According to http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/gcpol10.htm#The%20work
"The work
They did not realise that the same ill treatment would meet them there. .
Among the camp authorities there existed a special section (Arbeitseinsatz) for exploiting the labour of the prisoners of the Auschwitz camp. This section divided the prisoners into special working gangs and posted them to work in industrial plants and mines, scattered over the whole of Silesia. In the immediate vicinity of Oswiecim the Germans constructed a big chemical factory in Monowice (Buna) and established a Krupp "Union". Through this work people were reduced to an extreme state of exhaustion by work in draining swamps and marshes, in the mines and on road construction. Some working groups were obliged to walk 7-8 km. to their work. The SS-men ranged the prisoners in units, and surrounded by an escort armed with sticks, hounds and overseers, they were driven to work. During the work, which was carried on in complete silence, and as rule running, the prisoners were beaten under the slightest pretext. One for not straightening his back, another for not taking enough earth in his shovel and another for going aside, suffering from dysentery, to attend to the wants of nature.
Any attempt to rest during the hours of labour, or an accident during work resulting in material loss to the camp was treated and punished as sabotage.
Those who fell from fatigue were shot on the spot. The place of labour was at the same time a scene of mass murder.
A prisoner's day began with reveille at 4.30 a. m and finished at varying times up to late in the night according to the distance from the camp of the labour site.
The working gangs went to their labours to the tune of the camp orchestra, in which prisoners were playing standing at the gate. In the evening they came back from all parts of the Auschwitz camp bleeding, exhausted, carrying the corpses of their comrades on wooden stretchers, on their backs, or dragged in carts. The camp orchestra also played to this procession of ghosts and corpses. The corpses of the murdered comrades were also laid out for the roll-call in order to be counted, as the number of prisoners must always correspond to the camp lists. The fact that they were dead or alive was a matter of indifference.
Some of the camp regulations were an obvious encouragement to murder prisoners. Of such a character was the payment of a premium to the SS-men for shooting prisoners who left their work. The prisoners were first ordered by the SS-men to run on in front and then were shot as "runaways". A short report "shot while escaping" was the end of the matter ("auf dar Flucht erschossen") and the premium was duly paid for preventing the flight of a prisoner. It is seen from Orders 33/34, 88/43 and a series of others that the SS-men were rewarded for such exploits by several days leave also.
The Jews and priests were set to do the hardest work. Huge rollers were brought in on the work of extending the base camp, to the two shafts of which were harnessed Jews and priests. They had to drag the rollers all day long to the accompaniment of blows. The driver was a German prisoner, Krankenmann. Those who fell from exhaustion were killed under the blows of this executioner’s stick. He murdered in this way nearly all the priests and numerous Jews. Some prisoners dragged carts loaded with earth and stones, while others were forced to carry loads exceeding their strength. In the stores containing material for construction work 10 prisoners had to unload 480 sacks of cement in two hours. This worked out at 48 sacks of 50 kilograms each per prisoner. As the stores were located 150 metres from the railway track they had thus to travel 15 kilometres in two hours, carrying for half this distance a load of 50 kilograms.
The unloading of potatoes from the train went on in the same conditions. Near the wagons stood stretchers loaded with about 150 kg. of potatoes, which two prisoners were obliged to carry running to the mounds. The road, was guarded by a file of Capos and overseers, who forced the prisoners to hurry with sticks. This work was done running. After several hours the stretchers were falling from the hands of the prisoners, and the elders dropped from fatigue. Such weaker workers were regarded as saboteurs and were forced to continue working with blows under which they died. Their corpses were thrown into a nearby ditch, from whence they were taken before finishing the work by a special "Fleischwagen", or motor car for collecting the corpses from the place of work.
The bored SS-men often beat the working prisoners for amusement and women, dressed in the uniforms of the S.S. accompanied them for pleasure. The witness Walman told us about the following incident: a group of SS-men accompanied by dogs and German women approached a group of prisoners who were digging a deep ditch for burning the corpses near the crematoria. The SS-men ordered them to load 60 wheelbarrows with earth and to push them along a high earthen wall over the edge of the hole. They then released their dogs to chase them. The ,prisoners, nervously and physically exhausted, fell down with the wheelbarrows into the hole, and most of them were killed. The SS-men shot those prisoners who remained alive. The same performance was repeated by the SS-men the same afternoon. The women who accompanied them were very amused.
During the digging of the basements for the XVth block in the base camp, the following scene took place: The German prisoner Reinhold, being the Capo of a group which was working there threw an old Jew into a hole filled with water in the presence of his son who was working in the same group. When the father lifted himself from the water and tried to get out of the hole, Reinhold and the SS-men ordered the son to descend into the ditch and to drown the father. The son was compelled to fulfil this order, he descended into the ditch seized his father by his neck, put his head into the water and held it under as long as his father showed signs of life. The SS-men ordered the son to climb back to the edge of the ditch, where Reinhold and another prisoner, a German, seized him by his hands and feet, swung his body and threw him into the ditch, where other Jews working in the water digging for gravel were forced to drown him."