Polish Resistance member became prisoner to expose Auschwitz horror

Months after the occupying Nazi Germans set up Auschwitz, a Polish Resistance member made the courageous decision to become a prisoner there so he could expose the camp's horror.

But despite his extraordinary role, Witold Pilecki was unheeded abroad and, more than six decades after his execution by Poland's communist regime, he has been largely forgotten outside the country.

The first prisoners arrived at Auschwitz on June 14, 1940, nine months after Nazi Germany invaded Poland and sparked World War II.

The camp was based in a former Polish army barracks in the southern city of Oswiecim, or Auschwitz in German.

Although it is an enduring symbol of the Nazis' genocide of Jews - who made up a million of its 1.1 million victims - it initially was used to hold Polish resistance members who were subsequently killed.

Army officer Pilecki deliberately got himself arrested by the Nazis in the Polish capital Warsaw on September 19, 1940 and two days later found himself in Auschwitz.

In reports smuggled out to the Resistance he described "another planet".

Upon arrival, the Nazi guards ordered a prisoner to run and shot him dead. Ten more were killed as "collective punishment" for the "escape attempt", and the laughing guards set their dogs on the corpses.

From October 1940, Pilecki sent regular reports to the Resistance, using accomplices.

The testimony was spirited out of Nazi-occupied Europe, reaching Britain in March 1941. He pulled no punches, in one message detailing the massacre of 120 Polish women: "In the evening, their body parts, heads, hands, chopped-off breasts and mutilated corpses were taken by cart to the crematorium".

In March 1942 the Nazis opened a camp at nearby Brzezinka, or Birkenau.

It was purposely built for the "Final Solution" which claimed the lives of six million Jews across Europe, half of them from Poland.

Pilecki revealed information about Birkenau's deadly gas chambers and vast crematoria.

"The details were published in the Polish underground press, and information about Auschwitz gathered by the Resistance was also published in the West in 1944," said Adam Cyra, a historian at the Auschwitz museum.

Pilecki also created a Resistance network within the camp using independent cells of five prisoners.

Its members built a radio transmitter, smuggled in medication and even spread typhus among the guards using fleas.

By 1942, Pilecki felt ready to take over the camp for a few hours, long enough for a mass breakout backed by Resistance attacks beyond the wire and Allied air drops.

"The decision was made not to attack the camp because the battle would have ended in a massacre. It was an illusion," said Mr Cyra.

Escape was near-impossible, but Pilecki got away in April 1943 and tried to keep spreading the word.

Foreign leaders failed to believe the extent of the horror, however.

Mr Pilecki fought in the doomed 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis and then struggled with Poland's communist regime set up by the Soviets. He was captured, killed in a Warsaw jail in May 1948 and wiped from official history until the regime fell in 1989.

"We only learned he was dead when he was rehabilitated in 1990.

"I'd always kept hoping," his daughter, Zofia Pilecka-Optulowicz, 77, said.