The Daily History Chronicle

On June 14, 1940, 728 Polish priests, soldiers, students, and resistance members became the first prisoners at Auschwitz not Jewish victims, but Catholic Poles targeted for who they were. This episode tells the forgotten first chapter of history's most notorious camp, and asks how a political prison becomes a death factory through the ordinary machinery of bureaucratic decision-making. Both the Polish story and the Jewish catastrophe that followed are true. Neither cancels the other.