Horrible torture and executions by Japanese fascists during World War II! They were even worse than the Germans! German concentration camps during the Great Patriotic War (list).

1) Irma Grese - (October 7, 1923 - December 13, 1945) - warden of the Nazi death camps Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Irma's nicknames included "Blonde Devil", "Angel of Death", and "Beautiful Monster". She used emotional and physical methods to torture prisoners, beat women to death, and enjoyed arbitrarily shooting prisoners. She starved her dogs so she could set them on victims, and personally selected hundreds of people to be sent to the gas chambers. Grese wore heavy boots and, in addition to a pistol, she always carried a wicker whip.

The Western post-war press constantly discussed the possible sexual deviations of Irma Grese, her numerous connections with the SS guards, with the commandant of Bergen-Belsen Joseph Kramer (“The Beast of Belsen”).
On April 17, 1945, she was captured by the British. The Belsen trial, initiated by a British military tribunal, lasted from September 17 to November 17, 1945. Together with Irma Grese, the cases of other camp workers were considered at this trial - commandant Joseph Kramer, warden Juanna Bormann, and nurse Elisabeth Volkenrath. Irma Grese was found guilty and sentenced to hang.
On the last night before her execution, Grese laughed and sang songs with her colleague Elisabeth Volkenrath. Even when a noose was thrown around Irma Grese’s neck, her face remained calm. Her last word was “Faster,” addressed to the English executioner.

2) Ilse Koch - (September 22, 1906 - September 1, 1967) - German NSDAP activist, wife of Karl Koch, commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps. She is best known by her pseudonym as “Frau Lampshaded.” She received the nickname “The Witch of Buchenwald” for her brutal torture of camp prisoners. Koch was also accused of making souvenirs from human skin (however, no reliable evidence of this was presented at the post-war trial of Ilse Koch).

On June 30, 1945, Koch was arrested by American troops and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947. However, a few years later, American General Lucius Clay, the military commandant of the American occupation zone in Germany, released her, considering the charges of ordering executions and making souvenirs from human skin insufficiently proven.

This decision caused public protest, so in 1951 Ilse Koch was arrested in West Germany. A German court again sentenced her to life imprisonment.

On September 1, 1967, Koch committed suicide by hanging herself in her cell in the Bavarian prison of Eibach.

3) Louise Danz - b. December 11, 1917 - matron of women's concentration camps. She was sentenced to life imprisonment but later released.

She began working in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, then was transferred to Majdanek. Danz later served in Auschwitz and Malchow.
Prisoners later said they were abused by Danz. She beat them and confiscated the clothes they had been given for the winter. In Malchow, where Danz had the position of senior warden, she starved the prisoners, not giving food for 3 days. On April 2, 1945, she killed a minor girl.
Danz was arrested on June 1, 1945 in Lützow. At the trial of the Supreme National Tribunal, which lasted from November 24, 1947 to December 22, 1947, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1956 due to health reasons (!!!). In 1996, she was charged with the aforementioned murder of a child, but it was dropped after doctors said Dantz would be too hard to bear if she was imprisoned again. She lives in Germany. She is now 94 years old.

4) Jenny-Wanda Barkmann - (May 30, 1922 - July 4, 1946) From 1940 to December 1943 she worked as a fashion model. In January 1944, she became a guard at the small Stutthof concentration camp, where she became famous for brutally beating female prisoners, some of them to death. She also participated in the selection of women and children for the gas chambers. She was so cruel but also very beautiful that the female prisoners nicknamed her “Beautiful Ghost.”

Jenny fled the camp in 1945 when Soviet troops began to approach the camp. But she was caught and arrested in May 1945 while trying to leave the station in Gdansk. She is said to have flirted with the police officers guarding her and was not particularly worried about her fate. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was found guilty, after which she was given the last word. She stated, "Life is indeed great pleasure, and pleasure is usually short-lived."

Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was publicly hanged at Biskupka Gorka near Gdańsk on July 4, 1946. She was only 24 years old. Her body was burned and her ashes were publicly washed away in the latrine of the house where she was born.

5) Hertha Gertrude Bothe - (January 8, 1921 - March 16, 2000) - warden of women's concentration camps. She was arrested on charges of war crimes, but later released.

In 1942, she received an invitation to work as a guard at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. After four weeks of preliminary training, Bothe was sent to Stutthof, a concentration camp located near the city of Gdansk. In it, Bothe received the nickname "Sadist of Stutthof" due to her cruel treatment of female prisoners.

In July 1944, she was sent by Gerda Steinhoff to the Bromberg-Ost concentration camp. From January 21, 1945, Bothe was a guard during the death march of prisoners from central Poland to the Bergen-Belsen camp. The march ended on February 20-26, 1945. In Bergen-Belsen, Bothe led a detachment of 60 women engaged in wood production.

After the liberation of the camp she was arrested. At the Belsen court she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Released earlier than stated on December 22, 1951. She died on March 16, 2000 in Huntsville, USA.

6) Maria Mandel (1912-1948) - Nazi war criminal. Occupying the post of head of the women's camps of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the period 1942-1944, she was directly responsible for the death of about 500 thousand female prisoners.

Mandel was described by fellow employees as an "extremely intelligent and dedicated" person. Auschwitz prisoners called her a monster among themselves. Mandel personally selected the prisoners, and sent thousands of them to the gas chambers. There are known cases when Mandel personally took several prisoners under her protection for a while, and when she got bored with them, she put them on the list for destruction. Also, it was Mandel who came up with the idea and creation of a women’s camp orchestra, which greeted newly arrived prisoners at the gate with cheerful music. According to the recollections of survivors, Mandel was a music lover and treated the musicians from the orchestra well, personally coming to their barracks with a request to play something.

In 1944, Mandel was transferred to the post of warden of the Muhldorf concentration camp, one of the parts of the Dachau concentration camp, where she served until the end of the war with Germany. In May 1945, she fled to the mountains near her hometown of Münzkirchen. On August 10, 1945, Mandel was arrested by American troops. In November 1946, she was handed over to the Polish authorities at their request as a war criminal. Mandel was one of the main defendants in the trial of Auschwitz workers, which took place in November-December 1947. The court sentenced her to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on January 24, 1948 in a Krakow prison.

7) Hildegard Neumann (May 4, 1919, Czechoslovakia - ?) - senior guard at the Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt concentration camps.

Hildegard Neumann began her service at the Ravensbrück concentration camp in October 1944, immediately becoming chief warden. Due to her good work, she was transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp as the head of all the camp guards. Beauty Hildegard, according to the prisoners, was cruel and merciless towards them.
She supervised between 10 and 30 female police officers and over 20,000 female Jewish prisoners. Neumann also facilitated the deportation of more than 40,000 women and children from Theresienstadt to the death camps of Auschwitz (Auschwitz) and Bergen-Belsen, where most of them were killed. Researchers estimate that more than 100,000 Jews were deported from the Theresienstadt camp and were killed or died at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, with another 55,000 dying in Theresienstadt itself.
Neumann left the camp in May 1945 and faced no criminal liability for war crimes. The subsequent fate of Hildegard Neumann is unknown.

Bone fragments are still found in this land. The crematorium could not cope with the huge number of corpses, although two sets of ovens were built. They burned poorly, leaving fragments of bodies - the ashes were buried in pits around the concentration camp. 72 years have passed, but mushroom pickers in the forest often come across pieces of skulls with eye sockets, bones of arms or legs, crushed fingers - not to mention decayed scraps of striped "robes" of prisoners. The Stutthof concentration camp (fifty kilometers from the city of Gdansk) was founded on September 2, 1939, the day after the outbreak of World War II, and its prisoners were liberated by the Red Army on May 9, 1945. The main thing that Stutthof became famous for was These were "experiments" by SS doctors who, using humans as guinea pigs, made soap from human fat. A bar of this soap was later used at the Nuremberg trials as an example of Nazi savagery. Now some historians (not only in Poland, but also in other countries) are speaking out: this is “military folklore”, fantasy, this could not have happened.

Soap from prisoners

The Stutt-Hof museum complex receives 100 thousand visitors a year. Barracks, towers for SS machine gunners, a crematorium and a gas chamber are available for viewing: small, for about 30 people. The premises were built in the fall of 1944, before that they “coped” with the usual methods - typhus, exhausting work, hunger. A museum employee, taking me through the barracks, says: on average, the life expectancy of the inhabitants of Stutthof was 3 months. According to archival documents, one of the female prisoners weighed 19 kg before her death. Behind the glass I suddenly see large wooden shoes, as if from a medieval fairy tale. I ask: what is this? It turns out that the guards took away the prisoners’ shoes and in return gave them these “shoes” that abraded their feet to bloody blisters. In winter, prisoners worked in the same “robe”, only a light cape was required - many died from hypothermia. It was believed that 85,000 people died in the camp, but EU historians have recently re-estimated the number of prisoners who died to 65,000.

In 2006, the Institute of National Remembrance of Poland conducted an analysis of the same soap presented at the Nuremberg trials, says the guide Danuta Ochocka. - Contrary to expectations, the results were confirmed - it was indeed made by a Nazi professor Rudolf Spanner from human fat. However, now researchers in Poland claim: there is no exact confirmation that the soap was made specifically from the bodies of Stutthof prisoners. It is possible that the corpses of homeless people who died of natural causes, brought from the streets of Gdansk, were used for production. Professor Spanner indeed visited Stutthof at different times, but the production of “soap of the dead” was not carried out on an industrial scale.

Gas chamber and crematorium in the Stutthof concentration camp. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Hans Weingartz

"People were skinned"

The Institute of National Remembrance of Poland is the same “glorious” organization that advocates for the demolition of all monuments to Soviet soldiers, and in this case the situation turned out to be tragicomic. Officials specifically ordered an analysis of the soap in order to obtain proof of the “lies of Soviet propaganda” in Nuremberg, but it turned out the opposite. As for industrial scale, Spanner produced up to 100 kg of soap from “human material” in the period 1943-1944. and, according to the testimony of his employees, he repeatedly went to Stutthof for “raw materials.” Polish investigator Tuvya Friedman published a book where he described his impressions of Spanner’s laboratory after the liberation of Gdansk: “We had the feeling that we had been in hell. One room was filled with naked corpses. The other is lined with boards on which skins taken from many people have been stretched. Almost immediately they discovered a furnace in which the Germans were experimenting in making soap using human fat as a raw material. Several bars of this “soap” lay nearby.” A museum employee shows me a hospital used for experiments by SS doctors; relatively healthy prisoners were placed here under the formal pretext of “treatment.” Doctor Carl Clauberg went to Stutthof on short business trips from Auschwitz to sterilize women, and SS Sturmbannführer Karl Wernet from Buchenwald cut out people's tonsils and tongues, replacing them with artificial organs. Wernet was not satisfied with the results - the victims of the experiments were killed in a gas chamber. There are no exhibits in the concentration camp museum about the savage activities of Clauberg, Wernet and Spanner - they “have little documentary evidence.” Although during the Nuremberg trials that same “human soap” from Stutt-Hof was demonstrated and the testimony of dozens of witnesses was voiced.

"Cultural" Nazis

“I would like to draw your attention to the fact that we have an entire exhibition dedicated to the liberation of Stutt-Hof by Soviet troops on May 9, 1945,” says Dr. Marcin Owsiński, head of the museum's research department. - It is noted that this was precisely the release of prisoners, and not the replacement of one occupation with another, as is now fashionable to say. People rejoiced at the arrival of the Red Army. Regarding the SS experiments in the concentration camp, I assure you that there is no politics here. We work with documentary evidence, and most of the papers were destroyed by the Germans during the retreat from Stutthof. If they appear, we will immediately make changes to the exhibition.

In the cinema hall of the museum they are showing a film about the entry of the Red Army into Stutthof - archival footage. It is noted that by this time only 200 exhausted prisoners remained in the concentration camp and “then the N-KVD sent some to Siberia.” No confirmation, no names - but a fly in the ointment spoils the barrel of honey: there is clearly a goal - to show that the liberators were not so good. At the crematorium there is a sign in Polish: “We thank the Red Army for our liberation.” She is old, from the old days. Soviet soldiers, including my great-grandfather (buried in Polish soil), saved Poland from dozens of “death factories” like Stutt Hof, which entangled the country in a deadly network of ovens and gas chambers, but now they are trying to downplay the significance of their victories. They say that the atrocities of the SS doctors have not been confirmed, fewer people died in the camps and, in general, the crimes of the occupiers have been exaggerated. Moreover, this is stated by Poland, where the Nazis destroyed a fifth of the entire population. To be honest, I want to call an ambulance so that Polish politicians can be taken to a psychiatric hospital.

As a publicist from Warsaw said Maciej Wisniewski: “We will still live to see the time when they will say: the Nazis were a cultured people, they built hospitals and schools in Poland, and the war was started by the Soviet Union.” I wouldn't want to live to see these times. But for some reason it seems to me that they are not far off. January 27, 2015, 15:30

On January 27, the world celebrates 70 years since the liberation by the Soviet army of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz), where from 1941 to 1945, according to official data, 1.4 million people died, of which about 1.1 million were Jews. The photographs below, published by Photochronograph, show the life and martyrdom of prisoners at Auschwitz and other concentration death camps established in territory controlled by Nazi Germany.

Some of these photos can be emotionally traumatizing. Therefore, we ask children and people with unstable mental health to refrain from viewing these photographs.

Sending Slovak Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Arrival of a train with new prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Arrival of prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The prisoners gather centrally on the platform.

Arrival of prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. First stage of selection. It was necessary to divide the prisoners into two columns, separating men from women and children.

Arrival of prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The guards form a column of prisoners.

Rabbis in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Train tracks leading to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Registration photographs of children prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Prisoners of the Auschwitz-Monowitz concentration camp at the construction of a chemical plant of the German concern I.G. Farbenindustrie AG

The liberation by Soviet soldiers of the surviving prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Soviet soldiers examine children's clothing found in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

A group of children liberated from the Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz). In total, about 7,500 people, including children, were released from the camp. The Germans managed to transport about 50 thousand prisoners from Auschwitz to other camps before the approach of the Red Army.

Liberated children, prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz), show camp numbers tattooed on their arms.

Liberated children from the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Portrait of prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp after its liberation by Soviet troops.

Aerial photograph of the northwestern part of the Auschwitz concentration camp with the main objects of the camp marked: the railway station and the Auschwitz I camp.

Liberated prisoners of an Austrian concentration camp in an American military hospital.

Clothes of concentration camp prisoners abandoned after liberation in April 1945.

American soldiers inspect the site of the mass execution of 250 Polish and French prisoners at a concentration camp near Leipzig on April 19, 1945.

A Ukrainian girl released from a concentration camp in Salzburg (Austria) cooks food on a small stove.

Prisoners of the Flossenburg concentration camp after liberation by the 97th Infantry Division of the US Army in May 1945. The emaciated prisoner in the center - a 23-year-old Czech - is sick with dysentery. The Flossenburg camp was located in Bavaria near the city of the same name on the border with the Czech Republic. It was created in May 1938. During the existence of the camp, about 96 thousand prisoners passed through it, more than 30 thousand of them died in the camp.

Prisoners of the Ampfing concentration camp after liberation.

View of the Grini concentration camp in Norway.

Soviet prisoners in the Lamsdorf concentration camp (Stalag VIII-B, now the Polish village of Lambinowice).

The bodies of executed SS guards at observation tower "B" of the Dachau concentration camp.

Dachau is one of the first concentration camps in Germany. Founded by the Nazis in March 1933. The camp was located in southern Germany, 16 kilometers northwest of Munich. The number of prisoners held at Dachau from 1933 to 1945 exceeds 188,000. The death toll in the main camp and in the subcamps from January 1940 to May 1945 was at least 28 thousand people.

View of the barracks of the Dachau concentration camp.

Soldiers of the 45th American Infantry Division show teenagers from the Hitler Youth the bodies of prisoners in a carriage at the Dachau concentration camp.

View of the Buchenwald barracks after the liberation of the camp.

American generals George Patton, Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower at the Ohrdruf concentration camp near the fireplace where the Germans burned the bodies of prisoners.

Soviet prisoners of war in the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

The prison camp "Stalag XVIII" was located near the city of Wolfsberg (Austria). The camp held approximately 30 thousand people: 10 thousand British and 20 thousand Soviet prisoners. Soviet prisoners were isolated in a separate zone and did not intersect with other prisoners. In the English part, only half were ethnic English, about 40 percent were Australians, the rest were Canadians, New Zealanders (including 320 Maori aborigines) and other natives of the colonies. Of the other nations in the camp, there were French and downed American pilots. A special feature of the camp was the liberal attitude of the administration towards the presence of cameras among the British (this did not apply to the Soviets). Thanks to this, an impressive archive of photographs of life in the camp, taken from the inside, that is, by the people who sat in it, has survived to this day.

Soviet prisoners of war eat in the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Soviet prisoners of war near the barbed wire of the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Soviet prisoners of war near the barracks of the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

British prisoners of war on the stage of the theater of the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Captured British corporal Eric Evans with three comrades on the territory of the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Burnt bodies of prisoners of the Ohrdruf concentration camp. The Ohrdruf concentration camp was established in November 1944. During the war, about 11,700 people died in the camp. Ohrdruf became the first concentration camp liberated by the US Army.

The bodies of prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Buchenwald is one of the largest concentration camps in Germany, located near Weimar in Thuringia. From July 1937 to April 1945, about 250 thousand people were imprisoned in the camp. The number of camp victims is estimated at approximately 56 thousand prisoners.

Women from the SS guards of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp unload the corpses of prisoners for burial in a mass grave. They were attracted to this work by the allies who liberated the camp. Around the ditch is a convoy of English soldiers. As a punishment, former guards are prohibited from wearing gloves to expose them to the risk of contracting typhus.

Bergen-Belsen was a Nazi concentration camp located in the province of Hanover (now Lower Saxony) a mile from the village of Belsen and a few miles southwest of the city of Bergen. There were no gas chambers in the camp. But between 1943 and 1945, about 50 thousand prisoners died here, over 35 thousand of them from typhus a few months before the liberation of the camp. The total number of victims is about 70 thousand prisoners.

Six British prisoners on the territory of the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Soviet prisoners talk with a German officer in the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Soviet prisoners of war change clothes in the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Group photo of Allied prisoners (British, Australians and New Zealanders) at the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Band of Allied prisoners (Australians, British and New Zealanders) on the territory of the concentration camp "Stalag XVIII".

Captured Allied soldiers play the game Two Up for cigarettes on the territory of the Stalag 383 concentration camp.

Two British prisoners near the wall of the barracks of the Stalag 383 concentration camp.

A German soldier guard at the market of the Stalag 383 concentration camp, surrounded by Allied prisoners.

Group photo of Allied prisoners at the Stalag 383 concentration camp on Christmas Day 1943.

Barracks of the Vollan concentration camp in the Norwegian city of Trondheim after liberation.

A group of Soviet prisoners of war outside the gates of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad after liberation. Falstad was a Nazi concentration camp in Norway, located in the village of Ekne near Levanger. Created in September 1941. The number of dead prisoners is more than 200 people.

SS Oberscharführer Erich Weber on vacation in the commandant's quarters of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad.

The commandant of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad, SS Hauptscharführer Karl Denk (left) and SS Oberscharführer Erich Weber (right) in the commandant's room.

Five liberated prisoners of the Falstad concentration camp at the gate.

Prisoners of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad on vacation during a break between working in the field.

An employee of the Falstad concentration camp, SS Oberscharführer Erich Weber.

SS non-commissioned officers K. Denk, E. Weber and Luftwaffe sergeant major R. Weber with two women in the commandant's room of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad.

An employee of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad, SS Obersturmführer Erich Weber, in the kitchen of the commandant's house.

Soviet, Norwegian and Yugoslav prisoners of the Falstad concentration camp on vacation at a logging site.

The head of the women's block of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad, Maria Robbe, with policemen at the gates of the camp.

A group of Soviet prisoners of war on the territory of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad after liberation.

Seven guards of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad (Falstad) at the main gate.

Panorama of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad after liberation.

Black French prisoners in the Frontstalag 155 camp in the village of Lonvik.

Black French prisoners wash clothes in the Frontstalag 155 camp in the village of Lonvik.

Participants of the Warsaw Uprising from the Home Army in a concentration camp barracks near the German village of Oberlangen.

The body of a shot SS guard in a canal near the Dachau concentration camp.

Two American soldiers and a former prisoner retrieve the body of a shot SS guard from a canal near the Dachau concentration camp.

A column of prisoners from the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad passes in the courtyard of the main building.

An exhausted Hungarian prisoner freed from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

A released prisoner of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp who fell ill with typhus in one of the camp barracks.

Prisoners demonstrate the process of destroying corpses in the crematorium of the Dachau concentration camp.

Captured Red Army soldiers who died from hunger and cold. The prisoner of war camp was located in the village of Bolshaya Rossoshka near Stalingrad.

The body of a guard at the Ohrdruf concentration camp, killed by prisoners or American soldiers.

Prisoners in a barracks at the Ebensee concentration camp.

Irma Grese and Josef Kramer in the courtyard of a prison in the German city of Celle. The head of the labor service of the women's block of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp - Irma Grese and his commandant SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Josef Kramer under British escort in the courtyard of the prison in Celle, Germany.

A girl prisoner of the Croatian concentration camp Jasenovac.

Soviet prisoners of war carrying building elements for the barracks of the Stalag 304 Zeithain camp.

Surrendered SS Untersturmführer Heinrich Wicker (later shot by American soldiers) near the carriage with the bodies of prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp. In the photo, second from left is Red Cross representative Victor Myrer.

A man in civilian clothes stands near the bodies of prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
In the background, Christmas wreaths hang near the windows.

The British and Americans released from captivity stand on the territory of the Dulag-Luft prisoner of war camp in Wetzlar, Germany.

Liberated prisoners of the Nordhausen death camp sit on the porch.

Prisoners of the Gardelegen concentration camp, killed by guards shortly before the liberation of the camp.

In the back of the trailer are the corpses of prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp, prepared for burning in the crematorium.

American generals (from right to left) Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and George Patton watch a demonstration of one of the methods of torture at the Gotha concentration camp.

Mountains of clothes of prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp.

A released seven-year-old prisoner of the Buchenwald concentration camp queues before being sent to Switzerland.

Prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in formation.

The Sachsenhausen camp was located near the city of Oranienburg in Germany. Created in July 1936. The number of prisoners in different years reached 60 thousand people. On the territory of Sachsenhausen, according to some sources, over 100 thousand prisoners died in various ways.

A Soviet prisoner of war released from the Saltfjellet concentration camp in Norway.

Soviet prisoners of war in a barracks after liberation from the Saltfjellet concentration camp in Norway.

A Soviet prisoner of war leaves a barracks in the Saltfjellet concentration camp in Norway.

Women liberated by the Red Army from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, located 90 kilometers north of Berlin. Ravensbrück was a concentration camp of the Third Reich, located in northeastern Germany, 90 kilometers north of Berlin. Existed from May 1939 until the end of April 1945. The largest Nazi concentration camp for women. The number of registered prisoners during its entire existence amounted to more than 130 thousand people. According to official data, 90 thousand prisoners died here.

German officers and civilians walk past a group of Soviet prisoners during an inspection of a concentration camp.

Soviet prisoners of war in the camp in formation during verification.

Captured Soviet soldiers in a camp at the beginning of the war.

Captured Red Army soldiers enter the camp barracks.

Four Polish prisoners of the Oberlangen concentration camp (Oberlangen, Stalag VI C) after liberation. Women were among the Warsaw rebels who capitulated.

The orchestra of prisoners of the Janowska concentration camp performs "Tango of Death". On the eve of the liberation of Lviv by units of the Red Army, the Germans lined up a circle of 40 people from the orchestra. The camp guard surrounded the musicians in a tight ring and ordered them to play. First, the orchestra conductor Mund was executed, then, by order of the commandant, each orchestra member went to the center of the circle, put his instrument on the ground and stripped naked, after which he was shot in the head.

The Ustasha execute prisoners in the Jasenovac concentration camp. Jasenovac is a system of death camps created by the Ustaše (Croatian Nazis) in August 1941. It was located on the territory of the Independent Croatian State, which collaborated with Nazi Germany, 60 kilometers from Zagreb. There is no consensus on the number of victims of Jasenovac. While the official Yugoslav authorities during the existence of this state supported the version of 840 thousand victims, according to the calculations of the Croatian historian Vladimir Zherevich, their number was 83 thousand, and the Serbian historian Bogolyub Kocovic - 70 thousand. The Memorial Museum in Jasenovac contains information about 75,159 victims, and the Holocaust Memorial Museum says between 56-97 thousand victims.

Soviet child prisoners of the 6th Finnish concentration camp in Petrozavodsk. During the occupation of Soviet Karelia by the Finns, six concentration camps were created in Petrozavodsk to house local Russian-speaking residents. Camp No. 6 was located in the Transshipment Exchange area and held 7,000 people.

A Jewish woman with her daughter after being released from a German forced labor camp.

The corpses of Soviet citizens discovered on the territory of Hitler's concentration camp in Darnitsa. Kyiv area, November 1943.

General Eisenhower and other American officers look at the executed prisoners of the Ohrdruf concentration camp.

Dead prisoners of the Ohrdruf concentration camp.

Representatives of the Prosecutor's Office of the Estonian SSR near the bodies of the dead prisoners of the Klooga concentration camp. The Klooga concentration camp was located in Harju County, Keila Volost (35 kilometers from Tallinn).

A Soviet child next to his murdered mother. Concentration camp for civilians "Ozarichi". Belarus, town of Ozarichi, Domanovichi district, Polesie region.

Soldiers from the 157th American Infantry Regiment shoot SS guards at the German Dachau concentration camp.

A prisoner at the Webbelin concentration camp burst into tears after learning that he was not included in the first group of prisoners sent to hospital after liberation.

Residents of the German city of Weimar in the Buchenwald concentration camp near the bodies of dead prisoners. The Americans brought residents of Weimar, which was located near Buchenwald, to the camp, most of whom stated that they knew nothing about this camp.

An unknown guard at the Buchenwald concentration camp, beaten and hanged by prisoners.

Guards of the Buchenwald concentration camp beaten by prisoners in a punishment cell on their knees.

An unknown guard at the Buchenwald concentration camp was beaten by prisoners.

Soldiers of the medical service of the 20th Corps of the US Third Army near a trailer with the corpses of prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

The bodies of prisoners who died on the train on the way to the Dachau concentration camp.

Released prisoners in one of the barracks at Camp Ebensee, two days after the arrival of the advance elements of the US 80th Infantry Division.

One of the emaciated prisoners at the Ebensee camp basks in the sun. The Ebensee concentration camp was located 40 kilometers from Salzburg (Austria). The camp existed from November 1943 to May 6, 1945. Over the course of 18 months, thousands of prisoners passed through it, many of whom died here. The names of 7,113 people who died in inhumane conditions are known. The total number of victims is more than 8,200 people.

Soviet prisoners of war released from the Ezelheide camp rock an American soldier in their arms.
About 30 thousand Soviet prisoners of war died in camp No. 326 Ezelheide; in April 1945, the surviving Red Army soldiers were liberated by units of the 9th US Army.

French Jews in the Drancy transit camp, before their onward transfer to German concentration camps.

Guards at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp load the corpses of dead prisoners into a truck escorted by British soldiers.

Odilo Globocnik (far right) visits the Sobibor extermination camp, which operated from May 15, 1942 to October 15, 1943. About 250 thousand Jews were killed here.

The corpse of a prisoner of the Dachau concentration camp, found by Allied soldiers in a railway carriage near the camp.

Human remains in the oven of the crematorium of the Stutthof concentration camp. Filming location: surroundings of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland).

Hungarian actress Livia Nador, liberated from the Gusen concentration camp by soldiers of the US 11th Armored Division near Linz, Austria.

A German boy walks along a dirt road, on the side of which lie the corpses of hundreds of prisoners who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

Arrest of the commandant of the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen Joseph Kramer by British troops. He was subsequently sentenced to death and hanged in Hameln prison on December 13.

Children behind barbed wire in the Buchenwald concentration camp after its liberation.

Soviet prisoners of war undergo disinfection in the German prisoner of war camp Zeithain.

Prisoners during roll call at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Polish Jews await execution under the guard of German soldiers in a ravine. Presumably from the Belzec or Sobibor camp.

A surviving Buchenwald prisoner drinks water in front of the concentration camp barracks.

British soldiers inspect the crematorium oven at the liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Liberated child prisoners of Buchenwald leave the camp gates.

German prisoners of war are led through the Majdanek concentration camp. In front of the prisoners on the ground lie the remains of death camp prisoners, and the crematorium ovens are also visible. The Majdanek death camp was located on the outskirts of the Polish city of Lublin. In total, about 150 thousand prisoners were here, about 80 thousand were killed, of which 60 thousand were Jews. The mass extermination of people in gas chambers in the camp began in 1942. Carbon monoxide (carbon monoxide) was first used as a poisonous gas, and since April 1942, Zyklon B. Majdanek was one of two death camps of the Third Reich where this gas was used (the other was Auschwitz).

Soviet prisoners of war in the Zeithain camp undergo disinfection before being sent to Belgium.

Mauthausen prisoners look at an SS officer.

Death march from Dachau concentration camp.

Prisoners in forced labor. Weiner Graben quarry at Mauthausen concentration camp, Austria.

Representatives of the Prosecutor's Office of the Estonian SSR near the bodies of the dead prisoners of the Klooga concentration camp.

The arrested commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Joseph Kramer, in shackles and guarded by an English guard. Nicknamed the “Beast of Belsen,” Kramer was convicted by an English court of war crimes and hanged in Hameln prison in December 1945.

Bones of murdered prisoners of the Majdanek concentration camp (Lublin, Poland).

Furnace of the crematorium of the Majdanek concentration camp (Lublin, Poland). On the left is Lieutenant A.A. Guivik.

Lieutenant A.A. Huivik holds in his hands the remains of prisoners of the Majdanek concentration camp.

A column of prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp on the march in the suburbs of Munich.

A young man liberated from the Mauthausen camp.

The corpse of a prisoner of the Leipzig-Thekla concentration camp on barbed wire.

The remains of prisoners in the crematorium of the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar.

One of 150 victims from among the prisoners who died in the Gardelegen concentration camp.

In April 1945, at the Gardelegen concentration camp, the SS forced about 1,100 prisoners into a barn and set them on fire. Some of the victims tried to escape but were shot by guards.

Meeting of the Americans - liberators of the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Residents of the city of Ludwigslust walk past the bodies of prisoners of the concentration camp of the same name for prisoners of war. The bodies of the victims were found by soldiers of the American 82nd Airborne Division. The corpses were found in pits in the camp yard and interior. By order of the Americans, the civilian population of the area was obliged to come to the camp to familiarize themselves with the results of the crimes of the Nazis.

Workers at the Dora-Mittelbau camp killed by the Nazis. Dora-Mittelbau (other names: Dora, Nordhausen) is a Nazi concentration camp, founded on August 28, 1943, 5 kilometers from the city of Nordhausen in Thuringia, Germany, as a subdivision of the already existing Buchenwald camp. During the 18 months of its existence, 60 thousand prisoners of 21 nationalities passed through the camp, approximately 20 thousand died in custody.

American generals Patton, Bradley, Eisenhower in the Ohrdruf concentration camp near the fire where the Germans burned the bodies of prisoners.

Soviet prisoners of war liberated by the Americans from a camp near the French town of Sarreguemines, bordering Germany.

The victim's hand has a deep burn from phosphorus. The experiment consisted of setting fire to a mixture of phosphorus and rubber on the skin of a living person.

Liberated prisoners of the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Liberated prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

A Soviet prisoner of war, after the complete liberation of the Buchenwald camp by American troops, points to a former guard who brutally beat prisoners.

SS soldiers lined up on the parade ground of the Plaszow concentration camp.

Former guard of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp F. Herzog sorts through a pile of corpses of prisoners.

Soviet prisoners of war liberated by the Americans from the camp in Ezelheide.

A pile of corpses of prisoners in the crematorium of the Dachau concentration camp.

A pile of corpses of prisoners in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Corpses of prisoners of the Lambach concentration camp in the forest before burial.

A French prisoner of the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp on the floor of a barracks among his dead comrades.

Soldiers from the American 42nd Infantry Division near a carriage with the bodies of prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp.

Prisoners of the Ebensee concentration camp.

Corpses of prisoners in the courtyard of the Dora-Mittelbau camp.

Prisoners at the German Webbelin concentration camp awaiting medical assistance.

A prisoner at the Dora-Mittelbau (Nordhausen) camp shows an American soldier the camp crematorium.

Torture is often called various minor troubles that happen to everyone in everyday life. This definition is given to raising disobedient children, standing in line for a long time, doing a lot of laundry, then ironing clothes, and even the process of preparing food. All this, of course, can be very painful and unpleasant (although the degree of debilitation largely depends on the character and inclinations of the person), but still bears little resemblance to the most terrible torture in the history of mankind. The practice of “biased” interrogations and other violent actions against prisoners took place in almost all countries of the world. The time frame is also not defined, but since modern people are psychologically closer to relatively recent events, their attention is drawn to the methods and special equipment invented in the twentieth century, in particular in the German concentration camps of the times. But there were also ancient Eastern and medieval tortures. The fascists were also taught by their colleagues from Japanese counterintelligence, the NKVD and other similar punitive bodies. So why was everything over people?

Meaning of the term

To begin with, when starting to study any issue or phenomenon, any researcher tries to define it. “To name it correctly is already half to understand” - says

So, torture is the deliberate infliction of suffering. In this case, the nature of the torment does not matter; it can be not only physical (in the form of pain, thirst, hunger or deprivation of sleep), but also moral and psychological. By the way, the most terrible tortures in the history of mankind, as a rule, combine both “channels of influence.”

But it is not only the fact of suffering that matters. Senseless torment is called torture. Torture differs from it in its purposefulness. In other words, a person is beaten with a whip or hung on a rack for a reason, but in order to get some result. Using violence, the victim is encouraged to admit guilt, divulge hidden information, and sometimes they are simply punished for some misdemeanor or crime. The twentieth century added one more item to the list of possible purposes of torture: torture in concentration camps was sometimes carried out with the aim of studying the body's reaction to unbearable conditions in order to determine the limits of human capabilities. These experiments were recognized by the Nuremberg Tribunal as inhumane and pseudoscientific, which did not prevent their results from being studied by physiologists from the victorious countries after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Death or trial

The purposeful nature of the actions suggests that after receiving the result, even the most terrible tortures stopped. There was no point in continuing them. The position of executioner-executor, as a rule, was occupied by a professional who knew about painful techniques and the peculiarities of psychology, if not everything, then a lot, and there was no point in wasting his efforts on senseless bullying. After the victim confessed to a crime, depending on the degree of civilization of society, she could expect immediate death or treatment followed by trial. Legally formalized execution after biased interrogations during the investigation was characteristic of the punitive justice of Germany in the initial Hitler era and for Stalin’s “open trials” (the Shakhty case, the trial of the industrial party, reprisals against Trotskyists, etc.). After giving the defendants a tolerable appearance, they were dressed in decent suits and shown to the public. Broken morally, people most often obediently repeated everything that the investigators forced them to admit. Torture and executions were rampant. The veracity of the testimony did not matter. Both in Germany and in the USSR in the 1930s, the confession of the accused was considered the “queen of evidence” (A. Ya. Vyshinsky, USSR prosecutor). Brutal torture was used to obtain it.

Deadly torture of the Inquisition

In few areas of its activity (except perhaps in the manufacture of murder weapons) humanity has been so successful. It should be noted that in recent centuries there has even been some regression compared to ancient times. European executions and torture of women in the Middle Ages were carried out, as a rule, on charges of witchcraft, and the reason most often became the external attractiveness of the unfortunate victim. However, the Inquisition sometimes condemned those who actually committed terrible crimes, but the specificity of that time was the unequivocal doom of the condemned. No matter how long the torment lasted, it only ended in the death of the condemned person. The execution weapon could have been the Iron Maiden, the Brazen Bull, a bonfire, or the sharp-edged pendulum described by Edgar Poe, which was methodically lowered onto the victim’s chest inch by inch. The terrible tortures of the Inquisition were prolonged and accompanied by unimaginable moral torment. The preliminary investigation may have involved the use of other ingenious mechanical devices to slowly disintegrate the bones of the fingers and limbs and sever the muscle ligaments. The most famous weapons were:

A metal sliding bulb used for particularly sophisticated torture of women in the Middle Ages;

- “Spanish boot”;

A Spanish chair with clamps and a brazier for the legs and buttocks;

An iron bra (pectoral), worn over the chest while hot;

- “crocodiles” and special forceps for crushing male genitals.

The executioners of the Inquisition also had other torture equipment, which it is better not for people with sensitive psyches to know about.

East, Ancient and Modern

No matter how ingenious the European inventors of self-harm techniques may be, the most terrible tortures in the history of mankind were still invented in the East. The Inquisition used metal instruments, which sometimes had a very intricate design, while in Asia they preferred everything natural (today these products would probably be called environmentally friendly). Insects, plants, animals - everything was used. Eastern torture and execution had the same goals as European ones, but technically differed in duration and greater sophistication. Ancient Persian executioners, for example, practiced scaphism (from the Greek word “scaphium” - trough). The victim was immobilized with shackles, tied to a trough, forced to eat honey and drink milk, then the whole body was smeared with a sweet mixture, and lowered into the swamp. The blood-sucking insects slowly ate the man alive. They did the same thing in the case of execution on an anthill, and if the unfortunate person was to be burned in the scorching sun, his eyelids were cut off for greater torment. There were other types of torture in which elements of the biosystem were used. For example, it is known that bamboo grows quickly, a meter per day. It is enough to simply hang the victim at a short distance above the young shoots, and cut off the ends of the stems at an acute angle. The person being tortured has time to come to his senses, confess everything and hand over his accomplices. If he persists, he will slowly and painfully be pierced by the plants. This choice was not always provided, however.

Torture as a method of inquiry

Both in and in a later period, various types of torture were used not only by inquisitors and other officially recognized savage structures, but also by ordinary government bodies, today called law enforcement. It was part of a set of investigation and inquiry techniques. Since the second half of the 16th century, various types of bodily influence have been practiced in Russia, such as: whipping, hanging, racking, cauterization with pincers and open fire, immersion in water, and so on. Enlightened Europe was also by no means distinguished by humanism, but practice showed that in some cases torture, bullying and even the fear of death did not guarantee finding out the truth. Moreover, in some cases the victim was ready to confess to the most shameful crime, preferring a terrible end to endless horror and pain. There is a well-known case with a miller, which the inscription on the pediment of the French Palace of Justice calls for to be remembered. He took upon himself someone else's guilt under torture, was executed, and the real criminal was soon caught.

Abolition of torture in different countries

At the end of the 17th century, a gradual shift away from the practice of torture and a transition from it to other, more humane methods of inquiry began. One of the results of the Enlightenment was the realization that it is not the severity of punishment, but its inevitability that influences the reduction of criminal activity. In Prussia, torture was abolished in 1754; this country became the first to put its legal proceedings at the service of humanism. Then the process went progressively, different states followed her example in the following sequence:

STATE	Year of the phatic ban on torture	Year of official ban on torture
Denmark	1776	1787
Austria	1780	1789
France
Netherlands	1789	1789
Sicilian kingdoms	1789	1789
Austrian Netherlands	1794	1794
Venetian Republic	1800	1800
Bavaria	1806	1806
Papal States	1815	1815
Norway	1819	1819
Hanover	1822	1822
Portugal	1826	1826
Greece	1827	1827
Switzerland (*)	1831-1854	1854

Note:

*) the legislation of the various cantons of Switzerland changed at different times during this period.

Two countries deserve special mention - Britain and Russia.

Catherine the Great abolished torture in 1774 by issuing a secret decree. By this, on the one hand, she continued to keep criminals at bay, but, on the other, she showed a desire to follow the ideas of the Enlightenment. This decision was formalized legally by Alexander I in 1801.

As for England, torture was prohibited there in 1772, but not all, but only some.

Illegal torture

The legislative ban did not mean their complete exclusion from the practice of pre-trial investigation. In all countries there were representatives of the police class who were ready to break the law in the name of its triumph. Another thing is that their actions were carried out illegally, and if exposed, they were threatened with legal prosecution. Of course, the methods have changed significantly. It was necessary to “work with people” more carefully, without leaving visible traces. In the 19th and 20th centuries, objects that were heavy but had a soft surface were used, such as sandbags, thick volumes (the irony of the situation was manifested in the fact that most often these were codes of laws), rubber hoses, etc. They were not left without attention and methods of moral pressure. Some investigators sometimes threatened severe punishments, long sentences, and even reprisals against loved ones. This was also torture. The horror experienced by those under investigation prompted them to make confessions, incriminate themselves and receive undeserved punishments, until the majority of police officers performed their duty honestly, studying the evidence and collecting testimony to bring a substantiated charge. Everything changed after totalitarian and dictatorial regimes came to power in some countries. This happened in the 20th century.

After the October Revolution of 1917, a Civil War broke out on the territory of the former Russian Empire, in which both warring parties most often did not consider themselves bound by the legislative norms that were mandatory under the Tsar. Torture of prisoners of war in order to obtain information about the enemy was practiced by both the White Guard counterintelligence and the Cheka. During the years of the Red Terror, executions most often took place, but mockery of representatives of the “exploiter class,” which included the clergy, nobles, and simply decently dressed “gentlemen,” became widespread. In the twenties, thirties and forties, the NKVD authorities used prohibited methods of interrogation, depriving those under investigation of sleep, food, water, beating and mutilating them. This was done with the permission of management, and sometimes on his direct instructions. The goal was rarely to find out the truth - repressions were carried out to intimidate, and the investigator’s task was to obtain a signature on a protocol containing a confession of counter-revolutionary activities, as well as slander of other citizens. As a rule, Stalin’s “backpack masters” did not use special torture devices, being content with available objects, such as a paperweight (they hit them on the head), or even an ordinary door, which pinched fingers and other protruding parts of the body.

In Nazi Germany

Torture in the concentration camps created after Adolf Hitler came to power differed in style from those previously used in that it was a strange mixture of Eastern sophistication and European practicality. Initially, these “correctional institutions” were created for guilty Germans and representatives of national minorities declared hostile (Gypsies and Jews). Then came a series of experiments that were somewhat scientific in nature, but in cruelty exceeded the most terrible tortures in the history of mankind.
In an attempt to create antidotes and vaccines, Nazi SS doctors administered lethal injections to prisoners, performed operations without anesthesia, including abdominal ones, froze prisoners, starved them in the heat, and did not allow them to sleep, eat or drink. Thus, they wanted to develop technologies for the “production” of ideal soldiers, not afraid of frost, heat and injury, resistant to the effects of toxic substances and pathogenic bacilli. The history of torture during the Second World War forever imprinted the names of doctors Pletner and Mengele, who, along with other representatives of criminal fascist medicine, became the personification of inhumanity. They also conducted experiments on lengthening limbs by mechanical stretching, suffocating people in rarefied air, and other experiments that caused painful agony, sometimes lasting for long hours.

The torture of women by the Nazis concerned mainly the development of ways to deprive them of reproductive function. Various methods were studied - from simple ones (removal of the uterus) to sophisticated ones, which had the prospect of mass application in the event of a Reich victory (irradiation and exposure to chemicals).

It all ended before the Victory, in 1944, when Soviet and allied troops began to liberate the concentration camps. Even the appearance of the prisoners spoke more eloquently than any evidence that their very detention in inhuman conditions was torture.

Current state of affairs

The torture of the fascists became the standard of cruelty. After the defeat of Germany in 1945, humanity sighed with joy in the hope that this would never happen again. Unfortunately, although not on such a scale, torture of the flesh, mockery of human dignity and moral humiliation remain some of the terrible signs of the modern world. Developed countries, declaring their commitment to rights and freedoms, are looking for legal loopholes to create special territories where compliance with their own laws is not necessary. Prisoners of secret prisons have been exposed to punitive forces for many years without specific charges being brought against them. The methods used by military personnel of many countries during local and major armed conflicts in relation to prisoners and those simply suspected of sympathizing with the enemy are sometimes superior in cruelty to the abuse of people in Nazi concentration camps. In international investigations of such precedents, too often, instead of objectivity, one can observe a duality of standards, when war crimes of one of the parties are completely or partially hushed up.

Will the era of a new Enlightenment come when torture will finally be finally and irrevocably recognized as a disgrace to humanity and banned? So far there is little hope for this...

The word Auschwitz (or Auschwitz) in the minds of many people is a symbol or even the quintessence of evil, horror, death, a concentration of the most unimaginable inhuman cruelties and torture. Many today dispute what former prisoners and historians say happened here. This is their personal right and opinion. But after visiting Auschwitz and seeing with your own eyes huge rooms filled with... glasses, tens of thousands of pairs of shoes, tons of cut hair and... children's things... You feel empty inside. And my hair is moving in horror. The horror of realizing that this hair, glasses and shoes belonged to a living person. Maybe a postman, or maybe a student. An ordinary worker or market trader. Or a girl. Or a seven year old child. Which they cut off, removed, and threw into a common pile. To another hundred of the same. Auschwitz. A place of evil and inhumanity.

Young student Tadeusz Uzynski arrived in the first echelon with prisoners. As I already said in yesterday’s report, the Auschwitz concentration camp began to function in 1940, as a camp for Polish political prisoners. The first prisoners of Auschwitz were 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnow. At the time of its founding, the camp had 20 buildings - former Polish military barracks. Some of them were converted for mass housing of people, and 6 more buildings were additionally built. The average number of prisoners fluctuated between 13-16 thousand people, and in 1942 reached 20 thousand. The Auschwitz camp became the base camp for a whole network of new camps - in 1941, the Auschwitz II - Birkenau camp was built 3 km away, and in 1943 - Auschwitz III - Monowitz. In addition, in 1942-1944, about 40 branches of the Auschwitz camp were built, built near metallurgical plants, factories and mines, which were subordinate to the Auschwitz III concentration camp. And the camps Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II - Birkenau completely turned into a plant for the extermination of people.

In 1943, a tattoo of the prisoner's number on the arm was introduced. For infants and young children, the number was most often applied to the thigh. According to the Auschwitz State Museum, this concentration camp was the only Nazi camp in which prisoners had numbers tattooed on them.

Depending on the reasons for their arrest, prisoners received triangles of different colors, which, along with their numbers, were sewn onto their camp clothes. Political prisoners were given a red triangle, criminals were given a green triangle. Gypsies and antisocial elements received black triangles, Jehovah's Witnesses received purple ones, and homosexuals received pink ones. Jews wore a six-pointed star consisting of a yellow triangle and a triangle of the color that corresponded to the reason for the arrest. Soviet prisoners of war had a patch in the form of the letters SU. The camp clothes were quite thin and provided almost no protection from the cold. Linen was changed at intervals of several weeks, and sometimes even once a month, and the prisoners did not have the opportunity to wash it, which led to epidemics of typhus and typhoid fever, as well as scabies

Prisoners in the Auschwitz I camp lived in brick blocks, in Auschwitz II-Birkenau - mainly in wooden barracks. Brick blocks were only in the women's section of the Auschwitz II camp. During the entire existence of the Auschwitz I camp, there were about 400 thousand prisoners of different nationalities, Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners of building No. 11 awaiting conclusion of the Gestapo police tribunal. One of the disasters of camp life was the inspections at which the number of prisoners was checked. They lasted several, and sometimes over 10 hours (for example, 19 hours on July 6, 1940). Camp authorities very often announced penalty checks, during which prisoners had to squat or kneel. There were tests when they had to hold their hands up for several hours.

Housing conditions varied greatly in different periods, but they were always catastrophic. The prisoners, who were brought in at the very beginning in the first trains, slept on straw scattered on the concrete floor.

Later, hay bedding was introduced. These were thin mattresses filled with a small amount of it. About 200 prisoners slept in a room that barely accommodated 40-50 people.

With the increase in the number of prisoners in the camp, the need arose to densify their accommodation. Three-tier bunks appeared. There were 2 people lying on one tier. The bedding was usually rotted straw. The prisoners covered themselves with rags and whatever they had. In the Auschwitz camp the bunks were wooden, in Auschwitz-Birkenau they were both wooden and brick with wooden flooring.

Compared to the conditions in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the toilet of the Auschwitz I camp looked like a real miracle of civilization

toilet barracks in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp

Washroom. The water was only cold and the prisoner only had access to it for a few minutes a day. Prisoners were allowed to wash extremely rarely, and for them it was a real holiday

Sign with the number of the residential unit on the wall

Until 1944, when Auschwitz became an extermination factory, most prisoners were sent to grueling labor every day. At first they worked to expand the camp, and then they were used as slaves in the industrial facilities of the Third Reich. Every day, columns of exhausted slaves went out and entered through gates with the cynical inscription “Arbeit macht Frei” (Work makes you free). The prisoner had to do the work running, without a second of rest. The pace of work, meager portions of food and constant beatings increased the mortality rate. During the return of prisoners to the camp, those killed or exhausted, who could not move on their own, were dragged or carried in wheelbarrows. And at this time, a brass band consisting of prisoners played for them near the gates of the camp.

For every inhabitant of Auschwitz, block No. 11 was one of the most terrible places. Unlike other blocks, its doors were always closed. The windows were completely bricked up. Only on the first floor there were two windows - in the room where the SS men were on duty. In the halls on the right and left sides of the corridor, prisoners were placed awaiting the verdict of the emergency police court, which came to the Auschwitz camp from Katowice once or twice a month. During 2-3 hours of his work, he imposed from several dozen to over a hundred death sentences.

The cramped cells, which sometimes housed a huge number of people awaiting sentencing, had only a tiny barred window near the ceiling. And on the street side near these windows there were tin boxes that blocked these windows from the influx of fresh air

Those sentenced to death were forced to undress in this room before execution. If there were few of them that day, then the sentence was carried out right here.

If there were many condemned, they were taken to the “Wall of Death,” which was located behind a high fence with a blind gate between buildings 10 and 11. Large numbers of their camp number were written on the chests of undressed people with an ink pencil (until 1943, when tattoos appeared on the arm), so that later it would be easy to identify the corpse.

Under the stone fence in the courtyard of block 11, a large wall was built of black insulating boards, lined with absorbent material. This wall became the last facet of life for thousands of people sentenced to death by the Gestapo court for unwillingness to betray their homeland, attempted escape and political “crimes.”

Fibers of death. The condemned were shot by the reportfuehrer or members of the political department. For this, they used a small-caliber rifle so as not to attract too much attention with the sounds of shots. After all, very close there was a stone wall, behind which there was a highway.

The Auschwitz camp had a whole system of punishments for prisoners. It can also be called one of the fragments of their deliberate destruction. The prisoner was punished for picking an apple or finding a potato in a field, relieving himself while working, or for working too slowly. One of the most terrible places of punishment, often leading to the death of a prisoner, was one of the basements of building 11. Here in the back room there were four narrow vertical sealed punishment cells measuring 90x90 centimeters in perimeter. Each of them had a door with a metal bolt at the bottom.

The person being punished was forced to squeeze inside through this door and it was bolted. A person could only be standing in this cage. So he stood there without food or water for as long as the SS men wanted. Often this was the last punishment in the life of a prisoner.

Sending punished prisoners to standing cells

In September 1941, the first attempt was made to mass exterminate people using gas. About 600 Soviet prisoners of war and about 250 sick prisoners from the camp hospital were placed in small batches in sealed cells in the basement of the 11th building.

Copper pipelines with valves were already installed along the walls of the chambers. Gas flowed through them into the chambers...

The names of the exterminated people were entered into the "Day Status Book" of the Auschwitz camp

Lists of people sentenced to death by the extraordinary police court

Found notes left by those sentenced to death on scraps of paper

In Auschwitz, in addition to adults, there were also children who were sent to the camp along with their parents. 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. The rest, after a strict selection, were sent to a camp where they were subject to the same strict rules as adults.

Children were registered and photographed in the same way as adults and designated as political prisoners.

One of the most terrible pages in the history of Auschwitz were medical experiments by SS doctors. Including over children. For example, Professor Karl Clauberg, in order to develop a quick method of biological destruction of the Slavs, conducted sterilization experiments on Jewish women in building No. 10. Dr. Josef Mengele conducted experiments on twin children and children with physical disabilities as part of genetic and anthropological experiments. In addition, various kinds of experiments were carried out at Auschwitz using new drugs and preparations, toxic substances were rubbed into the epithelium of prisoners, skin transplants were carried out, etc.

Conclusion on the results of X-rays carried out during the experiments with the twins by Dr. Mengele.

Letter from Heinrich Himmler in which he orders a series of sterilization experiments to begin

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

List of released prisoners placed in a Soviet hospital for treatment

In the autumn of 1941, a gas chamber using Zyklon B gas began operating in the Auschwitz camp. It was produced by the Degesch company, which received about 300 thousand marks of profit from the sale of this gas during the period 1941-1944. To kill 1,500 people, according to Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, about 5-7 kg of gas was needed.

After the liberation of Auschwitz, a huge number of used Zyklon B cans and cans with unused contents were found in the camp warehouses. During the period 1942-1943, according to documents, about 20 thousand kg of Zyklon B crystals were delivered to Auschwitz alone.

Most Jews doomed to death arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with the conviction that they were being taken “for settlement” to eastern Europe. This was especially true for Jews from Greece and Hungary, to whom the Germans even sold non-existent building plots and lands or offered work in fictitious factories. That is why people sent to the camp for extermination often brought with them the most valuable things, jewelry and money.

Upon arrival at the unloading platform, all things and valuables were taken from people, SS doctors selected the deported people. Those who were declared unable to work were sent to gas chambers. According to the testimony of Rudolf Hoess, there were about 70-75% of those who arrived.

Items found in Auschwitz warehouses after the liberation of the camp

Model of the gas chamber and crematorium II of Auschwitz-Birkenau. People were convinced that they were being sent to a bathhouse, so they looked relatively calm.

Here, prisoners are forced to take off their clothes and are moved to the next room, which simulates a bathhouse. There were shower holes under the ceiling through which no water ever flowed. About 2,000 people were brought into a room of about 210 square meters, after which the doors were closed and gas was supplied to the room. People died within 15-20 minutes. The gold teeth of the dead were pulled out, rings and earrings were removed, and women's hair was cut off.

After this, the corpses were transported to the crematorium ovens, where the fire roared continuously. When the ovens overflowed or when the pipes were damaged from overload, the bodies were destroyed in the burning areas behind the crematoria. All these actions were carried out by prisoners belonging to the so-called Sonderkommando group. At the peak of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, its number was about 1,000 people.

A photograph taken by one of the Sonderkommando members, which shows the process of burning dead people.

In the Auschwitz 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.

In the second hall there were three double ovens, in which up to 350 bodies were burned during the day.

One retort held 2-3 corpses.