Tsunami

Source: NOAA National Weather Service Forecast Office. His Auschwitz scene was therefore filmed outside the near-symmetrical entrance, with scenery added to make it look like the real thing. Possible Tsunamis. However, permission was denied to Steven Spielberg for Schindler's List. Other tsunamis that have occurred include the following:. The Polish film directors Andrzej Munk and Andrzej Wajda were both given permission to film in Auschwitz for the films Pasażerka and Krajobraz Po Bitwie respectively. In light of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, UNESCO and other world bodies have called for a global tsunami monitoring system. Most media outlets now show awareness of the offence this may cause, and try to avoid using such expressions (or issue an apology after using them, see for example the recent note in The Guardian).

This is in part due to the absence of major tsunami events between 1883 (the Krakatoa eruption, which killed 36,000 people) and 2004. Recently the Polish media and the foreign ministry of Poland have voiced objections to the use of the expression "Polish death camp" in relation to Auschwitz, as they feel that phrase might misleadingly suggest that Poles (rather than Germans) perpetrated the Holocaust.
Unlike in the Pacific Ocean, there is no organized alert service covering the Indian Ocean. In short, all of the denier's blustering about the 'Four Million Variant' is a specious attempt to envelope the reader into their web of deceit, and it can be discarded after the most rudimentary examination of published histories."[2].
. If they can't keep their numbers straight, their reasoning goes, how can we say that their evidence for the Holocaust is credible? One must wonder which historians they speak of, as most have been remarkably consistent in their estimates of a million or so dead.
. They hope to discredit historians by making them seem inconsistent.

The disaster prompted a huge worldwide effort to help victims of the tragedy, with billions of dollars being raised for disaster relief. Holocaust deniers have attempted to use this change as propaganda, in the words of Nizkor: "Deniers often use the 'Four Million Variant' as a stepping stone to leap from an apparent contradiction to the idea that the Holocaust was a hoax, again perpetrated by a conspiracy. The tsunami killed people over an area ranging from the immediate vicinity of the quake in Indonesia, Thailand and the north-western coast of Malaysia to thousands of kilometres away in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and even as far as Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania in eastern Africa. After the collapse of the Communist government, the plaque was removed and the official death toll given as 1.1 million. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, which had a magnitude of 9.15, triggered a series of lethal tsunamis on December 26, 2004 that killed approximately 275,000 people (more than 168,000 in Indonesia alone), making it the deadliest tsunami in recorded history. This number was never taken seriously by Western historians, and was never used in any of the calculations of the death toll at Auschwitz (which have generally remained consistently around 1-1.5 million for the last sixty years) or for the total deaths in the Holocaust as a whole. As a result, 202 people on the small island of Okushiri lost their lives, and hundreds more were missing or injured. For many years, a memorial plaque placed at the camp by the Soviet authorities and the Polish communist government stated that 4 million people had been murdered at Auschwitz.

A devastating tsunami occurred off the coast of Hokkaido in Japan as a result of an earthquake on July 12, 1993. "27 January 2005, the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany's death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a combined total of up to 1.5 million Jews, Roma, Poles, Russians and prisoners of various other nationalities, and homosexuals, were murdered, is not only a major occasion for European citizens to remember and condemn the enormous horror and tragedy of the Holocaust, but also for addressing the disturbing rise in anti-semitism, and especially anti‑semitic incidents, in Europe, and for learning anew the wider lessons about the dangers of victimising people on the basis of race, ethnic origin, religion, social classification, politics or sexual orientation.". The total number of victims of this tragedy was 259 dead, 798 wounded and 95 missing presumed dead. The European Parliament marked the anniversary of the camp's liberation in 2005 with a minute of silence and the passage of this resolution:. When the Tumaco Tsunami hit the coast, it caused great destruction in the city of Tumaco, as well as in the small towns of El Charco, San Juan, Mosquera and Salahonda on the Pacific Coast of Colombia. In 1996, Germany made 27 January, the day of the liberation of Auschwitz, the official day for the commemoration of the victims of 'National Socialism'. The earthquake was felt in Bogotá, Cali, Popayán, Buenaventura and several other cities and towns in Colombia and in Guayaquil, Esmeraldas, Quito and other parts of Ecuador. See Auschwitz cross for more details.

The earthquake and the resulting tsunami caused the destruction of at least six fishing villages and the death of hundreds of people in the Colombian province of Nariño. Following an agreement between the Polish Catholic Church and the Polish government, the smaller crosses were removed in 1999 but the large papal one remains. A magnitude 7.9 earthquake occurred on December 12, 1979 at 7:59:4.3 (UTC) along the Pacific coast of Colombia and Ecuador. In 1998, after further calls to remove the cross, some 300 smaller crosses were erected by local activists near the large one, leading to further protests and heated exchanges. The tsunamis were up to 6 m tall, and killed 11 people as far away as Crescent City, California. The Catholic Church told the Carmelites to move by 1989, but they stayed on until 1993, leaving the large cross behind. After the magnitude 9.2 Good Friday Earthquake, tsunamis struck Alaska, British Columbia, California and coastal Pacific Northwest towns, killing 121 people. Some Catholics have pointed out that the people killed in Auschwitz I were mainly Polish Catholics.

Nearly 2,000 people were killed. This led to protests by Jewish groups, who said that mostly Jews were killed at Auschwitz and demanded that religious symbols be kept away from the site. A tsunami was triggered which swept over the top of the dam (without bursting it) and into the valley below. One year later the Carmelites erected the 8 metre (26 ft) tall cross from the 1979 mass near their site, just outside block 11 and barely visible from within the camp. The reservoir behind the Vajont Dam in northern Italy was struck by an enormous landslide. After some Jewish groups called for the removal of the convent, representatives of the Catholic Church agreed in 1987. The number of people killed by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami is estimated to be between 490 and 2,290. Carmelite nuns opened a convent near Auschwitz I in 1984.

When the tsunami hit Onagawa, Japan, almost 22 hours after the quake, the wave height was 3 m above high tide. A short while later, a Star of David appeared at the site, leading to a proliferation of religious symbols there; eventually they were removed. 61 lives were lost allegedly due to people's failure to heed warning sirens. After the pope had announced that Edith Stein would be beatified, some Catholics erected a cross near bunker 2 of Auschwitz II where she had been gassed. The highest wave at Hilo Bay was measured at around 10.7m (35 ft.). In 1979, the newly elected Polish Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass on the grounds of Auschwitz II to some 500,000 people. The first tsunami arrived at Hilo, Hawaii approximately 14.8 hrs after it originated off the coast of South Central Chile. The Auschwitz concentration camp is part of the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites.

It spread across the entire Pacific Ocean, with waves measuring up to 25 metres high. Auschwitz II and the remains of the gas chambers there are also open to the public. Its epicenter off the coast of South Central Chile, generated one of the most destructive tsunamis of the 20th century. However, in most cases the departure from the historical truth is minor, and is clearly labelled. The Great Chilean Earthquake, at magnitude 9.5 the strongest earthquake ever recorded. Today, the Auschwitz I museum site combines elements from several periods into a single complex: for example the gas chamber at Auschwitz I (which did not exist by the war's end) was restored and the fence was moved (because of building being done after the war but before the establishment of the museum). Note: The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center was established to track these killer waves and provide warning. The Polish government then decided to restore Auschwitz I and turn it into a museum honouring the victims of nazism; Auschwitz II, where buildings were prone to decay, was preserved but not restored.

The tsunami is locally known in Hawaii as the April Fools Day Tsunami in Hawaii due to people thinking the warnings were an April Fools prank. The Buna Werke were taken over by the Polish government and became the foundation for the chemical industry of the region. The Aleutian Island earthquake tsunami that killed 165 people on Hawaii and Alaska resulted in the creation of a tsunami warning system, established in 1949 for Pacific Ocean area countries. After the war, the camp served as a prison of the NKVD through most of 1945 and then remained in a state of disrepair for several years. The resulting tsunami measured over 7 metres in height and took about 2½ hours to reach the Burin Peninsula on the south coast of Newfoundland, where 28 people lost their lives in various communities. This number has met with "significant, though not complete" agreement among scholars.^ . The quake was felt throughout the Atlantic Provinces of Canada and as far west as Ottawa, Ontario and as far south as Claymont, Delaware. A larger study started around the same time by Franciszek Piper used time tables of train arrivals combined with deportation records to calculate 1.1 million Jewish deaths and 140,000-150,000 Polish victims, along with 23,000 Roma.

On November 18, 1929, an earthquake of magnitude 7.2 occurred beneath the Laurentian Slope on the Grand Banks. In 1983, French scholar George Wellers was one of the first to use Nazi data on deportations to estimate the number killed at Auschwitz, arriving at 1.613 million dead, including 1.44 million Jews and 146,000 Poles. On the facing coasts of Java and Sumatra the sea flood went many miles inland and caused such vast loss of life that one area was never resettled but went back to the jungle and is now the Ujung Kulon nature reserve. Though this number, and a higher total of 4 million, was used by Soviet and Polish authorities, it was never taken seriously by Western scholars, who generally supported numbers of around 1-2 million. Tsunami waves were observed throughout the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the American West Coast, South America, and even as far away as the English Channel. Early efforts to count the number of dead relied on the testimony of witnesses, especially Nazi Rudolf Hoess, who gave the number of dead at 2.5-3 million. A series of large tsunami waves was generated from the explosion, some reaching a height of over 40 metres above sea level. Since the Nazis attempted to destroy the evidence of the mass murder at Auschwitz, the exact number of victims is impossible to fix with certainty.

The island volcano of Krakatoa in Indonesia exploded with devastating fury in 1883, blowing its underground magma chamber partly empty so that much overlying land and seabed collapsed into it. Soviet POWs were accused of collaborating with the Germans and were either executed or sent to gulags in the Soviet Union. The philosophical concept of the sublime, as described by philosopher Immanuel Kant in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, took inspiration in part from attempts to comprehend the enormity of the Lisbon quake and tsunami. 'Liberation' was not necessarily the end of the ordeal for many prisoners. Philosophers of the Enlightenment, notably Voltaire, wrote about the event. Those too weak or sick to walk were left behind; about 7,500 prisoners were liberated by the 322nd Infantry unit of the Red Army on January 27, 1945. Europeans of the 18th century struggled to understand the disaster within religious and rational belief systems. On January 17, 1945 Nazi personnel started to evacuate the facility; most of the prisoners were marched West.

Historical records of explorations by Vasco da Gama and other early navigators were lost, and countless buildings were destroyed (including most examples of Portugal's Manueline architecture). The gas chambers of Birkenau were blown up by the Germans in November 1944 in an attempt to hide their crimes from the advancing Soviet troops. The earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent fires killed more than a third of Lisbon's pre-quake population of 275,000. The debate over what could have been done, or what should have been attempted even if success was unlikely, has continued heatedly ever since. Before the great wall of water hit the harbour, waters retreated, revealing lost cargo and forgotten shipwrecks. One bomb accidentally fell into the camp and killed some prisoners. Many townspeople fled to the waterfront, believing the area safe from fires and from falling debris from aftershocks. Later several nearby military targets were bombed.

Tens of thousands of Portuguese who survived the great 1755 Lisbon earthquake were killed by a tsunami which followed a half hour later. At one point Winston Churchill ordered that such a plan be prepared, but he was told that bombing the camp would most likely kill prisoners without disrupting the killing operation, and that bombing the railway lines was not technically feasible. January 26 - The Cascadia Earthquake, one of the largest earthquakes on record, ruptures the Cascadia Subduction Zone offshore from Vancouver Island to northern California, creating a tsunami logged in Japan and oral traditions of the American First Nations. Starting with a plea from the Slovakian rabbi Weissmandl in May 1944, there was a growing campaign to convince the Allies to bomb Auschwitz or the railway lines leading to it. In 2002 it was suggested that the Bristol Channel floods of 1607 in England and Wales, UK, may have been caused by a tsunami. (In fact, it was not until the 1970s that these photographs of Auschwitz were looked at carefully.). Santorini is regarded as the most likely source for Plato's literary parable of Atlantis. Detailed air reconnaissance photographs of the camp were taken accidentally during 1944 by aircraft seeking to photograph nearby military-industrial targets, but no effort was made to analyse them.

At some time between 1650 BC and 1600 BC (still debated), the volcanic Greek island Santorini erupted, causing a 100 m to 150 m high tsunami that devastated the north coast of Crete, 70 km (45 miles) away, and would certainly have wiped out the Minoan civilization along Crete's northern shore. This changed with receipt of the very detailed report of two escaped prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, which finally convinced most Allied leaders of the truth about Auschwitz in the middle of 1944. In the North Atlantic Ocean (Norwegian Sea), the Storegga Slides were a major series of sudden underwater land movements over the course of tens of thousands of years, which caused tsunamis and megatsunamis across a wide area. Some information regarding Auschwitz reached the Allies during 1941-1944, such as the reports of Witold Pilecki and Jerzy Tabeau, but the claims of mass killings were generally dismissed as exaggerated. Very small tsunamis, non-destructive and undetectable without specialized equipment, occur frequently as a result of minor earthquakes and other events. Female subcamps were constructed at Budy , Plawy, Zabrze, Gleiwitz I, II, III, Rajsko and at Lichtenwerden. Tsunamis occur most frequently in the Pacific Ocean, but are a global phenomenon; they are possible wherever large bodies of water are found, including inland lakes, where they can be caused by landslides. The largest subcamps were built at Trzebinia, Bleechammer and Althammer.

See also List of historic tsunamis by death toll.. In regular intervals, doctors from Auschwitz II would visit the work camps and select the weak and sick for the gas chambers of Birkenau. While it would take some years for the trees to grow to a useful size, such plantations could offer a much cheaper and longer-lasting means of tsunami mitigation than the costly and environmentally destructive method of erecting artificial barriers. It was associated with the synthetic rubber and liquid fuel plant Buna-Werke owned by IG Farben. [5] Environmentalists have suggested tree planting along stretches of sea coast which are prone to tsunami risks. The largest work camp was Auschwitz III Monowitz, starting operations in May 1942. In one striking example, the village of Naluvedapathy in India's Tamil Nadu region suffered minimal damage and few deaths as the wave broke up on a forest of 80,244 trees planted along the shoreline in 2002 in a bid to enter the Guinness Book of Records. The surrounding satellite work camps were closely connected to German industry and were associated with arms factories, foundries and mines.

Some locations in the path of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami escaped almost unscathed as a result of the tsunami's energy being sapped by a belt of trees such as coconut palms and mangroves. Many of the inmates enslaved here survived less than a year due to their harsh with duck head living conditions. The effects of a tsunami can be mitigated by natural factors such as tree cover on the shoreline. The prisoners then attempted a mass escape, but nearly all of the 250 were killed soon after. The wall may have succeeded in slowing down and moderating the height of the tsunami but it did not prevent major destruction and loss of life. Female prisoners had smuggled in explosives from a weapons factory, and crematorium IV was partly destroyed by an explosion. The port town of Aonae was completely surrounded by a tsunami wall, but the waves washed right over the wall and destroyed all the wood-framed structures in the area. On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos (those prisoners kept separate from the main camp and involved in the operation of the gas chambers and crematoria) staged an uprising.

For instance, the tsunami which hit the island of Hokkaido on July 12, 1993 created waves as much as 30m (100 ft) tall - as high as a 10-story building. On 10 October, eight hundred Roma children were systematically killed at Birkenau. However, their effectiveness has been questioned, as tsunamis are often higher than the barriers. They were gassed in July 1944. Other localities have built floodgates and channels to redirect the water from incoming tsunamis. Many Roma had been imprisoned in a special section of the camp, mostly in family units. Japan has implemented an extensive programme of building tsunami walls of up to 4.5m (13.5 ft) high in front of populated coastal areas. ^[1].

While it is not possible to prevent a tsunami, in some particularly tsunami-prone countries some measures have been taken to reduce the damage caused on shore. When the crematoria could not keep up, bodies were burned in open pits. Some scientists speculate that animals may have an ability to sense subsonic Rayleigh waves from an earthquake minutes or hours before a tsunami strikes shore (Kenneally, [4]).. Between May and July 1944, about 438,000 Jews from Hungary were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the most were killed there. The phenomenon was also noted in Sri Lanka in the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake ([3]). The largest group of Jews deported to Auschwitz came from Hungary after Germany took control of its former ally in March 1944. The Lisbon quake is the first documented case of such a phenomenon in Europe. Jews from many countries were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau to be killed: 300,000 from Poland, 69,000 from France, 60,000 from the Netherlands, 55,000 from Greece, 46,000 from Moravia, 25,000 from Belgium, as well as tens of thousands of Jews from other countries.

Many animals sense danger and flee to higher ground before the water arrives. An oven room, where selected camp prisoners called Sonderkommandos took out the dead bodies and burned them, was part of the same building. One of the early warnings comes from nearby animals. Gas chambers in crematoria IV and V were above ground and Zyklon B was poured through the special windows in the walls. Computer models can roughly predict tsunami arrival and impact based on information about the event that triggered it and the shape of the seafloor (bathymetry) and coastal land (topography).[2]. Once the victims were sealed shut in the chamber, the toxic agent Zyklon B was discharged from openings in the ceiling. In some communities on the west coast of the United States, which is prone to Pacific Ocean tsunamis, warning signs advise people where to run in the event of an incoming tsunami. The victims were ordered to strip naked and leave their belongings in the undressing room in a location that they could subsequently remember, before being led to the adjacent gas chamber.

Regions with a high risk of tsunamis may use tsunami warning systems to detect tsunamis and warn the general population before the wave reaches land. To avoid mass panic, the victims were told that they were going there for showering; to reinforce this impression, shower heads were fitted in the gas chamber, though never connected to a water supply. In a low-lying coastal area, a strong earthquake is a major warning sign that a tsunami may be produced. Two of the crematoria (Krema II and Krema III) each had an underground undressing room and the underground gas chamber, capable of holding thousands of people. Again, being educated about a tsunami is important, to realise that when the water level drops the first time, the danger is not yet over. Those selected for extermination were sent to any of four massive gas chamber/crematorium complexes, all at the edge of the camp. In instances where the leading edge of the tsunami is its first peak, succeeding waves can lead to further flooding. Items such as banknotes, coins, jewellery, precious metals and diamonds were removed from "Canada" and shipped off to the Reichsbank.

People unaware of the danger may remain at the shore due to curiosity, or for collecting fish from the exposed sea bed. In another section known as "Canada" (so named because Germans believed that Canada was a land of vast riches), the belongings of the arriving victims were sorted and stored, to be transferred to the German government. If the slope is shallow, this recession can exceed many hundreds of metres. One section of the camp was reserved for female prisoners. In instances where the leading edge of the tsunami wave is its trough, the sea will recede from the coast half of the wave's period before the wave's arrival. Those arriving prisoners who survived the initial selection would go on to spend some time in quarantine quarters and eventually work on the camp's maintenance or expansion or be sent to one of the surrounding satellite work camps. Tsunamis cannot be prevented or precisely predicted, but there are some warning signs of an impending tsunami, and there are many systems being developed and in use to reduce the damage from tsunamis. Young children were taken from their mothers and placed with older women to be gassed, along with the sick, weak and old.

The following have at various times been associated with a tsunami [1]:. At other times, the Nazis would perform "selections", often administered by Josef Mengele, to the end of choosing whom to kill right away and whom to imprison as labour force or use for medical experiments. As a result, Hilo suffered worse damage than any other place in Hawaii, with the tsunami/seiche reaching a height of 14 m and killing 159 inhabitants. At times, the whole transport would be sent to its death immediately. That meant that every second wave was in phase with the motion of Hilo Bay, creating a seiche in the bay. From 1944 railway tracks extended into the camp itself; before that, arriving prisoners were marched from the Auschwitz railway station to the camp. The natural resonant period of Hilo Bay is about thirty minutes. Most people arrived at the camp by rail, often after horrifying trips in cattle cars lasting several days.

For instance, the tsunami that hit Hawaii on April 1, 1946 had a fifteen-minute interval between wave fronts. Large-scale extermination started in Spring 1942. Local geographic peculiarities can lead to seiche or standing waves forming, which can amplify the onshore damage. For this purpose, the camp was equipped with four crematoria with gas chambers; each gas chamber was designed to hold up to 2,500 people at one time. They also need not be symmetrical; tsunami waves may be much stronger in one direction than another, depending on the nature of the source and the surrounding geography. The camp's main purpose, however, was not internment with forced labour (as Auschwitz I & III) but rather extermination. However, tsunami waves can diffract around land masses (as shown in this Indian Ocean tsunami animation as the waves reach southern Sri Lanka and India). The camp held up to 100,000 prisoners at one time.

Tsunamis propagate outward from their source, so coasts in the "shadow" of affected land masses are usually fairly safe. Fields as well as the camp itself were surrounded with barbed, electrified wire (which was used by some of the inmates to commit suicide). There is no proof for this. The camp was about 2.5 kilometres by 2 kilometres (1½ mi by 1¼ mi) large and was divided into several sections, each of which was separated into fields. This gives the transient pressure built up during the quake as equal to twice and in addition to the hydrostatic pressure. The camp was designed, according to the Bauhaus concept of functionalism and construction started in 1941, as part of the Final Solution (Endlösung). The passing "hump" mentioned earlier is a "momentum flux" equal to density multiplied by the square of the velocity. The camp is located in Brzezinka (Birkenau), about 3 kilometres (1.8 mi) from Auschwitz I.

However a conjecture exists for velocities. It was the site of the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands, and the killings of over one million people, mainly Jews. At a water depth of 40 m, the speed would be 20 m/s (about 72 km/h or 45 mi/h), which is much slower than the speed in the open ocean but the wave would still be difficult to outrun. Auschwitz II (Birkenau) is the camp that many people know simply as "Auschwitz". For example, in the Pacific Ocean, where the typical water depth is about 4000 m, a tsunami travels at about 200 m/s (720 km/h or 450 mi/h) with little energy loss, even over long distances. It was staffed by women specifically selected for the purpose, and by some volunteers from the female prisoners most of whom were raped by the Nazis. Shallow-water waves move at a speed that is equal to the square root of the product of the acceleration of gravity (9.8 m/s²) and the water depth. The camp brothel, established in the summer of 1943 on Himmler's order, was located in block 24 and was used to reward privileged prisoners.

A wave becomes a 'shallow-water wave' when the ratio between the water depth and its wavelength gets very small, and since a tsunami has an extremely large wavelength (hundreds of kilometres), tsunamis act as a shallow-water wave even in deep oceanic water. Prisoners in the camp hospital who were not quick to recover were regularly killed by a lethal injection of phenol. As a wave goes down the whip from handle to tip, the same energy is deposited in less and less material, which then moves more violently as it receives this energy. Josef Mengele experimented on twins in the same complex. The steepening process is analogous to the cracking of a tapered whip. Dr. While a person at the surface of deep water would probably not even notice the tsunami, the wave can increase to a height of 30 m or more as it approaches the coastline and compresses. Carl Clauberg conducted sterilization experiments on Jewish women in block 10 of Auschwitz I, with the aim of developing a simple injection method to be used on the Slavic people.

As the wave approaches land, the sea shallows and the wave no longer travels as quickly, so it begins to 'pile-up'; the wave-front becomes steeper and taller, and there is less distance between crests. Dr. The wave travels across the ocean at speeds from 500 to 1,000 km/h. From April 1943 to May 1944, the gynecologist Prof. The energy of a tsunami passes through the entire water column to the sea bed, unlike surface waves, which typically reach only down to a depth of 10 m or so. The first women arrived in the camp on March 26, 1942. This is often practically unnoticeable to people on ships. This gas chamber operated from 1941 to 1942 and was then converted into an air-raid shelter.

The actual height of a tsunami wave in open water is often less than one metre. The tests deemed successful, a gas chamber and crematorium were constructed by converting a bunker. This is very different from typical wind-generated swells on the ocean, which might have a period of about 10 seconds and a wavelength of 150 metres. The substance producing the highly-lethal cyanide gas was sold under the trade name Zyklon B, originally for use as a pesticide used to kill lice. In open water, tsunamis have extremely long periods (the time for the next wave top to pass a point after the previous one), from minutes to hours, and long wavelengths of up to several hundred kilometres. The first experiment was on 3 September, 1941, and it killed 600 Soviet POWs. A single tsunami event may involve a series of waves of varying heights; the set of waves is called a train. In September 1941, the SS conducted poison gas tests in block 11, killing 850 Poles and Russians using cyanide.

This is the two-dimensional equivalent of the inverse square law in three dimensions. Others were executed by shooting, hanging or starving. Although the total or overall loss of energy is small, the total energy is spread over a larger and larger circumference as the wave travels, so the energy per linear meter in the wave decreases as the inverse power of the distance from the source. Some prisoners had to spend several days in tiny cells too small to sit down. A tsunami can cause damage thousands of kilometres from its origin, so there may be several hours between its creation and its impact on a coast, arriving long after the seismic wave generated by the originating event arrives. Block 11 of Auschwitz I was the "prison within the prison", where violations of the numerous rules were punished. Tsunamis act very differently from typical surf swells; they are phenomena which move the entire depth of the ocean (often several kilometres deep) rather than just the surface, so they contain immense energy, propagate at high speeds and can travel great trans-oceanic distances with little overall energy loss. The harsh work requirements, combined with poor nutrition and hygiene, led to high death rates among the prisoners.

Large objects such as ships and boulders can be carried several miles inland before the tsunami subsides. All inmates had to work; except in the associated arms factories, Sundays were reserved for cleaning and showering and there were no work assignments. The sheer weight of water is enough to pulverise objects in its path, often reducing buildings to their foundations and scouring exposed ground to the bedrock. The various classes of prisoners were distinguishable by special marks on their clothes; Jews were generally treated the worst. Most of the damage is caused by the huge mass of water behind the initial wave front, as the height of the sea keeps rising fast and floods powerfully into the coastal area. The SS selected some prisoners, often German criminals, as specially privileged supervisors of the other inmates (so-called: kapo). Instead it looks rather like an endlessly onrushing tide which forces its way around and through any obstacle. Contrary to what is depicted in several films, the majority of the Jews were imprisoned in the Auschwitz II camp, and did not pass under this sign.

Although often referred to as "tidal waves", a tsunami does not look like the popular impression of "a normal wave only much bigger". The camp's prisoners who left the camp during the day for construction or farm labour were made to march through the gate at the sounds of an orchestra. However, an extremely large landslide could generate a megatsunami that might have ocean-wide impacts. The entrance to Auschwitz I was (and still is) marked with the cynical sign "Arbeit macht frei", "Work (shall) make (you) free" (or "work liberates"). These events can give rise to much larger local shock waves (solitons), such as the landslide at the head of Lituya Bay which produced a water wave estimated at 50 – 150 m and reached 524 m up local mountains. At any time, the camp held between 13,000 and 16,000 inmates; in 1942 the number reached 20,000. Tsunamis caused by these mechanisms, unlike the ocean-wide tsunamis caused by some earthquakes, generally dissipate quickly and rarely affect coastlines distant from the source due to the small area of sea affected. Jews were sent to the camp as well, beginning with the very first shipment (from Tarnów).

These phenomena rapidly displace large volumes of water, as energy from falling debris or expansion is transferred to the water into which the debris falls. Common German criminals, "anti-social elements" and 48 German homosexuals were also imprisoned there. In the 1950s it was discovered that larger tsunamis than previously believed possible could be caused by landslides, explosive volcanic action and impact events. The camp was initially used for interning Polish intellectuals and resistance movement members, then also for Soviet Prisoners of War. Waves are formed as the displaced water mass moves under the influence of gravity to regain its equilibrium and radiates across the ocean like ripples on a pond. A group of 728 Polish political prisoners from Tarnów became the first residents of Auschwitz on June 14th that year. Similarly, a violent submarine volcanic eruption can uplift the water column and form a tsunami. It was founded on May 20, 1940, on the basis of an old Polish brick army barracks.

Sub-marine landslides; which are sometimes triggered by large earthquakes; as well as collapses of volcanic edifices, may also disturb the overlying water column as sediment and rocks slide downslope and are redistributed across the sea floor. Auschwitz I served as the administrative center for the whole complex. Subduction earthquakes are particularly effective in generating tsunamis, and occur where denser oceanic plates slip under continental plates in a process known as subduction. . Such large vertical movements of the earth's crust can occur at plate boundaries. A common punishment for escape attempts was death by starvation; the families of successful escapees were sometimes arrested and interned in Auschwitz and prominently displayed to deter others. Tsunamis can be generated when the sea floor abruptly deforms and vertically displaces the overlying water. About 700 prisoners attempted to escape from the Auschwitz camps during the years of their operation, with about 300 attempts successful.

An earthquake which is too small to create a tsunami by itself may trigger an undersea landslide quite capable of generating a tsunami. Chief of the women's field was handled by Johanna Langefeld, Maria Mandel and last by Elisabeth Volkenrath. However, the most common cause is an undersea earthquake. He was hanged in 1947 in front of the entrance to the crematorium of Auschwitz I. A tsunami can be generated by any disturbance that rapidly moves a large mass of water, such as an earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide or meteorite impact. Höß provided a detailed description of the camp's workings during his interrogations after the war and also in his autobiography. . The commandants of the camp were the SS-Obersturmbannführers Rudolf Höß (sometimes transliterated in English as "Hoess") until Summer 1943, and later Arthur Liebehenschel and Richard Baer.

However, since they are not actually related to tides the term is considered misleading and its usage is discouraged by oceanographers. Like all Nazi concentration camps, the Auschwitz camps were operated by Heinrich Himmler's SS. Tsunamis have been historically referred to as tidal waves because as they approach land they take on the characteristics of a violent onrushing tide rather than the sort of cresting waves that are formed by wind action upon the ocean (with which people are more familiar). The exact number of people killed in the camps is not known, but most modern estimates are around 1.1-1.5 million. A tsunami is not a sub-surface event in the deep ocean; it simply has a much smaller amplitude (wave heights) offshore, and a very long wavelength (often hundreds of kilometres long), which is why they generally pass unnoticed at sea, forming only a passing "hump" in the ocean. See List of subcamps of Auschwitz for others. The term was created by fishermen who returned to port to find the area surrounding the harbour devastated, although they had not been aware of any wave in the open water. The three main camps were:.

Although in Japanese tsunami is used for both the singular and plural, in English tsunamis is well-established as the plural. The camps were a major element in the perpetration of the Holocaust, killing around 1.1-1.5 million people, of whom over 90% were Jews. The term tsunami comes from the Japanese language meaning harbour ("tsu", 津) and wave ("nami", 波 or 浪). Beginning in 1940, Nazi Germany built several concentration camps and an extermination camp in the area, which at the time had been annexed by Nazi Germany. The effects of a tsunami can range from unnoticeable to devastating. The name is derived from the German name for the nearby Polish town of Oświęcim (pronounced [oʃˈventʃiːm]), situated about 60 kilometres (37 mi) southwest of Kraków. Earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions and large meteorite impacts all have the potential to generate a tsunami. Auschwitz is the name loosely used to identify the largest Nazi extermination camp along with two main German concentration camps and 45-50 sub-camps.

A tsunami (IPA pronunciation /suˈnɑːmi/ or /tsuˈnɑːmi/]) is a series of waves generated when water in a lake or the sea is rapidly displaced on a massive scale. Indiana University Press, 1998, pp 60-70. 16 October 1979 23 people died when the coast of Nice, France, was hit by a tsunami. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. 4 July 1992 - Daytona Beach, FL. ^ Yisrael Gutman, Michael Berenbaum, Raul Hilberg, Franciszek Piper, Yehuda Baur. 19 May 1964 - Northeast USA. Auschwitz III (Monowitz), which served as a labor camp for the IG Farben company.

21 September 1938 - Hurricane, NJ coast. Auschwitz II (Birkenau), an extermination camp and the site of the deaths of roughly 1.1 million Jews, 75,000 Poles, and some 19,000 Roma. 19 August 1931 - Atlantic City, NJ. Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp which served as the administrative centre for the whole complex, and was the site of the deaths of roughly 70,000 people, mostly Poles and Soviet Prisoners of War. 8 August 1924 - Coney Island, NY . 6 August 1923 - Rockaway Park, Queens, NY .

9 June 1913 - Longport, NJ. 35 Million years ago - Chesapeake Bay impact crater, Chesapeake Bay. 18 August 1946 - Dominican Republic. 4 August 1946 - Dominican Republic.

9 January 1926 - Maine. 18 November 1929 - Newfoundland. 11 October 1918 - Puerto Rico. 17 November 1872 - Maine.

18 November 1867 - Virgin Islands. 14 November 1840 - Great Swell on the Delaware River. The villages of Arop and Warapu were destroyed. While the magnitude of the quake was not large enough to create these waves directly, it is believed the earthquake generated an undersea landslide, which in turn caused the tsunami.

A 7.1 magnitude earthquake 24 km offshore was followed within 11 minutes by a tsunami about 12 m tall. 17 July, 1998: A Papua New Guinea tsunami killed approximately 2200 people [7]. May 26, 1983: 104 people in western Japan were killed by a tsunami spawned from a nearby earthquake. 1976: On 16 August (midnight) a tsunami killed more than 5000 people in the Moro Gulf region (Cotabato City) of the Philippines.

It travelled at over 150 kph. This happened in the fjord shaped Lituya Bay, Alaska, USA. July 9, 1958: A huge landslip caused the highest ever reported tsunami which was 524 metres high. 1946: An earthquake in the Aleutian Islands sent a tsunami to Hawaii, killing 159 people (five died in Alaska).

A wave more than seven stories tall (about 20 m) drowned some 26,000 people. One of the worst tsunami disasters engulfed whole villages along Sanriku, Japan, in 1896. January 26, 1700: the Cascadia Earthquake (estimated 9.0 magnitude) caused massive tsunamis across the Pacific Northwest. The cause of the flood remains disputed, it is quite possible that it was caused by a combination of meteorological extremes and tidal peaks (discussion).

January 20, 1606/1607: along the coast of the Bristol Channel (main article) thousands of people were drowned, houses and villages swept away, farmland was inundated and flocks were destroyed by a flood that might have been a tsunami. circa 500 C.E.: Poompuhar, Tamil Nadu, India, Maldives. As the wave approaches, the top of the wave may glow red. A flash of red light might be seen near the horizon.

The sea may recede to a considerable distance. or a whistling sound. or a noise akin to the periodic whop-whop of a helicopter,. a roaring noise as of a jet plane.

A thunderous boom may be heard followed by