Hello, after watching few documentaries and having some basic knowledge about this part of history, I ended up being a little curious about this, how exactly did the SS exterminate their prisoners?
I recall about 0,5 mil prisoners stationed in Auschwitz itself (majority obviously died). A lot of people also mention the gassing, however after inspecting the blueprints of the gas rooms and the crematorium it is almost impossible to imagine so many people dying there (also very impractical to just drag so many corpses from the gassing rooms to the crematorium) were they shot or did they just die due to hunger or typhus?
(I am not tying to deny the gas chamber theory or the holocaust itself, if it does look like it then I apologize in advance).
Can I ask what blueprints you have been looking at and how you analyzed to blueprints to come to that conclusion?
Auschwitz consisted of both labor/concentration camp where people basically were worked to death (or died by malnutrition, disease or mistreatment) and an extermination camp where people was killed in gas chambers immediately on arrival. The majority of killings were by the extermination camp since it was highly efficient "killing factory". At the height, it is estimated to have gassed and incinerated 20,000 victims a day. Since the extermination camp ran for about two years, it could easily have killed a million victims at that rate.
Auschwitz-Birkenau had four crematoriums which was gas chambers and crematoria ovens combined in one building for maximum efficiency. Additionally, some times bodies was burned on open air pyres, when the capacity of the ovens were insufficient.
Be aware that some holocaust deniers have claimed that it is not possible for the crematories to kill people at that rate. That claim is based on comparison to the capacity of modern crematoria where each body is burned individually and fully before entering a new body. This is done out of respect for the deceased and to make it possible to collect the ashes of individual persons. In the Birkenau creamatoria, many bodies were burned at the same time, and the ovens were continuously fed new bodies.
The vast majority of people in Auschwitz died through gassing. The systematic gassing of Jews upon arrival started in July 1942 (though there had been gassings before that) and was suspended in late 1944, when the demolition of the gas chambers and crematoria started. They were demolished so that the nazis (and the people whose websites I assume you have been reading) could later deny that any such thing went on there. The same thing happened in Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec.
The first gas chamber was built in Auschwitz I, the smaller main camp, in late 1941. It had an adjoining crematorium. This gas chamber could accommodate several hundred people at a time.
In the spring of 1942, a second gas chamber was fitted out at Birkenau (Auschwitz II), the larger camp a couple of kilometers off. This chamber held 800 people. It was in use for a year.
In mid-1942 a third gas chamber became operational at Birkenau which held about 1,200 people. The thing to keep in mind is that they did not hold these people "comfortably". They were piled in until there was not a square inch left and when the doors were opened afterwards the corpses were all still standing as there was no room to fall down. This chamber was retired from operating after a year, but was pressed back into service after another year (mid-1944) to cope with the enormous influx of Hungarian Jews that were sent to Auschwitz in the wake of the German occupation of Hungary.
Between the end of March and the end of June 1943, four large additional gas chambers with adjoining crematoria became operational at Birkenau. That is when the second and third chambers mentioned above went inactive as they did not have adjoining crematoria and were therefore not as "convenient". The new chambers each held 2,000 people. The four crematoria could burn 4,400 (according to an SS report) to 8,000 (according to surviving prisoners) corpses a day in total (not each). This became a problem during the massive "Hungarian action" I mentioned above when more people were gassed than could be cremated. The solution they adopted was to burn them in open pyres.
About 900,000 Jews were gassed immediately upon arrival at the camp and never entered the camp's registration system. About 200,000 Jews were selected for forced labour and died from overwork, starvation, disease, or subsequent gassing in the sporadic selections of camp prisoners who were too sick to work. Some thousands of Gypsies were gassed en masse in 1944. Several thousand each of Soviet POWs, Poles, and political prisoners from other countries were gassed after becoming too sick to work. All in all well over 1 million people were gassed and between one and two hundred thousand died from other causes (starvation, disease, maltreatment, exhaustion). These numbers are approximate. In relative terms: 90% of people who were brought to Auschwitz were gassed.