24-02-2016, 09:15
From a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners Auschwitz gradually became the site of the largest massacre in history. 1.1 million people died here, more than 200 thousand of them were children. “One image stuck in my memory, stuck at the very moment it was described to me. It was the image of a "procession" of empty baby carriages - property stolen from the dead Jews - which were taken out of Auschwitz towards the station, five of them in a row. A prisoner who saw this column says that it drove past him for a whole hour,” writes Lawrence Rees.
In the spring of 1940, the “New Reich” began construction of one of the first Nazi concentration camps near the town of Auschwitz. Just eight months ago it was Southwestern Poland, and now it is German Upper Silesia. In Polish the town was called Auschwitz, in German - Auschwitz. It should be noted that the functions of the camps in the Nazi state were different. Concentration camps such as Dachau (established in March 1933, just two months after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany) differed significantly from extermination camps such as Treblinka, which did not emerge until mid-war. The history of Auschwitz is interesting, the most notorious of them, which became both a concentration camp and an extermination camp...
No Germans, even those who had previously been fanatical Nazis, admitted to “welcoming” the existence of death camps, but many quite approved of the existence of concentration camps in the 1930s. After all, the first prisoners who ended up in Dachau in March 1933 were mainly political opponents of the Nazis. Then, at the dawn of the Nazi regime, Jews were vilified, humiliated and beaten, but the left-wing politicians of the previous government were considered a direct threat.
The regime at Dachau was not just brutal; everything was arranged in such a way as to break the will of the prisoners. Theodor Eicke, the first commandant of the camp, elevated the violence, ruthlessness and hatred that the Nazis felt towards their enemies into a certain system and order. Dachau is notorious for the physical sadism that reigned in the camp: floggings and severe beatings were common. The prisoners could have been killed, and their death attributed to “murder while trying to escape” - many of those who ended up in Dachau died there. But the Dachau regime really did not last so much physical violence, no matter how terrible it undoubtedly was, how much on moral humiliation.
Poland was despised by the Nazis for its “ eternal mess" The Nazis had no differences in their attitude towards the Poles. They despised them. The question was different - what to do with them. One of the main “problems” that the Nazis had to solve was the problem of Polish Jews. Unlike Germany, where Jews made up less than 1% of the population and where most were assimilated, Poland had 3 million Jews, most of whom lived in communities; they could often be easily identified by their beards and other “signs of their faith.” After Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union, immediately after the outbreak of war (under the terms of the secret part of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed in August 1939), more than two million Polish Jews found themselves in the German occupation zone.
Another problem for the Nazis, which they themselves created, was finding housing for the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans who were moving to Poland at the time. Under a treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union, ethnic Germans from the Baltic countries, Bessarabia and other regions recently occupied by Stalin were allowed to emigrate to Germany - “to return home to the Reich,” as the slogan of the time said. Obsessed with ideas about racial purity"German blood", people like Himmler considered it their duty to give all Germans the opportunity to return to their homeland. But one difficulty arose: where, exactly, should they return?
By the spring of 1940, Poland was divided into two parts. Areas appeared that officially became “German” and entered the “New Reich” as new imperial districts - Reichsgau - Reichsgau West Prussia - Danzig (Gdansk); Reichsgau Wartheland (also known as Warthegau) in western Poland in the area of Posen (Poznan) and Lodz; and Upper Silesia in the Katowice region (it was this area that included Auschwitz). In addition, on the largest part of the former Polish territory An entity called the General Government was created, which included the cities of Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin and was intended to house the majority of Poles.
Over the course of a year and a half, about half a million ethnic Germans were settled in the new part of the Reich, while hundreds of thousands of Poles were evicted from there to make way for the arriving Germans. Many Poles were simply pushed into freight cars and taken south to the General Government, where they were simply thrown out of the cars, left without food and without a roof over their heads. It is not surprising that in January 1940 Goebbels wrote in his diary: “Himmler is now engaged in population transfers. Not always successful."
With regard to the Jews, Himmler made a different decision: if ethnic Germans needed living space, which was obvious, then they needed to take it away from the Jews and force them to live in a much smaller area than before. The solution to this problem was the creation of a ghetto. The ghettos that became such a terrible sign of the Nazi persecution of Jews in Poland were not originally created for the terrible conditions that ultimately prevailed there. Like so much else in the history of Auschwitz and the Nazi "Final Solution" Jewish question", the fatal changes that occurred in the ghettos during their existence were not initially included in the plans of the Nazis.
The Nazis believed that, ideally, Jews should simply be forced to “get away,” but since this was impossible at that time, they had to be isolated from everyone else: since, as the Nazis believed, Jews, especially Eastern Europeans, were carriers of all sorts of diseases. In February 1940, while the deportation of Poles to the General Government was in full swing, it was announced that all Jews of Łódź were to “move” to an area of the city designated as a ghetto. At first, such ghettos were planned only as a temporary measure, a place to imprison Jews before deporting them elsewhere. In April 1940, the Lodz ghetto was placed under guard and Jews were forbidden to leave its territory without permission from the German authorities.
Auschwitz was originally conceived as a transit concentration camp- in Nazi jargon, “quarantine” - in which prisoners were to be held before being sent to other camps in the Reich. But within a few days after the creation of the camp, it became clear that it would function independently as a place of permanent detention. The Auschwitz camp was intended to detain and intimidate Poles at a time when the entire country was being ethnically reorganized and the Poles as a nation were being intellectually and politically destroyed.
The first prisoners to arrive at Auschwitz in June 1940 were, however, not Poles, but Germans - 30 criminals transferred here from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. They were to become the first capo prisoners to act as agents of SS control over Polish prisoners.
The first Polish prisoners of Auschwitz were sent to the camp by various reasons: on suspicion of working for the Polish underground, or because they were members of one of the social groups especially persecuted by the Nazis (such as priests and intellectuals) - or simply because some German did not like them. Many of the first group of Polish prisoners transferred to the camp on June 14, 1940 from Tarnow Prison were university students. The very first task for all newly arrived prisoners was simple: they had to build their own camp. At this stage of the camp's existence, not many Jews were sent to Auschwitz, since the policy of creating ghettos throughout the country was still in full swing.
By the end of 1940, Rudolf Hess - the camp commandant - had already created the basic structures and principles according to which the camp would function for the next four years: kapos who controlled every moment of the prisoners' lives; a very harsh regime that allowed guards to punish prisoners arbitrarily, at their own discretion - often simply without any reason; the prevailing belief in the camp that if a prisoner failed to somehow evade a team sent to dangerous work, a quick and unexpected death awaited him.
By the end of 1940, Hess had already created the basic structures and principles under which the camp would operate for the next four years: the capos, who controlled every moment of the prisoners' lives; a very harsh regime that allowed guards to punish prisoners arbitrarily, at their own discretion - often simply without any reason; the prevailing belief in the camp that if a prisoner failed to somehow evade a team sent to dangerous work, a quick and unexpected death awaited him. But besides this, in those first months of the camp’s existence, another phenomenon was created that most clearly symbolized the Nazi camp culture - it was block 11. This block was a prison within a prison - a place of torture and murder.
In 1941, Auschwitz, designed for 10 thousand prisoners, began to expand. From July 1941, Soviet prisoners of war, mainly military political instructors - commissars, began to be sent to Auschwitz. From the moment they arrived at Auschwitz, these prisoners were treated differently from others. Incredible, but true - even considering the torture that was already happening in the camp: this group of prisoners was treated even worse. Jerzy Bielecki heard how they were being mocked even before he saw them: “I remember terrible screams and moans...” He and a friend approached a gravel pit at the edge of the camp, where they saw Soviet prisoners of war. “They ran wheelbarrows filled with sand and gravel,” says Beletsky. “This was not ordinary camp work, but some kind of hell that the SS men specially created for Soviet prisoners of war.” The capos beat the working commissars with sticks, and the SS guards watching all this encouraged them: “Come on, guys! Beat them!”
In 1941, Auschwitz prisoners became victims of a Nazi program called “adult euthanasia.” At first injections were used to kill disabled people, but then favorite method began the use of carbon monoxide in cylinders. At first this happened in special centers, equipped mainly in former psychiatric hospitals. Gas chambers were built there, designed in such a way that they looked like showers.
Later, in late August or early September 1941, a more “effective way to kill people” was found. The basement of block 11 was hermetically sealed, and it naturally became the most suitable place in order to conduct an experiment with the gas “Cyclone B”. By the beginning of 1942, “experiments” with the cyclone began to be carried out directly in the camp crematorium, which was much more convenient... In the fall of 1941, the deportation of German Jews began. Many of them ended up first in the ghetto, and then in Auschwitz and other camps. As part of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” gassing of “useless” Jews from the areas surrounding Auschwitz began.
In the fall of 1941, 10 thousand Soviet prisoners of war were sent to Auschwitz, who were supposed to build a new camp, Birkenau (Brzezinka). Polish prisoner Kazimierz Smolen witnessed their arrival. “It was already snowing, which is rare for October; they (Soviet prisoners of war) were unloaded from the cars three kilometers from the camp. They were ordered to take off their clothes and plunge into vats of disinfectant solution, and they went to Auschwitz (the main camp) naked. They were completely exhausted. Soviet prisoners became the first in the main camp to have camp numbers tattooed on their bodies.” This was yet another “improvement” invented at Auschwitz, the only camp in the Nazi state where prisoners were identified in this way.” The working and maintenance conditions of our prisoners of war were so difficult that average duration The life of Soviet prisoners of war in Birkenau was two weeks...
By the spring of 1942, Auschwitz began to develop into a unique institution in the Nazi state. On the one hand, some prisoners were still accepted into the camp, assigned serial number and forced to work. On the other hand, there was now a whole category of people who were killed hours and sometimes minutes after arriving. No other Nazi camp was operational In a similar way. There were death camps like Chelmno and concentration camps like Dachau; but there were none similar to Auschwitz.
After the defeat of the Germans near Moscow, Soviet prisoners of war were no longer sent to Auschwitz - they were sent to work in military factories, and their place in the camp was taken by deported Slovak Jews, and then French, Belgian and Dutch. In the spring of 1942, women and children began to be sent to the camp, until that moment it was purely men's institution. Jews arrived in trainloads, and if they were not suitable for work, they were ruthlessly disposed of. New gas chambers appeared in Auschwitz: “Red House”, “White House”. However, the extermination process at Auschwitz remained ineffective and improvised. As a center of mass murder, Auschwitz was still far from “perfect”, and its capacity was very limited...
In the history of Auschwitz and the Nazi “Final Solution,” 1943 was a turning point. By the beginning of the summer of 1943, four crematoria connected to gas chambers were already operating in Auschwitz-Birkenau. In total, these four crematoria were prepared to kill about 4,700 people every day. Birkenau's crematoria and gas chambers became the center of a huge semi-industrial complex. Here, selected Jews were first sent to work in one of the many small camps nearby, and then, when they were deemed unfit for work after months of horrific treatment, they were transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination zone, which was several kilometers away from the work camps.
Over time, there were already 28 subcamps operating around Auschwitz, which were located near various industrial sites throughout Upper Silesia: from a cement plant in Goleszow to an armory in Eintrachthütte, from an Upper Silesian power plant to a giant camp in Monowice, built to serve a chemical plant for the production of artificial rubber. company I.G. Farben. About 10 thousand Auschwitz prisoners (including the Italian scientist and writer Primo Levi, who after the war would try to understand the reasons for the cruelty of the Nazi regime in his books) were placed in Manowitz. By 1944, more than 40 thousand prisoners were working as slaves in various industrial plants throughout Upper Silesia. It is estimated that Auschwitz brought Nazi state about 30 million marks of net income by selling this forced labor to private concerns.
Auschwitz was famous for its medical experiments on prisoners. As part of the solution to the Jewish question, sterilization experiments were carried out. Auschwitz prisoners were even “sold” to Bayer, a subsidiary of I.G. Farben as guinea pigs for testing new drugs on them. One of the messages from Bayer to the leadership of Auschwitz reads: “The party of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain final results because they died during the experiments. We kindly ask you to send us another group of women in the same number and at the same price.” These women, who died while testing experimental painkillers, cost the company 170 Reichsmarks each.
Auschwitz became the site of the largest massacres in history as a result of the events of 1944. Until the spring of that year, the number of victims in this camp was several hundred thousand less than in Treblinka. But in the spring and early summer of 1944, Auschwitz made money full power and even more, a period of the most monstrous and insane murders that this camp had ever seen began. Most of the Jews who suffered and died during this terrible time, arrived from one country - Hungary.
The Hungarians always tried to play a cunning political game with the Nazis, consumed by two strong and contradictory feelings. On the one hand, they experienced traditional fear of the power of Germany, and on the other, they really wanted to cooperate with the winning side, especially if the latter meant the opportunity to grab a piece of territory from eastern neighbor, Romania.
In the spring of 1941, the Hungarians supported their ally Germany in the seizure of Yugoslavia, and later, in June, sent troops to participate in the war against Soviet Union. But when the promised lightning war” was never successful, dragging on for a much longer period than expected, the Hungarians began to realize that they had taken the wrong side. In January 1943, the Red Army utterly defeated the Hungarian forces. Eastern Front, causing catastrophic losses: Hungary lost about 150 thousand people killed, wounded or captured. The new “reasonable” position, the Hungarian leadership decided, was to distance itself from the Nazis.
In the spring of 1944, Hitler decided to send his troops into the territory of an unreliable ally. Hungary remained one of the few Eastern European countries that had not yet been plundered. This was amazingly rich territory, and now, Hitler decided, it was time for the Nazis to seize these riches. And of course, the local Jews became a special target of the Nazis. More than 760 thousand Jews lived in Hungary.
Due to the difficult military situation and the growing need for forced labor, the Nazis should have paid more attention to selecting those Jews who could serve as manual labor war economy Germany, from those who were of no value to the Third Reich, and therefore should have been subjected to immediate destruction. Thus, from the Nazi point of view, Auschwitz became the ideal destination for the deportation of Hungarian Jews. He became a giant human sieve through which specially selected Jews could get into the factories of the Reich that used slave labor. By July 1944, Auschwitz had received 440 thousand Hungarian Jews. In less than 8 weeks, more than 320 thousand people died here.
Everything was organized with German pedantry. The trains were unloaded in the basement of the crematorium. The gas chambers of crematoria 2 and 3 were located underground, so the delivery of “cyclone B”, when people were pushed into the chamber and the door was closed behind them, was carried out almost directly. Standing outside on the roof of the gas chamber, SS members opened the valves, gaining access to hidden columns in the gas chamber. Then they placed canisters with “Cyclone B” in the columns and lowered them, and when the gas reached the bottom, they pushed the valves back in and battened them down. The Sonderkommando had to remove the bodies from the gas chamber and transport them using a small lift upstairs to the crematorium ovens on the ground floor. They then entered the cells again, carrying heavy fire hoses, and washed away the blood and excrement that covered the floors and walls.
Even the hair of those killed in the prison camp was put into the service of the Reich. An order was received from the economic department of the SS: to collect human hair from two centimeters in length so that it could be spun into thread. These threads were used to make “felt socks for crews” submarines and felt hoses for railways”...
When the end came, everything happened incredibly quickly. In January 1945, the Nazis blew up the crematoria, and on January 27, Soviet soldiers of the 1st Ukrainian Front entered the camp complex. There were about 8 thousand prisoners in the camp, whom the Nazis did not have time to destroy, and 60 thousand were driven to the west. Rudolf Hess was executed at Auschwitz in April 1947. According to modern estimates, of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million died in the camp. The Jews made up a staggering 1 million people.
Despite the decision of the Nuremberg trials that the SS as a whole was a "criminal" organization, no one ever even attempted to defend the position that mere work in the ranks of the SS at Auschwitz was already a war crime - a position that would undoubtedly have been supported by the public opinion. Convicting and giving a sentence, even the mildest, to every member of the SS from Auschwitz would certainly convey the message very clearly to future generations. But that did not happen. Approximately 85% of the SS men who served in Auschwitz and survived the war escaped punishment.
Auschwitz and final decision Jewish Question" represent the most heinous act in history. With their crime, the Nazis brought to the world an understanding of what educated, technically equipped people can do if they have a cold heart. The knowledge of what they did, once released into the world, should not be forgotten. It still lies there - ugly, heavy, waiting to be discovered by another generation. A warning for us and for those who come after us.
The article was written based on the book “Auschwitz” by Lawrence Rees. Nazis and the final solution to the Jewish question", M., KoLibri, Azbuka-Antikus, 2014.
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Usually, after visiting an interesting museum, there are many different thoughts in your head and a feeling of satisfaction. After leaving the territory of this museum complex, you are left with a feeling of deep devastation and depression. I've never seen anything like this before. I never really read into the historical details of this place, I had no idea how large-scale the politics of human cruelty could be.
The entrance to the Auschwitz camp is crowned with the famous inscription “Arbeit macht frei”, which means “Work gives liberation”.
Arbeit macht frei is the title of a novel by German nationalist writer Lorenz Diefenbach. The phrase was placed as a slogan at the entrance of many Nazi concentration camps, either as a mockery or to convey false hope. But, as you know, labor did not give anyone the desired freedom in this concentration camp.
Auschwitz 1 served as the administrative center of the entire complex. It was founded on May 20, 1940, on the basis of two- and three-story brick buildings of former Polish and formerly Austrian barracks. The first group, consisting of 728 Polish political prisoners, arrived at the camp on June 14 of the same year. Over the course of two years, the number of prisoners varied from 13 to 16 thousand, and by 1942 it reached 20,000. The SS selected some prisoners, mostly Germans, to spy on the rest. Camp prisoners were divided into classes, which was visually reflected by stripes on their clothes. Prisoners were required to work 6 days a week, except Sunday.
In the Auschwitz camp there were separate blocks that served different purposes. In blocks 11 and 13, punishments were carried out for violators of camp rules. People were placed in groups of 4 in so-called “standing cells” measuring 90 cm x 90 cm, where they had to stand all night. More stringent measures involved slow killings: the offenders were either put in a sealed chamber, where they died from lack of oxygen, or simply starved to death. Between blocks 10 and 11 there was a torture yard, where prisoners, at best, were simply shot. The wall where the execution took place was reconstructed after the end of the war.
On September 3, 1941, on the orders of the deputy camp commander, SS-Obersturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the first gas etching test was carried out in Block 11, which resulted in the deaths of about 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 other prisoners, mostly sick. The test was considered successful and one of the bunkers was converted into a gas chamber and crematorium. The cell operated from 1941 to 1942, and then it was rebuilt into an SS bomb shelter.
Auschwitz 2 (also known as Birkenau) is what is usually meant when talking about Auschwitz itself. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles and Gypsies were kept there in one-story wooden barracks. The number of victims of this camp was more than a million people. Construction of this part of the camp began in October 1941. Auschwitz 2 had 4 gas chambers and 4 crematoria. New prisoners arrived daily by train at the Birkenau camp from all over occupied Europe.
This is what the barracks for prisoners look like. 4 people in a narrow wooden cell, there is no toilet in the back, you can’t leave the back at night, no heating.
Those who arrived were divided into four groups.
The first group, which made up approximately ¾ of all those brought, was sent to the gas chambers within several hours. This group included women, children, old people and all those who had not passed a medical examination to determine their full suitability for work. More than 20,000 people could be killed in the camp each day.
The selection procedure was extremely simple - all newly arrived prisoners lined up on the platform, several German officers selected potentially able-bodied prisoners. The rest went to the showers, that's what people were told... No one ever panicked. Everyone undressed, left their things in the sorting room and entered the shower room, which in reality turned out to be a gas chamber. The Birkenau camp housed the largest gas plant and crematorium in Europe; it was blown up by the Nazis during their retreat. Now it is a memorial.
Jews who arrived in Auschwitz were allowed to take up to 25 kg of personal belongings; accordingly, people took the most valuable things. In the sorting rooms for things after mass executions, camp staff confiscated all the most valuable things - jewelry, money, which went to the treasury. Personal belongings were also sorted. Much went into repeated trade turnover to Germany. In the halls of the museum, some stands are impressive, where the same type of things are collected: glasses, dentures, clothes, dishes... THOUSANDS of things piled up in one huge stand... behind each thing there is someone's life.
Another fact was very striking: hair was cut from the corpses, which went to the textile industry in Germany.
The second group of prisoners was sent to slave labor on industrial enterprises various companies. From 1940 to 1945, about 405 thousand prisoners were assigned to factories in the Auschwitz complex. Of these, more than 340 thousand died from disease and beatings, or were executed.
The third group, mostly twins and dwarfs, went to various medical experiments, in particular to Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the “angel of death.”
Below I have given an article about Mengele - this incredible incident, when a criminal of this magnitude completely escaped punishment.
Josef Mengele, the most famous of the Nazi doctor criminals
After being wounded, SS-Hauptsturmführer Mengele was declared unfit for combat service and in 1943 was appointed chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
In addition to its main function - the destruction of "inferior races", prisoners of war, communists and simply the dissatisfied, concentration camps performed another function in Nazi Germany. With the arrival of Mengele, Auschwitz became a "major scientific research center."
“Research” went on as usual. The Wehrmacht ordered a topic: to find out everything about the effects of cold on a soldier’s body (hypothermia). The experimental methodology was the most simple: a concentration camp prisoner is taken, covered on all sides with ice, “doctors” in SS uniforms constantly measure body temperature... When a test subject dies, a new one is brought from the barracks. Conclusion: after the body has cooled below 30 degrees, it is most likely impossible to save a person.
The Luftwaffe, the German air force, commissioned research on the effect of high altitude on pilot performance. A pressure chamber was built in Auschwitz. Thousands of prisoners were taken terrible death: at ultra-low pressure a person simply burst. Conclusion: it is necessary to build aircraft with a pressurized cabin. By the way, not a single one of these aircraft took off in Germany until the very end of the war.
On his own initiative, Joseph Mengele, who became interested in racial theory, conducted experiments with eye color. For some reason, he needed to prove in practice that the brown eyes of Jews under no circumstances could become the blue eyes of a “true Aryan.” He gives hundreds of Jews injections of blue dye - extremely painful and often leading to blindness. The conclusion is obvious: a Jew cannot be turned into an Aryan.
Tens of thousands of people became victims of Mengele’s monstrous experiments. What is the value of research alone on the effects of physical and mental exhaustion on human body! And the “study” of 3 thousand young twins, of which only 200 survived! The twins received blood transfusions and organ transplants from each other. Sisters were forced to bear children from their brothers. Forced gender reassignment operations were carried out. Before starting the experiments, the good Doctor Mengele could pat the child on the head, treat him with chocolate...
Last year, one of the former prisoners of Auschwitz sued the German pharmaceutical company Bayer. The makers of aspirin are accused of using concentration camp prisoners to test their sleeping pill. Judging by the fact that soon after the start of the “approbation” the concern additionally purchased 150 more Auschwitz prisoners, no one was able to wake up after the new sleeping pills. By the way, other representatives of German business also collaborated with the concentration camp system. The largest chemical concern in Germany, IG Farbenindustri, made not only synthetic gasoline for tanks, but also Zyklon-B gas for the gas chambers of the same Auschwitz.
In 1945, Josef Mengele carefully destroyed all the collected “data” and escaped from Auschwitz. Until 1949, Mengele worked quietly in his native Günzburg at his father’s company. Then, using new documents in the name of Helmut Gregor, he emigrated to Argentina. He received his passport quite legally, through... the Red Cross. In those years, this organization provided charity, issued passports and travel documents to tens of thousands of refugees from Germany. Perhaps Mengele's fake ID simply could not be thoroughly checked. Moreover, the art of forging documents in the Third Reich reached unprecedented heights.
Despite mostly negative attitude from the world community to Mengele's experiments, he made a certain useful contribution to medicine. In particular, the doctor developed methods for warming victims of hypothermia, used, for example, when rescuing from avalanches; skin grafting (for burns) is also an achievement of the doctor. He brought in significant contribution into the theory and practice of blood transfusion.
One way or another, Mengele ended up in South America. In the early 50s, when Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest (with the right to kill him upon arrest), Iyozef moved to Paraguay. However, all this was rather a sham, a game of catching Nazis. Still with the same passport in the name of Gregor, Joseph Mengele repeatedly visited Europe, where his wife and son remained.
The man responsible for tens of thousands of murders lived in prosperity and contentment until 1979. Mengele drowned in the warm ocean while swimming on a beach in Brazil.
The fourth group, mostly women, were selected into the "Canada" group for personal use by the Germans as servants and personal slaves, as well as for sorting the personal property of prisoners arriving at the camp. The name "Canada" was chosen as a mockery of Polish prisoners - in Poland the word "Canada" was often used as an exclamation upon seeing valuable gift. Previously, Polish emigrants often sent gifts to their homeland from Canada. Auschwitz was partly maintained by prisoners, who were periodically killed and replaced with new ones. About 6,000 SS members watched everything.
By 1943, a resistance group had formed in the camp, which helped some prisoners escape, and in October 1944, the group destroyed one of the crematoria. In connection with the approach of Soviet troops, the Auschwitz administration began evacuating prisoners to camps located in Germany. When Soviet soldiers occupied Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they found about 7,500 survivors there.
Over the entire history of Auschwitz, there were about 700 escape attempts, 300 of which were successful, but if someone escaped, all his relatives were arrested and sent to the camp, and all prisoners from his block were killed. It was quite effective method prevent escape attempts.
The exact number of deaths in Auschwitz is impossible to establish, since many documents were destroyed, in addition, the Germans did not keep records of victims sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arrival. Modern historians There is consensus that between 1.4 and 1.8 million people were exterminated at Auschwitz, most of whom were Jews.
On March 1-29, 1947, the trial of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, took place in Warsaw. The Polish Supreme People's Court sentenced him to death by hanging on April 2, 1947. The gallows on which Höss was hanged were installed at the entrance to the main crematorium of Auschwitz.
When Höss was asked why millions of innocent people were being killed, he answered:
First of all, we must listen to the Fuhrer, and not philosophize.
It is very important to have such museums on earth, they change consciousness, they are evidence that a person can go as far as he likes in his actions, where there are no boundaries, where no moral principles exist...
This is a story of the triumph of blind cruelty, one and a half million deaths and silent human grief. Here the last hopes crumbled into dust, coming into contact with hopelessness and terrible reality. Here, in the poisonous fog of an existence torn by pain and deprivation, some said goodbye to their relatives and loved ones, others - to own life. This is the story of the Auschwitz concentration camp - the site of massacre throughout the history of mankind.
As illustrations I use archival photographs 2009. Unfortunately, many of them are of very poor quality.
Spring 1940. Rudolf Hess arrives in Poland. Then an SS captain, Hess was to create a concentration camp in the small town of Auschwitz (German name Auschwitz), located in the occupied territory.
It was decided to build the concentration camp on the site where the Polish army barracks had once been located. Now they were in a state of disrepair, many were dilapidated.
The authorities gave Hess a difficult task - to create a camp for 10 thousand prisoners in a relatively short time. Initially, the Germans planned to hold Polish political prisoners here.
Since Hess had worked in the camp system since 1934, the construction of another concentration camp was commonplace for him. However, at first everything did not go very smoothly. The SS did not yet consider the Auschwitz concentration camp as a strategic important object And special attention I didn’t give it to him. There were supply difficulties. Hess later wrote in his memoirs that one day he needed a hundred meters of barbed wire and he simply stole it.
One of the symbols of Auschwitz is a cynical inscription above the main gate of the camp. "Arbeit macht frei" - work makes you free.
When prisoners returned from work, an orchestra played at the entrance to the camp. This was necessary so that the prisoners would maintain their marching order and this would make it easier for the guards to count them.
The region itself was of considerable interest to the Third Reich, since the largest coal deposits were located 30 km from Auschwitz. This region was also rich in limestone reserves. Coal and limestone are valuable raw materials for the chemical industry, especially during war. Coal, for example, was used to produce synthetic gasoline.
The German syndicate IG Farbenindustrie decided to competently exploit what had passed into the hands of the Germans. natural potential territories. In addition, IG Farbenindustrie was interested in the free labor that concentration camps filled to capacity with prisoners could provide.
It is important to note that many German companies used slave labor from camp prisoners, although some still choose to deny this.
In March 1941, Himmler visited Auschwitz for the first time.
Nazi Germany subsequently wanted to build an exemplary german city with money from IG Farbenindustrie. Ethnic Germans could live here. Local population Of course, I would have to be deported.
Now in some barracks of the main Auschwitz camp there is a museum complex where photographs, documents of those years, prisoners’ belongings, lists with surnames are stored
Suitcases with numbers and names, dentures, glasses, children's toys. All these things will long preserve the memory of the horror that happened here for several years.
People came here deceived. They were told that they were being sent to work. Families took with them the best things and food. In fact, it was the path to the grave.
One of the heaviest elements of the exhibition is the room where a huge amount of human hair is stored behind glass. It seems that I will remember the heavy smell in this room for the rest of my life.
The photo shows a warehouse where 7 tons of hair were found. The photo was taken after the liberation of the camp.
By the onset of the summer of 1941, in the territory occupied by the invaders, execution campaigns had become large-scale and began to be carried out constantly. The Nazis often killed women and children at close range. Observing the situation, senior officials expressed concern to the SS leadership about the morale of the killers. The fact is that the execution procedure had Negative influence on the psyche of many German soldiers. There were fears that these people - the future of the Third Reich - were slowly turning into mentally unstable "beasts". The invaders needed to find a simpler and less bloody way to effectively kill people.
Given that the conditions of detention of prisoners at Auschwitz were terrible, many quickly became incapacitated due to hunger, physical exhaustion, torture and disease. For some time, prisoners unable to work were shot. Hess wrote in his memoirs about the negative attitude towards execution procedures, therefore the transition to a more “clean” and quick method killing people in the camp at that time would have been very helpful.
Hitler believed that the care and maintenance of mentally retarded and mentally ill people in Germany was an unnecessary expense item for the Reich economy and it was pointless to spend money on it. Thus, in 1939, the murder of mentally retarded children was initiated. When the war began in Europe, adult patients began to be involved in this program.
By the summer of 1941, approximately 70 thousand people were killed as part of the adult euthanasia program. In Germany, mass murders of patients were most often carried out using carbon monoxide. People were told they had to undress to shower. They were taken into a room with pipes that were connected to gas cylinders, and not to running water.
The adult euthanasia program is gradually expanding beyond Germany. At this time, the Nazis are faced with another problem - transporting cylinders with carbon monoxide over long distances becomes a costly affair. The killers were given a new task - to reduce the cost of the process.
German documents from that time also mention experiments with explosives. After several terrible attempts to implement this project, when German soldiers had to comb the area and collect body parts of victims scattered around the area, the idea was considered impractical.
After some time, the negligence of one SS soldier, who fell asleep in a car with the engine running in the garage and almost suffocated on exhaust fumes, suggested the Nazis a solution to the problem of cheap and fast way killing the sick.
Doctors began to arrive in Auschwitz to search for sick prisoners. A story was specially invented for the prisoners, according to which all the fuss boiled down to the selection of patients to be sent for treatment. Many prisoners believed the promises and went to their deaths. Thus, the first Auschwitz prisoners died in gas chambers, not in the camp, but in Germany.
In the early autumn of 1941, one of the deputy commandants of the Hess camp, Karl Fritsch, came up with the idea of testing the effect of the gas on people. According to some sources, the first experiment with Zyklon B in Auschwitz was carried out in this room - a dark bunker converted into a gas chamber next to Hess's office.
A camp employee climbed onto the roof of the bunker, opened the hatch and poured powder into it. The camera functioned until 1942. It was then rebuilt into a bomb shelter for SS troops.
This is what the interior of the former gas chamber looks like now.
Next to the bunker there was a crematorium, where the corpses were transported on carts. As the bodies were burned, a thick, gag-inducing, sweetish smoke billowed over the camp.
According to another version, Zyklon B was first used on the territory of Auschwitz in the 11th block of the camp. Fritsch ordered the basement of the building to be prepared for this purpose. After the first loading of Zyklon B crystals, not all the prisoners in the room died, so it was decided to increase the dose.
When Hess was informed about the results of the experiment, he calmed down. Now SS soldiers did not have to stain their hands every day with the blood of executed prisoners. However, the gas experiment set in motion a horrific mechanism that, within a few years, would turn Auschwitz into the site of the largest mass murder in human history.
Block 11 was called a prison within a prison. This place had a bad reputation and was considered the most terrible in the camp. The prisoners tried to avoid him. Here they interrogated and tortured guilty prisoners.
The cells of the block were always crowded with people.
In the basement there was a punishment cell and solitary confinement.
Among the measures of influence on prisoners, the so-called “standing punishment” was popular in block 11.
The prisoner was locked in a cramped, stuffy brick box, where he had to stand for several days. Prisoners were often left without food, so few managed to leave block 11 alive.
In the courtyard of block 11 there is an execution wall and a gallows.
The gallows located here are not quite ordinary. It is a beam driven into the ground with a hook. The prisoner was suspended by his hands tied behind his back. Thus, the entire weight of the body fell on the inverted shoulder joints. Since there was no strength to endure the hellish pain, many almost immediately lost consciousness.
Near the execution wall, the Nazis shot prisoners, usually in the back of the head. The wall is made of fiber material. This was done to prevent bullets from ricocheting.
According to available data, up to 8 thousand people were shot at this wall. Now there are flowers and candles burning here.
The camp area is surrounded by a high fence made of barbed wire in several rows. During the operation of Auschwitz, high voltage was applied to the wire.
Prisoners who were unable to withstand the suffering in the dungeons of the camp threw themselves onto the fences and thereby saved themselves from further torment.
Photos of prisoners with dates of entry into the camp and death. Some were not able to live here even for a week.
The next part of the story will talk about giant factory death - the Birkenau camp located a few kilometers from Auschwitz, corruption in Auschwitz, medical experiments on prisoners and the “beautiful beast”. I’ll show you a photo from a barracks in the women’s section of Birkenau, the place where the gas chambers and crematorium were located. I will also tell you about the life of people in the dungeons of the camp and about the further fate of Auschwitz and its superiors after the end of the war.
The history of World War II contains many unsightly pages, but German concentration camps are one of the worst. The events of those days clearly show that the cruelty of people towards each other really knows no bounds.
“Auschwitz” became especially famous in this regard. Not the best glory is coming and about Buchenwald or Dachau. It was there that the Soviet soldiers who liberated Auschwitz were stationed and were long impressed by the atrocities that were committed within its walls by the Nazis. What kind of place was this and for what purposes did the Germans create it? This article is devoted to this topic.
Basic information
It was the largest and most technologically advanced concentration camp ever created by the Nazis. More precisely, it was a whole complex consisting of an ordinary camp, an institution for forced labor and a special territory where people were massacred. This is what Auschwitz is known for. Where is this place? It is located near the Polish city of Krakow.
Those who liberated Auschwitz were able to save part of the “accounting” of this scary place. From these documents, the command of the Red Army learned that during the entire existence of the camp, about one million three hundred thousand people were tortured within its walls. Approximately a million of them are Jews. Auschwitz had four huge gas chambers, each of which could hold 200 people at once.
So how many people were killed there?
Alas, there is every reason to believe that there were much more victims. One of the commandants of this terrible place, at the trial in Nuremberg, said that the total number of people killed could easily reach 2.5 million. In addition, it is unlikely that this criminal named the true figure. In any case, he constantly fussed at the trial, claiming that he never knew the exact number of exterminated prisoners.
Considering the huge capacity of the gas chambers, it is possible to do logical conclusion that there were indeed much more dead than indicated in official reports. Some researchers think that about four million (!) innocent people found their end within these terrible walls.
The bitter irony was that the gates of Auschwitz were decorated with an inscription that read: “ARBEIT MACHT FREI.” Translated into Russian this means: “Work makes you free.” Alas, in reality there was no smell of freedom there. On the contrary, labor from what is necessary and useful activity in the hands of the Nazis it turned into an effective means of exterminating people, which almost never failed.
When was this death complex created?
Construction began in 1940 on territory previously occupied by a Polish military garrison. The first barracks were soldiers' barracks. Of course, the builders were Jews and prisoners of war. They were fed poorly and killed for every offense - real or imaginary. This is how “Auschwitz” reaped its first “harvest” (you already know where this place is located).
Gradually the camp grew, turning into a huge complex designed to supply cheap work force, which could work for the benefit of the Third Reich.
Nowadays little is said about this, but prison labor was intensively used by all (!) large German companies. In particular, the famous BMV corporation actively exploited slaves, the need for which grew every year, as Germany threw more and more divisions into the meat grinder of the Eastern Front, being forced to equip them with new equipment.
The conditions were terrible. At first, people were put in barracks that had nothing in them. Nothing at all, except for a small armful of rotten straw worth several dozen square meters floor. Over time, they began to issue mattresses at the rate of one for every five to six people. The most preferred option for prisoners was bunks. Although they stood on three floors, only two prisoners were placed in each cell. In this case it was not so cold, since at least I had to sleep not on the floor.
In any case, there was little good. In a room that could accommodate a maximum of fifty people in a standing position, one and a half to two hundred prisoners were huddled together. The unbearable stench, humidity, lice and typhoid fever... Thousands of people died from all this.
The chambers for killing with the Zyklon-B gas operated around the clock, with a break of three hours. The bodies of eight thousand people were burned every day in the crematoria of this concentration camp.
Medical experiments
Concerning medical care, then the prisoners who managed to survive in “Auschwitz” for at least a month began to turn gray at the word “doctor.” And in fact: if a person became seriously ill, it was better for him to immediately climb into the noose or run in full view of the guards, hoping for a merciful bullet.
And no wonder: given that the well-known Mengele and a number of “healers” of lesser rank “practised” in these parts, a trip to the hospital most often ended with the Auschwitz victims playing the role of a guinea pig. Poisons, dangerous vaccines, exposure to extremely high and low temperatures were tested on prisoners, new transplantation techniques were tried... In a word, death was truly a blessing (especially considering the tendency of “doctors” to perform operations without anesthesia).
Hitler’s murderers had one “pink dream”: to develop a means of quickly and effectively sterilizing people, which would make it possible to destroy entire nations, depriving them of the ability to reproduce themselves.
For this purpose, monstrous experiments were carried out: men and women had their genitals removed, and the rate of healing of postoperative wounds was studied. Many experiments were carried out on the topic of radiation depletion. The unfortunate people were irradiated with unrealistic doses of x-rays.
Career of “doctors”
Subsequently, they were used in the study of numerous oncological diseases, which after such “therapy” appeared in almost all irradiated people. In general, all experimental subjects faced only a terrible, painful death for the benefit of “science and progress.” No matter how you admit it, many of the “doctors” not only managed to escape the noose in Nuremberg, but also settled well in America and Canada, where they were considered almost the luminaries of medicine.
Yes, the data they obtained was indeed priceless, but the price paid for it was disproportionately high. Once again the question of the ethical component in medicine arises...
Feeding
They were fed accordingly: the entire daily ration was a bowl of translucent “soup” made from rotten vegetables and crumbs of “technical” bread, which contained a lot of rotten potatoes and sawdust, but no flour. Almost 90% of the prisoners suffered from a chronic intestinal disorder, which killed them faster than the “caring” Nazis.
The prisoners could only envy the dogs that were kept in the neighboring barracks: the kennels had heating, and the quality of feeding was not worth comparing...
conveyor belt of death
The gas chambers of Auschwitz have become a terrible legend today. The killing of people was put on stream (in the literal sense of the word). Immediately after arriving at the camp, prisoners were sorted into two categories: fit and unfit for work. Children, old people, women and disabled people were sent directly from the platforms to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Unsuspecting prisoners were first sent to the “locker room.”
What did they do with the bodies?
There they undressed, were given soap and taken “to the shower.” Of course, the victims ended up in gas chambers, which were actually disguised as shower cabins (there were even water sprayers on the ceiling). Immediately after the batch was accepted, the sealed doors were closed, the cylinders with Cyclone-B gas were activated, after which the contents of the containers rushed into the “shower room”. People died within 15-20 minutes.
After this, their bodies were sent to crematoria, which worked non-stop for days on end. The resulting ashes were used to fertilize agricultural land. The hair that prisoners were sometimes shaved off was used to stuff pillows and mattresses. When the cremation ovens failed and their pipes burned out from constant use, the bodies of the unfortunate people were burned in a huge pit dug on the camp grounds.
Today, the Auschwitz Museum was erected on that site. An eerie, oppressive feeling still covers everyone who visits this territory of death.
About how the camp managers got rich
You need to understand that the same Jews were brought to Poland from Greece and other distant countries. They were promised “relocation to Eastern Europe” and even jobs. Simply put, people came to the place of their murder not only voluntarily, but also taking all their valuables with them.
They should not be considered too naive: in the 30s of the 20th century, Jews were indeed evicted from Germany to the East. People simply did not take into account that times had changed, and from now on it was much more profitable for the Reich to destroy “untermensch” that it did not like.
Where do you think all the gold and silver items, good clothes and shoes taken from the murdered went? For the most part, they were appropriated by the commandants, their wives (who were not at all embarrassed that the new earrings had been on dead man), camp security. The Poles who worked part-time here were especially “distinguished.” They called the warehouses with looted items “Canada”. In their minds it was wonderful, rich country. Many of these “dreamers” not only got rich by selling the things of the murdered, but were also able to escape to Canada.
How effective was prisoner slave labor?
Paradoxical as it may seem, but economic efficiency from the slave labor of prisoners who were “sheltered” by the Auschwitz camp was scanty. People were harnessed (and women) to carts on agricultural lands; more or less strong men were used as low-skilled labor at metallurgical, chemical and military enterprises; they paved and repaired destroyed bomb attacks allies of the road...
But the management of the enterprises where the Auschwitz camp supplied labor was not happy: people fulfilled a maximum of 40-50% of the norm, even with the constant threat of death for the slightest offense. And surprisingly there is nothing here: many of them could barely stand on their feet, what kind of working capacity is there?
No matter what Hitler’s nonhumans said at the trial in Nuremberg, their only goal was the physical destruction of people. Even their effectiveness as a labor force was of no serious interest to anyone.
Regime easing
Almost 90% of those who survived that hell thank God that they were brought to Auschwitz in mid-1943. At that time, the regime of the institution softened significantly.
Firstly, from now on the guards did not have the right to kill without trial any prisoner they did not like. Secondly, at local paramedic stations they actually began to treat, and not kill. Thirdly, the food has become significantly better.
Have the Germans woken up their conscience? No, everything is much more prosaic: it has finally become clear that Germany is losing this war. The “Great Reich” urgently needed workers, and not raw materials to fertilize the fields. As a result, the life of the prisoners grew a little in the eyes of even complete monsters.
In addition, from now on, not all newborn children were killed. Yes, yes, until that time, all the women who arrived in this place pregnant lost their children: the babies were simply drowned in a bucket of water, and then their bodies were thrown away. Often right behind the barracks where the mothers lived. How many unfortunate women went crazy, we will never know. The 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was recently celebrated, but time does not heal such wounds.
So here it is. During the “thaw”, all babies began to be examined: if at least something “Aryan” slipped into their facial features, the child was sent for “assimilation” to Germany. So the Nazis hoped to solve the monstrous demographic problem that arose in full height after huge losses on the Eastern Front. It is difficult to say how many descendants of the Slavs who were captured and sent to Auschwitz live in Germany today. History is silent about this, and no documents (for obvious reasons) have survived.
Liberation
Everything in the world comes to an end. This concentration camp was no exception. So who liberated Auschwitz, and when did this happen?
And it was Soviet soldiers who did it. Warriors of the First Ukrainian front The prisoners of this horrific place were released on January 25, 1945. The SS units guarding the camp fought to the death: they received an order to give the other Nazis time at all costs to destroy both all prisoners and documents that would shed light on their monstrous crimes. But our guys did their duty.
This is who liberated Auschwitz. Despite all the streams of mud that are pouring in their direction today, our soldiers, at the cost of their lives, managed to save many people. Don't forget about this. On the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, almost the same words were spoken by the current leadership of Germany, which paid tribute to the memory Soviet soldiers who died for the freedom of others. Only in 1947 was a museum opened on the camp grounds. Its creators tried to preserve everything as the unfortunate people arriving here saw it.
| January 27, 2015 |
From the editors of “Russia Forever”: Arkady Maler: I wrote this article 5 years ago and some patriots told me then that it was not “relevant” enough.
Photo:January 1945Liberated children from the Auschwitz concentration camp. These children no longer face anything except nightmares at night and memories that cannot be escaped. Of the 1 million 300 thousand prisoners of Auschwitz, children accounted for about 234,000. Of these—220,000 Jewish children, 11 thousand Roma; several thousand Belarusian, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish. By the day of the liberation of Auschwitz, 611 children remained in the camp.
On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops under the command of Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Konev (1897-1973) liberated the largest Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz. This event marked the liberation mission of the Russian Soviet army, and in 2005 the UN General Assembly recognized January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Auschwitz was originally the name of a Polish city located 60 kilometers west of Krakow, occupied by Nazi Germany in 1939. The Germans called it in their own way - Auschwitz and by this name it is known throughout the non-Slavic world. In the Auschwitz-Auschwitz area, the German authorities built the famous concentration camp, or rather, a whole complex of concentration camps, which made this name a household name.
But today the memory of crimes against humanity, as the accusation against the Nazis was accurately formulated on Nuremberg trials, disappears along with the last witnesses to these crimes, and not every schoolchild, not only in Germany, but even in Poland and Russia itself, imagines what a concentration camp is and why the memory of this nightmare should never leave human race, if he still wants to remain human. The idea of isolating one or another category of enemies and prisoners in specially designated premises, and bringing them to death with inhuman labor and endless psychobiological experiments, has no author - its initiators can be imagined anywhere and anytime, but only in the country of victorious National Socialism, in “ civilized" German Empire In the 20th century, this idea was fully realized, with German methodology and Nordic equanimity.
It is impossible to calculate the exact number of all people who died in Auschwitz, as well as in the entire concentration camp system of any totalitarian state, because the very idea of a concentration camp does not imply statistics.
The idea of exterminating people in gas chambers, which horrifies any sane person today, was then and there considered the height of progress and even the most “humane” means of all possible - after all, people had to be killed not individually, but in hundreds and preferably without unnecessary blood . The first gas-baiting test at Auschwitz was carried out on September 3, 1941, on the orders of the deputy camp commandant, SS-Obersturmführer Karl Fritzsch, when a short time 600 Soviet prisoners of war and another 250 prisoners died from suffocation. Later, more than 20,000 people could be killed in a concentration camp in one day. People died from torture, and from hunger, and from unbearable work, and while trying to escape, and if someone suspected them of disobedience, and from their own attempts to commit suicide in this hell created by human hands.
In general, according to general estimates, about one and a half million (!) people died in Auschwitz alone. At the same time, the commandant of this camp in 1940-43, Rudolf Hoess, stated at the Nuremberg Tribunal that about two and a half million (!) people died, and admitted that no one counted the people themselves. When the Russians liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, about seven and a half thousand prisoners were found on its territory, and 1,185,345 men's and women's suits were found in clothing warehouses. In a short time, the Nazis managed to remove and kill more than 58 thousand people.
The meeting of Marshal Konev’s army with Auschwitz can only be compared with the meeting of Scipio’s army with Carthage - just as the Romans suddenly saw the temple of Baal with the bodies of thousands of burnt people sacrificed to this demon, so the Russians suddenly saw the hell that the “enlightened one” had prepared for them. "Germany. It was an encounter with barbarism masquerading as culture. And it was necessary to have very strong will to life and hope for salvation, so that even after this meeting we can continue to pretend that nothing like this happened. This is why the philosopher Theodor Adorno said that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, because why are we, the survivors, better than those who ended up in this hell?
The experience of Auschwitz shows us what a person who has ceased to perceive humanity as a value can be capable of. People living in Germany in the 30-40s of the twentieth century are no worse than any other people living ever and anywhere, but they were only able to create a state that systematically exterminates people based on ethnicity and is sincerely confident that this will happen. will always continue. This is evidence of the abyss of evil in which a person can completely voluntarily find himself and from which everything that we also call culture is trying to protect him. And today all over the world there are a lot of people who would be ready to organize more than one Auschwitz if they had such an opportunity, and they perceive our worries about the past as nothing more than our personal problems,
- after all, it can’t even occur to them that any new Auschwitz could affect them themselves, and often first of all.
In the same way, everything in our world more people who consider the Great Patriotic War nothing more than “Soviet-Nazi” and are happy to speculate about all the “delights” of the German occupation. But Auschwitz is exactly what could have happened to each of us, and also to each of them, if Nazi Germany defeated Soviet Russia. If they had won the Second World War, they would have been the Baltic nationalists, the “Banderists”, the “Galicia” division, the so-called. “Russian Liberation Army” of General Vlasov, etc. If they had won, we would have had Auschwitz. That is why, out of hatred for historical Russia, they are today ready to step over the last line and deny even what is recognized throughout European civilization, which they so want to consider themselves a part of, deny the tragedy of the Holocaust and Great Victory 1945. And how can they call for sympathy for their own historical pain if its price is complete indifference to the real pain of everyone else.
The fact of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Russian army is still not sufficiently appreciated in world history. IN Soviet Russia this event was regarded as a natural component of the general victory over Hitler's Germany, and in the West, the image of the Russian soldier-liberator was carefully supplanted by the American one, so that now the average European schoolchild can be sure that all the concentration camps were liberated by the Americans, and that it was as if there were no Russians in the war at all. But there are facts that cannot be denied - just as Russia, first of all, won the Second World War, so it was Russia that liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. This greatest achievement our national history, not only no less, but even more important than the launch of Sputnik or Gagarin’s flight, because here we're talking about directly about the liberation of living people and the victory over the anti-human regime of all times and peoples, which could one day destroy all of humanity. With the liberation of Auschwitz, Russia once again demonstrated its historical mission, and the Soviet regime for the first time received moral justification, so the USSR before and after the war is practically two different states. Therefore, the liberation of Auschwitz should become one of the main pages in Russian history textbooks, it is here that films and programs should be made about it, and this event itself should become a symbol of the universal mission of Russia as a country that has more than once saved European humanity from death.
Before today Only three photographs taken by prisoners on the camp grounds have survived. In the first, stripped naked Jewish women are led to the gas chambers. The other two show huge piles of human bodies, burned in the open air.
Liberating the camp at Auschwitz, Soviet army I found about 7 tons of hair packed in bags in warehouses. These were the remains that the camp authorities did not manage to sell and send to the factories of the Third Reich. The analysis showed that they contain traces of hydrogen cyanide, a special toxic component of drugs called “Cyclone B”. From human hair, German companies, among other products, produced hair tailor's beads. Rolls of beading found in one of the cities, located in a display case, were submitted for analysis, the results of which showed that it was made from human hair, most likely women's hair.
It is very difficult to imagine the tragic scenes that played out every day in the camp. Former prisoners - artists - tried to convey the atmosphere of those days in their work:
Scenes from the life of the Auschwitz camp. Construction on the inspection area
Before being sent to the gas chamber. Artist - former prisoner Wladislaw Siwek
To work
Return of prisoners from work. Some exhausted prisoners are carried by their comrades so that the guards do not shoot the exhausted man on the spot. Artist - former prisoner Wladislaw Siwek
A brass band made up of prisoners plays a march as prisoners return from work to the camp. Artist - Mstislav Koscielniak (Miesczyslaw Koscielniak)
The prisoners were allowed to wash themselves. Artist - Mstislav Koscielniak (Miesczyslaw Koscielniak)
Caught fugitives who face the death penalty. Artist - Mstislav Koscielniak. Over the entire history of Auschwitz, there were about 700 escape attempts, 300 of which were successful, but if someone escaped, all his relatives were arrested and sent to the camp, and all prisoners from his block were killed. This was a very effective method of preventing escape attempts.
The photographs of 14-year-old Czeslawa Kwoka, provided by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, were taken by Wilhelm Brasse, who worked as a photographer at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. In December 1942, a Polish Catholic woman, Czeslawa, originally from the town of Wolka Zlojecka, was sent to Auschwitz along with her mother. Three months later they both died. In 2005, photographer (and fellow prisoner) Brasse told how he photographed Czeslava: “She was so young and so scared. The girl didn’t understand why she was there and didn’t understand what she was being told. And then the kapo (prison guard) took a stick and hit in her face. This German woman simply took out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful, young and innocent creature. She cried, but could not do anything. Before being photographed, the girl wiped tears and blood from her broken lip. Frankly, I felt as if they had beaten me, but I could not intervene. For me it would have ended fatally" ().
Hard work and hunger led to complete exhaustion of the body. From hunger, prisoners fell ill with dystrophy, which very often ended in death. These photographs were taken after liberation; they show adult prisoners weighing from 23 to 35 kg.
In Auschwitz, in addition to adults, there were also children who were sent to the camp along with their parents. First of all, these were the children of Jews, Gypsies, as well as Poles and Russians. Most Jewish children died in gas chambers immediately after arriving at the camp. A few of them, after careful selection, were sent to a camp where they were subject to the same strict rules as adults. Some of the children, such as twins, were subjected to criminal experiments.
Children, victims of experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum archives)
Joseph Mengele. Did Mengele consider his experiments serious research, given the carelessness with which he worked? Most operations were performed without anesthetics. For example, Mengele once removed part of the stomach without anesthesia. Another time the heart was removed, and again without anesthesia. It was monstrous. Mengele was obsessed with power.
Experiments on twins
Cards of recording anthropometric data of experimental prisoners as part of Dr. Mengele's experiments
Pages of the register of the dead, which contain the names of 80 boys who died after injections of phenol as part of medical experiments
Selection in the basements of block 11. Artist - former prisoner Wladislaw Siwek
Before execution at the Wall of Death. Artist - former prisoner Wladislaw Siwek
Execution in the courtyard of block 11 at the Wall of Death
One of the most terrible exhibits is a model of one of the crematoria in the Auschwitz II camp. On average, about 3 thousand people were killed and burned in such a building per day...
In the Auschwitz concentration camp, the crematorium was located outside the camp fence. Its largest room was the morgue, which was converted into a temporary gas chamber. Here, in 1941 and 1942, Soviet prisoners of war and Jews from the ghettos located in Upper Silesia were exterminated.
Transportation of the bodies of those executed at the Wall of Death by prisoners from the Sonderkommando. former prisoner Wladislaw Siwek
Tears
Security, guards and camp support staff. In total, Auschwitz was guarded by about 6,000 SS men.
Their personal data has been preserved. Three quarters had completed secondary education. 5% are university graduates with an advanced degree. Almost 4/5 identified themselves as believers. Catholics - 42.4%; Protestants - 36.5%.
On a rest
SS Choir
Auschwitz. Members of the SS Helferinnen (overseer) and SS officer Karl Hoecker sitting on a fence eating blueberries from cups, accompanied by an accordion player
Resting...
Hard day's Night
After work: Richard Baer, unknown person, camp doctor Josef Mengele, commandant of the Birkenau camp Josef Kramer (partially obscured) and the previous commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Hess (not to be confused with the namesake and almost namesake - “flyer” Rudolf Hess)
Liberation of Auschwitz. A Soviet nurse holds the girl Zinaida Grinevich in her hands. This is how it is described in the material about to the rescued girl: “Then another old newspaper clipping. With a photograph taken in Auschwitz shortly after the liberation. Children in prison clothes with an old, sad look. Barbed wire, watchtowers. On the left, a nurse holds in her hands a child wrapped in a blanket - Zinaida.
The photo was taken shortly before she, along with two other children, was sent to Lvov, to an orphanage. The three-year-old child had been separated for several months from his mother, who was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Bartya and her sisters went to a camp in Lithuania. Zinaida was too weak to travel. In addition, the concentration camp executioners needed her as a guinea pig. She was infected again and again various diseases. Rubella, chickenpox. And then Nazi doctors tested counteracting drugs on her. Zinaida is one of those children who survived torture."