So, waking up to Holocaust Remembrance Day on the tv. Was just struck by the interesting and terrifying detail from a podcast I had just heard that the famous arbeit mach frei portal was put there along with the extension of the rail line into Auschwitz from the rail station some distance away in May 1944. The Final Solution had been in full swing since 1942. The Nazi regime had just invaded their ostensible ally Hungary in March 1944 -- who had until then had resisted handing over to them their Jewish citizens -- with a goal being the elimination of Hungary's Jews.
So, the rail line is extended because otherwise the Nazis have to carefully march the camp's new arrivals several hundred meters from the rail station with all their worldly possessions.
The portal with the "work makes you free" is constructed to give the ones who are clinging to the idea that this is a labor camp one more euphemism to cling to.
all with the goal of murdering a population of people who could have been warned.
Some estimates are that 800,000 Jews at the start of WWII with some 600,000 who died. Some 400,000 were murdered in the period May to July 1944.
The 20 percent who were not murdered were used as slave labor and used in medical experiments.
Yes it matters that (y)our racist uncles or coworkers are allowed to be idiotic racists.