, the survivor's tale of swapping scraps of news and contraband goods for a crust of bread came to mind.
And even a late summer sun breaking through the clouds above the ruins of the two massive underground gas chambers and crematoria, blown up by the SS in November 1944 to hide the evidence of their hideous crimes, could not take away the chill surrounding the mass graves of millions of people whose only crime, apart from being Jewish, was not to be young, or fit and healthy enough to work.
The rain-filled burial pits were cordoned off by tape as they still contain human ashes and pieces of bone which could not be completely destroyed.
And although the numbers who perished within the barbed wire and electrified fences of Auschwitz-Birkenau were too massive to take in, the "sauna's" commemorative walls covered with photographs of smiling husbands, wives, children, grandfathers and aunts who had everything to live for yet never returned, brought home, like a blow to the gut, the incomprehensible human tragedy of the Holocaust.