The fortified walls, barbed wire, watchtowers, barracks, gallows, gas chambers, and crematoria illustrate the conditions of the Nazi genocide at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most extensive concentration and extermination camp of the Third Reich. Historical research indicates that 1.5 million people, including a significant number of Jews, were systematically starved, tortured, and executed in this camp, a stark symbol of humanity's capacity for cruelty to its own kind in the 20th century.