Jonathan Webber writes informatively about Auschwitz in the Guardian today:
The sheer scale of the atrocities, the horrific industrialisation of mass murder by poison gas, the systematic robbery of personal property - all this, and very much more besides, rightly confirms the name of Auschwitz as an indelible stain on the moral history of humanity and on the social and political history of Europe.Webber poses the question why the name of Auschwitz is so much more widely known that that of the other Nazi death camps in Poland: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka; Chelmno and Majdanek. (These shouldn't be confused with the concentration camps in Germany and Austria - like Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbruck, Mauthausen, etc. - which weren't dedicated killing centres like those camps in Poland, although of course large numbers of people died and were killed in them.) He gives three reasons. First, there were many more survivors of Auschwitz than of the other death camps. Second, people can still visit Auschwitz, where a lot of the buildings still stand; but nothing remains of Belzec and Treblinka. Third, the 'catchment area' for Auschwitz was much wider:
[P]eople were deported there from all over Europe, from as far away as northern Norway and even from the Greek island of Rhodes. All over Europe the memory of this camp located near a small Polish town thus lives on...Webber concludes by pointing out that, despite the infamy of Auschwitz, more of the Jewish victims met their deaths elsewhere. And it is an important point. The mechanized, production-line killing of this camp has left an image of a particular sort in the public mind - not without reason. However, it can also be misleading if it is taken as representative of the experience of the Holocaust in general. There was also plenty of non-mechanized killing and much 'traditional' brutality: people shot, beaten, tortured, starved, overworked; dying of exhaustion and illness and disease. It has been estimated that roughly a quarter of the Jewish dead were killed in shootings, at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen and other such execution squads, half of them perished in the death camps, and the rest died in the dreadful conditions of life in the ghettos, labour and concentration camps and on the death marches towards the end of the war.