Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945)

Auschwitz-Birkenau stands as the darkest place on the World Heritage List. The largest of the Third Reich's camps, it preserves the barbed wire, watchtowers, barracks, gas chambers and crematoria of a machinery of genocide in which some 1.5 million people — most of them Jews — were starved, tortured and murdered between 1940 and 1945. UNESCO inscribed the site in 1979 so that the evidence of humanity's capacity for cruelty is never erased; a visit is harrowing, and necessary.