Auschwitz concentration camp. Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. concentration camps. Liberation of Auschwitz
I want to tell you about the Auschwitz concentration camp. It is located 50 km from Krakow. After his inspection we have plans to go to the Czech Republic.
Two hours drive from the hotel where we were staying and we were already there. A few words about Polish roads: they are very narrow, one lane in each direction. If you want to overtake - you can not overtake. Everyone drives according to the rules. If there is a 50 km/h sign, then everyone travels 50 km. Poland itself is very clean, all the towns are polished, small, neat.
The Auschwitz concentration camp is usually called Auschwitz-Birkenau - that is how it was named by the Germans and was listed in all the documentation. This camp was founded in 1940-1945 near the city of Auschwitz, which in 1939 was annexed to the territory of the Third Reich by Hitler's decree.
A terrible number of people were killed in this place - about 1,300,000 people, of which about 1,000,000 were Jews. When you hear such a figure, it eats into your memory and makes you think about this terrible pain that people have experienced. A museum was created on the territory of the camp in 1947, which is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. This is where we arrived.
Entry to the camp is free. There is also a free parking lot, but you have to drive to it, ignoring the girls who invite you to pay parking.
When we got out of the car and began to approach the entrance to the camp, we were seized by a terrible feeling of fear. This atmosphere of "pain" will reign for years. I'll tell you it's worth seeing and experiencing for yourself. Let many people say that there is bad energy and all that, but without seeing it with your own eyes, you will never understand what happened then, in the 40s.
A railroad was laid in the concentration camp, along which trains loaded with people drove by. People of different nationalities were collected from countries and cities and taken to one camp. Everyone was taken away: old people, children, men and women. Entire "cities" were loaded onto trains without any notice of where they were being taken. People did not know that they were going to the place where their life would end...
Loaded trains entered the camp, where they were met by the Germans with machine guns in their hands and the doctor Josef Mengel, nicknamed the "Angel of Death" - for his kind smile, but terrible goals. It was the doctor who decided who lived and who did not. On average, ¾ of those brought were sent to the gas chambers - they were not able-bodied old people, children and the sick. The camp had 4 gas chambers and 4 crematoria. Menge's favorites were twins and dwarfs. He took them for his experiments and research.
Some people went to work at industrial enterprises of different companies. There was a case in history when the German industrialist Oskar Schindler saved about 1000 Jews by buying them to work in his factory.
And the rest of the people, mostly women, were selected into a group called "Canada" for the personal use of the Germans as servants and slaves, as well as for sorting the property of prisoners arriving at the camp. The name "Canada" was chosen as a mockery of the Polish prisoners - in Poland the word "Canada" was often used as an exclamation at the sight of a valuable gift. Previously, Polish emigrants often sent gifts home from Canada.
The prisoners lived in barracks built of wood.
Inside there was a heating stove with two chimneys and racks in three tiers for sleeping. People were forced to live in terrible conditions.
Inside the barracks, you can find scrawled words on the walls. Last words.
barrack-shower room
They bathed the prisoners once a week. Bathing took place in the barracks - first the first barrack was washed, then the second, and so on.
barrack-kitchen
Prisoners also served in the camp. There was a separate barrack-kitchen where food was prepared.
There was also a separate area with barracks, where there were especially dangerous prisoners - these were people who knew something and could divulge information that was not necessary for the Germans.
In this camp, as in any other, there is a road of "death". It was along this road that the prisoners were led to the gas chambers.
On this road there are stands with photographs of what happened. How inhuman! How crazy do you have to be to do such evil and write down everything that happens.
road to the gas chambers
Before people were brought into the cells, they were undressed in a special room. People's belongings were sorted. All things were saved for a reason unknown to us. After the camp was liberated, huge warehouses of prisoners' belongings (glasses, toothbrushes, shoes, etc.) were found.
this is what the place where there was a room for undressing people looks like now
The corpses of people were mostly burned in pits. People were thrown in layers and rearranged with logs. All this burned to the ground.
Occasionally people were burned in furnaces. Basically, these were people on whom experiments were carried out, or if they were killed in small numbers.
There is a memorial plaque on the territory of the camp. It contains entries in the languages of the peoples whose representatives were martyred here, including the Ukrainian language. On this slab you can see many small pebbles. These stones are brought by the Jews. For Jews, the stone symbolizes eternity.
Having examined Auschwitz 2, we went to see what Auschwitz 1 is like. It is located very close.
It has more solid brick buildings. Auschwitz 1 is like a separate city.
On the territory of Auschwitz 1 there is a gate with the well-known inscription made of cast iron "Arbeit macht fre" ("Work sets you free"). By the way, in 2009 this inscription was stolen and sawn into 3 parts for transportation to Sweden. The criminals were caught and punished, and the inscription was replaced with a copy made during restoration in 2006.
Many prisoners wanted to commit suicide by touching live barbed wire. Someone managed to run to it, and someone was shot by the guards who were on the observation towers.
In 1945, on January 27, Soviet troops under the command of Marshal Konev liberated Auschwitz, in which at that moment there were about 7.6 thousand prisoners.
It is difficult to talk about it, but it was and our grandparents remember it. In our time, there are only a few old people who were still children in this camp. It is worth paying tribute to them and making a big bow for the fact that they survived and endured it all on their shoulders.
Let this terrible past remain behind and not disturb the present. After all, there is a lot of beauty in the present, and we consider it to be the next point of our route.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex was founded in May 1940 near the Silesian city of Auschwitz, 60 km from Krakow. During the war, about 1.4 million people became victims of the death camp, of which approximately 1.1 million were Jews.
By November 1944, when it became clear that the territory of Auschwitz would come under the control of the Red Army, the use of gas chambers in the concentration camp was ordered to stop, three of the four crematoria were closed, and one was converted into an air raid shelter. A maximum of documents were destroyed, mass graves were tried to be disguised, approaches to the camp were mined, and prisoners were prepared for evacuation. This evacuation, called the "death march" because of the huge number of dead and killed along the way, began on 18 January. About 58 thousand prisoners went under escort to the territory of Germany.
Actions to liberate the death camp were carried out as part of the Vistula-Oder operation, in which divisions took part as part of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front. According to the list of military personnel of the 60th Army according to socio-demographic characteristics (the document was declassified several years ago), Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by soldiers of 39 nationalities. According to various estimates, from 234 to 350 Soviet soldiers and officers died in the battles for the liberation of the concentration camp.
The battle for Auschwitz began on January 24, 1945, when the 107th Rifle Division, under the command of the then Colonel Vasily Petrenko, attacked the village of Monovitsy. The commander of the assault detachment of the 106th Rifle Corps, Major Anatoly Shapiro, recalled those days as follows: “We had to take the village of Kostelitsa, so I remember its name (it is possible that the village of Kopciovice was meant. - Gazeta.Ru), in 12 km from the concentration camp.
The village was small, on both sides of it there were two tall churches. On the bell towers of these churches, the Nazis installed machine guns,
of which heavy fire was fired at the advancing Soviet troops (including my battalion). Our soldiers could not even raise their heads. The field in front of the village was completely mined. Our advance has stopped. After waiting for the night, we went around the fortified village and moved towards Auschwitz through a small forest, in which we also met fierce resistance from the Nazis. It was January 25, 1945."
On January 26, 1945, Soviet troops advanced according to the available map, according to which there should have been a dense forest ahead. But suddenly the forest ended, and a "fortified bastion" with brick walls, surrounded by barbed wire, appeared before the Soviet army.
Few people knew about the existence of a concentration camp in Auschwitz. Therefore, the presence of any buildings came as a surprise to the fighters.
“Until the last moment, we did not know that we were going to liberate the concentration camp. We went to the town of Auschwitz, but it turned out that the entire territory around this Polish town was in camps, ”said Ivan Martynushkin, senior lieutenant, commander of a machine gun company of the 322nd rifle division.
On the night of January 27, 1945, Soviet troops came close to Auschwitz itself. “And here they almost did not meet the resistance of the enemy, only our sappers had a lot of work,” Shapiro recalled. “Someone told me that a few kilometers from the main camp, the Germans set up a factory for the production of Kohinoor pencils and prisoners work there. While the sappers cleared the area at the main gate of the camp, my assault squad made a forced march to this factory. I was struck by the silence that deafened when we entered its territory.
Photo report: Liberation of Auschwitz
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Through the wide entrance doors, a group of soldiers tumbled into the inside of a long two-story brick building, Shapiro continued: “In the half-lit room, we saw several long tables along which people continued to sit, or rather they were living skeletons. They stuffed pencil blanks with powdered graphite, paying no attention to us. As we later learned,
the norm for each prisoner was the production of a thousand pencils per shift. Those who did not comply with the norm were waiting for the gas chamber.
It seemed that there were no forces in the world that could tear the still living beings away from this occupation, although life had almost left them. It took some time for my soldiers to stop this lingering conveyor belt. We were instructed to feed people with a weak solution of broth, but most of them could not stand this food and soon died. Only glazed eyes with a pained expression could tell about the torments they had experienced.
In turn, Martynushkin with his company approached the fence of Auschwitz on January 26, when it got dark: “We did not go to the territory, but occupied some guardhouse outside the camp. It was very hot there, the radiators were so hot that we completely dried out there overnight: the weather was damp, and we also had to cross some rivers along the way.
And the next day we started cleaning up around the camp. When we started to move around the village of Brzezinka, we were fired on - not from the camp, but from some two or three-story building, state-owned, maybe it was a school ... We lay low, did not move further and contacted the command: they asked that this building was hit by artillery. Let's break it down and move on. And they suddenly answered us that the artillery would not hit, because there was a camp, and there were people in the camp, and therefore we even had to avoid skirmishes so that stray bullets would not accidentally catch anyone. And then we realized what kind of fence it was.”
It was already light when the Soviet soldiers saw the prisoners who had left the barracks. “At first we decided that they were fascists or camp guards,” said Martynushkin. “But they, apparently, guessed who we were, and began to greet us with gestures, shouting something. We were separated by a solid fence, very high - four meters, no less than barbed wire.
B. Borisov / RIA Novosti Prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp look into the lens from behind barbed wire, January 27, 1945
At about three o'clock in the afternoon on January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers were able to break open the gates of the camp. “In the afternoon, we passed through the main gate, over which hung a slogan made in wire: “Work makes you free,” Shapiro said. - How the Germans made people free from life through labor, we have already seen at the pencil factory. (...) It was possible to escape from the death camp only to the next world, through the chimney of the crematorium. The furnaces that burned the corpses worked around the clock, and the air was constantly filled with ash particles and the smell of burnt human meat.
The atmosphere was so poisoned by these particles that the poplars standing outside the wire fence of the camp lost their crown forever and stood bare all year.
By the time the Red Army soldiers entered the territory of Auschwitz, about 6 thousand prisoners remained in the camp - the sickest and weakest prisoners. In addition, there were “up to 100 Germans in the camps, mostly criminals, only random representatives of the incoming units deal with their fate,” the memorandum to the head of the political department of the 1st Ukrainian Front says.
“All the prisoners look extremely exhausted, gray-haired old men and young boys, mothers with babies and teenagers, almost all half-dressed. Among them are many crippled, with traces of torture, ”said the report to Georgy Malenkov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
“Some kept on their feet, even were able to work, but all had black, haggard faces.
There were also those who could not get up: they sat leaning against the walls of the barracks. We also looked into these barracks ... A terrible impression. The stench is such that I didn't even want to go in there.
On the bunks lay people who were unable to get up and go out. The air is already creepy, and some strange smell was added to it, maybe carbolic acid, ”recalled Martynushkin.
Boris Ignatovich/RIA Novosti Liberation of Auschwitz prisoners, January 27, 1945
Shapiro also spoke about the terrible smell in the barracks: “It was impossible to go inside the barracks without a protective gauze bandage. Uncleaned corpses lay on the two-story bunks. The reaction of the surviving prisoners to our appearance was the same as in the pencil factory. Half-dead skeletons sometimes crawled out from under the bunks and swore that they were not Jews. No one could believe in a possible liberation.”
“I saw children ... A terrible picture: stomachs swollen from hunger, wandering eyes; hands like whips, thin legs; the head is huge, and everything else, as it were, is not human - as if sewn on. The children were silent and showed only the numbers tattooed on their arm. These people had no tears. I saw them trying to wipe their eyes, but their eyes remained dry, ”wrote Vasily Petrenko, who commanded the 226th Infantry Division, in his memoirs Before and After Auschwitz.
After the barracks, the Red Army soldiers inspected the warehouses. Almost 1.2 million men's and women's suits, 43.3 thousand pairs of men's and women's shoes, 13.7 thousand carpets, a huge number of toothbrushes and shaving brushes, as well as other small household items were found on the territory of the concentration camp.
According to the memoirs of the liberators of Auschwitz, there were huge rooms in the concentration camp filled with human ashes, not yet packed in bags. In one of the rooms there were boxes filled to the brim with dental crowns and gold dentures.
“I was particularly struck by the mountains of bales of human hair that were sorted by quality.
Children's fibers, as softer ones, were used to stuff pillows, and adult hair was used to make mattresses. I could not look without tears at the mountains of children's underwear, shoes, toys taken from babies, at baby carriages, ”Shapiro wrote in his memoirs. But what really shocked them was a room filled with “delicate handbags, lampshades, wallets, purses and other leather goods” that were made from human skin.
Part of the Auschwitz complex was converted into a hospital for former prisoners, part of the camp was transferred to the jurisdiction of the NKVD and until 1947 served as a special prison for prisoners of war and displaced persons. In parallel, investigations were carried out on the territory. Their results were used during the trials of Nazi criminals.
In 1947, a museum was created in Auschwitz, which is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Since 2005, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz has been celebrated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
This is the story of the triumph of blind cruelty, one and a half million deaths and silent human grief. Here, the last hopes crumbled to dust, in contact with hopelessness and terrible reality. Here, in a poisonous fog, shredded by pain and hardships of being, some said goodbye to relatives, loved ones, others to their own lives. This is the story of the Auschwitz concentration camp - the site of the most massacre in the history of mankind.
As illustrations, I use archival photographs of 2009. Unfortunately, many of them are of very poor quality.
Spring 1940. Rudolf Hess arrives in Poland. Then still the captain of the SS, Hess, was to create a concentration camp in the small town of Auschwitz (the German name for Auschwitz) located in the occupied territory.
It was decided to build a concentration camp on the site where once the barracks of the Polish army were located. Now they were in a neglected state, many were dilapidated.
The authorities set a difficult task for Hess - to create a camp for 10 thousand prisoners within a relatively short time. Initially, the Germans planned to keep Polish political prisoners here.
Since Hess had been working in the camp system since 1934, building another concentration camp was a matter of course for him. However, things did not go very smoothly at first. The SS did not yet consider the concentration camp in Auschwitz as a strategically important object and did not pay much attention to it. There were supply difficulties. Hess later wrote in his memoirs that once he needed a hundred meters of barbed wire and he just stole it.
One of the symbols of Auschwitz is a cynical inscription above the main gate of the camp. "Arbeit macht frei" - work makes free.
When the prisoners returned from work, an orchestra played at the entrance to the camp. This was necessary so that the prisoners kept their marching pace and so it was 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. Also, this region was rich in limestone reserves. Coal and limestone are valuable raw materials for the chemical industry, especially during times of war. Coal, for example, was used to produce synthetic gasoline.
The German syndicate IG Farbenindustrie decided to competently exploit the natural potential of the territory that had passed into the hands of the Germans. In addition, IG Farbenindustrie was interested in free labor, which could be provided by concentration camps packed to overflowing with prisoners.
It is important to note that the slave labor of the prisoners of the camps was used by many German companies, although some still prefer to deny this.
In March 1941, Himmler visited Auschwitz for the first time.
Nazi Germany subsequently wanted to build a model German city near Auschwitz with the money of IG Farbenindustrie. Ethnic Germans could live here. The local population, of course, 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, things of prisoners, lists with surnames are stored.
Suitcases with numbers and names, artificial limbs, glasses, children's toys. All these things will keep the memory of the horror that happened here for several years for a long time to come.
People came here deceived. They were told they were being sent to work. Families took with them the best things, food. In fact, it was the road to the grave.
One of the most "difficult" elements of the exposition is a room where a huge amount of human hair is stored behind glass. I think I will remember the heavy smell in this room for the rest of my life.
In the photo - a warehouse where 7 tons of hair were found. The photo was taken after the camp was liberated.
By the onset of the summer of 1941, in the territory occupied by the invaders, execution campaigns assumed a large-scale character and began to be carried out constantly. Often the Nazis killed women and children at close range. Observing the situation, the highest ranks expressed concern to the leadership of the SS regarding the morale of the killers. The fact is that the execution procedure had a negative impact on the psyche of many German soldiers. There were fears that these people - the future of the Third Reich - were slowly turning into mentally unbalanced "beasts". The invaders needed to find an easier and less bloody way to effectively kill people.
Given the appalling conditions at Auschwitz, many quickly became incapacitated due to starvation, physical exhaustion, torture, and disease. For a certain time, prisoners unable to work were shot. Hess wrote in his memoirs about the negative attitude towards the shooting procedures, so the transition to a "cleaner" and faster method of 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 extra cost item for the Reich economy and it was pointless to spend money on this. 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 70,000 people had been killed as part of the adult euthanasia program. In Germany, the massacres of the sick were most often committed with the help of carbon monoxide. People were told that they had to undress to take a shower. They were brought into a room with pipes that were connected to gas cylinders, not to the water supply.
The adult euthanasia program is gradually expanding beyond Germany. At this time, the Nazis are faced with another problem - transporting carbon monoxide cylinders over long distances becomes a costly affair. The killers were given a new task - to reduce the cost of the process.
German documents of the time also mention experiments with explosives. After several terrible attempts to implement this project, when the German soldiers had to comb the area and collect the body parts of the victims scattered around the district, the idea was recognized as inappropriate.
Some time later, the negligence of one SS-Soviet, who fell asleep in a car with the engine running in the garage and almost suffocated with exhaust gases, prompted the Nazis to solve the problem of a cheap and quick way to kill the sick.
Doctors began to arrive in Auschwitz, who were looking for sick prisoners. For the prisoners, they specially invented a bike, according to which all the hype was reduced to the selection of patients to be sent for treatment. Many prisoners believed the promises and went to their deaths. Thus, the first prisoners of Auschwitz died in the gas chambers not at all 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 to test the effect of the gas on people. According to some reports, the first experiment with Zyklon B at Auschwitz was carried out in this room - a dark bunker converted into a gas chamber next to Hess's office.
An employee of the camp climbed onto the roof of the bunker, opened this hatch and poured powder into it. The chamber functioned until 1942. Then it was rebuilt into a bomb shelter for the SS-sheep.
This is what the interior of the former gas chamber looks like now.
Next to the bunker was a crematorium, where the corpses were taken on carts. As the bodies were burned, a greasy, 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 the SS soldiers did not have to stain their hands daily with the blood of executed prisoners. However, the gas experiment set in motion a terrifying mechanism that, in a few years, will turn Auschwitz into the site of the most mass murder of people in the history of mankind.
Block 11 was called a prison within a prison. This place had a bad reputation and was considered the most terrible in the camp. Zeki tried to bypass him. Here the delinquent prisoners were interrogated and tortured.
The cells of the block were always packed with people.
In the basement there was a punishment cell and solitary cells.
Among the measures of influence on prisoners in the 11th block, the so-called "standing punishment" was popular.
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 people managed to get out of Block 11 alive.
In the courtyard of block 11 there is an execution wall and a gallows.
The gallows located here is not quite ordinary. It is a bar with a hook driven into the ground. The prisoner was hung up by his hands tied behind his back. Thus, the entire weight of the body fell on the everted shoulder joints. Since there was no strength to endure the hellish pain, many almost immediately lost consciousness.
At the execution wall, the Nazis shot the prisoners, usually in the back of the head. The wall is made of fibrous material. This is done so that the bullets do not ricochet.
According to available data, up to 8 thousand people were shot at this wall. Now flowers are lying here and candles are burning.
The territory of the camp is surrounded by a high barbed wire fence in several rows. During the functioning of Auschwitz, high voltage was applied to the wire.
The prisoners, who were unable to endure the suffering in the dungeons of the camp, threw themselves on the fences and thereby saved themselves from further torment.
Photographs of prisoners with dates of admission to the camp and death. Some did not manage to live here even for weeks.
In the next part of the story, we will talk about the giant death factory - the Birkenau camp located a few kilometers from Auschwitz, corruption in Auschwitz, medical experiments on prisoners and the "beautiful beast". I will show you a photo from the barracks in the women's part of Birkenau, the place where the gas chambers and the 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 his superiors after the end of the war.
The word Auschwitz (or Auschwitz) in the minds of many people is a symbol or even the quintessence of evil, horror, death, the concentration of the most unimaginable inhuman fanaticism and torture. Many today dispute what former prisoners and historians say happened here. This is their personal right and opinion. But having been to Auschwitz and seeing with my own eyes huge rooms filled with... glasses, tens of thousands of pairs of shoes, tons of cut hair and... children's things... You have an emptiness inside. And the hair is moving in horror. The horror of realizing that this hair, glasses and shoes belonged to a living person. Maybe a postman, maybe a student. An ordinary worker or a merchant in the market. Or a girl. Or a seven year old. Which they cut off, removed, thrown into a common pile. To another hundred of the same. Auschwitz. A place of evil and inhumanity.
Young student Tadeusz Uzhinsky arrived in the first echelon with prisoners As I said in yesterday's report, the Auschwitz concentration camp began to function in 1940, being a camp for Polish political prisoners. The first prisoners of Auschwitz were 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnow. At the time of its foundation, there were 20 buildings in the camp - former Polish military barracks. Some of them were converted for mass detention of people, and 6 more buildings were additionally built. The average number of prisoners ranged from 13-16 thousand people, and in 1942 it 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 the years 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 Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II - Birkenau camps have completely turned into a plant for the destruction of people.
In 1943, a tattoo of the prisoner's number was introduced on the arm. Infants and young children were most often numbered on the thigh. According to the Auschwitz State Museum, this concentration camp was the only Nazi camp in which prisoners were tattooed with numbers.
Depending on the reasons for the arrest, the prisoners received triangles of different colors, which, together with the numbers, were sewn onto camp clothes. Political prisoners were supposed to have a red triangle, criminals - green. Gypsies and anti-social elements received black triangles, Jehovah's Witnesses - purple, homosexuals - pink. The 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 little 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, about 400 thousand prisoners of various nationalities, Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners of corps No. 11, who were awaiting the conclusion of the Gestapo police tribunal, were registered here. One of the disasters of camp life was verification, which checked the number of prisoners. They lasted for several, and sometimes more than 10 hours (for example, 19 hours on July 6, 1940). The camp authorities very often announced penal checks, during which the prisoners had to squat or kneel. There were verifications when they had to keep their hands up for several hours.
Living conditions in different periods were very different, but they were always catastrophic. The prisoners, who were brought in at the very beginning by the first echelons, slept on straw scattered on the concrete floor.
Later, hay bedding was introduced. They were thin mattresses stuffed 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, it became necessary to compact their accommodation. There were three-tiered bunks. There were 2 people on one level. In the form of bedding, as a rule, there was rotten straw. The prisoners were covered with rags and what was. In the Auschwitz camp, the bunks were wooden, in Auschwitz-Birkenau both wooden and brick with wooden flooring.
The toilet of the Auschwitz I camp, compared with the conditions in Auschwitz-Birkenau, looked like a real miracle of civilization.
toilet hut in Auschwitz-Birkenau camp
Washroom. The water was only cold and the prisoner had access to it for only a few minutes a day. The prisoners were allowed to wash extremely rarely, and for them it was a real holiday.
The plate with the number of the residential block on the wall
Until 1944, when Auschwitz became an extermination factory, most of the prisoners were sent to grueling labor every day. At first they worked on the expansion of the camp, and then they were used as slaves in the industrial facilities of the Third Reich. Every day columns of emaciated slaves left and entered through the gate with the cynical inscription "Arbeit macht Frei" (Work makes free). The prisoner had to do the work by running, without a second of rest. The pace of work, meager portions of food and constant beatings increased mortality. During the return of prisoners to the camp, dead 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 11 was one of the scariest places. Unlike other blocks, its doors were always closed. The windows were completely walled 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. Within 2-3 hours of his work, he passed from several dozen to over a hundred death sentences.
The cramped cells, in which there were sometimes a huge number of people awaiting sentence, had only a tiny barred window right up to the ceiling. And from the side of the street, near these windows, there were tin boxes that blocked these windows from the influx of fresh air.
Those sentenced before being shot were forced to undress in this room. If there were few of them that day, then the sentence was carried out right here.
If there were many sentenced, they were taken to the "Wall of Death", which was located behind a high fence with blank gates between buildings 10 and 11. Large digits of their camp number were applied with an ink pencil on the chest of the undressed people (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 Unit 11, a large wall of black insulating boards was built, sheathed with absorbent material. This wall became the last facet of the lives of thousands of people sentenced to death by the Gestapo court for their unwillingness to betray their homeland, attempted flight and political "crimes".
The fibers of death. The condemned were shot by the reporter or members of the political department. To do this, they used a small-caliber rifle so as not to attract too much attention with the sounds of shots. After all, not far away was a stone wall, beyond which there was a highway.
In the Auschwitz camp there was 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 the field, defecation 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 the 11th building. Here, in the back room, there were four narrow vertical sealed punishment cells measuring 90x90 centimeters in perimeter. In each of them there was a door with a metal bolt at the bottom.
Through this door, the punished was forced to squeeze inside and closed it with a bolt. In this cage, a person could only be standing. So he stood without food and water for as long as the SS wanted. Often this was the last punishment in the prisoner's life.
Directions of punished prisoners to standing punishment cells
In September 1941, the first attempt was made to mass exterminate people with gas. About 600 Soviet prisoners of war and about 250 sick prisoners from the camp hospital were placed in small batches in airtight cells in the basement of building 11.
Copper pipelines with valves have already been laid along the walls of the chambers. Gas entered the chambers through them ...
The names of the destroyed people were entered in the "Book of the Daily Status" of the Auschwitz camp
Lists of people sentenced to death by the emergency 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 with their parents. These were the children of Jews, Gypsies, as well as Poles and Russians. Most of the Jewish children perished in the gas chambers as soon as they arrived at the camp. The rest, after a strict selection, were sent to the camp, where they were subject to the same strict rules as adults.
Children were registered and photographed in the same way as adults and were labeled as political prisoners.
One of the most terrible pages in the history of Auschwitz was medical experiments by SS doctors. Including over children. So, for example, Professor Karl Clauberg, in order to develop a quick method for the biological destruction of the Slavs, conducted sterilization experiments on Jewish women in building No. 10. Dr. Josef Mengele, within the framework of genetic and anthropological experiments, conducted experiments on twin children and children with physical disabilities. In addition, various experiments were carried out in Auschwitz with the use of new drugs and preparations, toxic substances were rubbed into the epithelium of prisoners, skin grafts were performed, etc.
Conclusion on the results of X-rays carried out during experiments with twins by Dr. Mengele.
Letter from Heinrich Himmler ordering the start of a series of sterilization experiments
Maps of records of anthropometric data of experimental prisoners in the framework of Dr. Mengele's experiments.
Pages of the register of the dead, which indicate the names of 80 boys who died after being injected with phenol as part of medical experiments
List of released prisoners admitted to a Soviet hospital for treatment
Since the autumn of 1941, a gas chamber began to function in the Auschwitz camp, in which Zyklon B gas is used. It was produced by the Degesch company, which in the period 1941-1944 received about 300 thousand marks of profit from the sale of this gas. To kill 1,500 people, according to the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, about 5-7 kg of gas were 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. For the period 1942-1943, according to documents, about 20 thousand kg of Zyklon B crystals were delivered to Auschwitz alone.
Most of the Jews doomed to death arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau with the conviction that they were being taken "to a settlement" in Eastern Europe. This was especially true of Jews from Greece and Hungary, to whom the Germans even sold non-existent building plots and land or offered work in fictitious factories. That is why people sent to the camp for destruction often brought with them the most valuable things, jewelry and money.
Upon arrival at the unloading platform, all things and valuables were taken away from people, SS doctors selected the deported people. Those who were deemed incapacitated were sent to the gas chambers. According to Rudolf Goess, there were about 70-75% of those who arrived.
Things found in the warehouses of Auschwitz 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 the bathhouse, so they appear relatively calm.
Here, the prisoners are forced to take off their clothes and are taken to the next room, which imitates a bathhouse. Shower holes were located under the ceiling, through which water never 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 were dying within 15-20 minutes. Gold teeth were pulled out from the dead, rings and earrings were removed, women's hair was cut off.
After that, the corpses were transported to the crematorium ovens, where the fire hummed continuously. In the event of an overflow of the ovens or at a time when the pipes were damaged by overloading, the bodies were destroyed in the places of burning behind the crematoria. All these actions were carried out by prisoners belonging to the so-called Sonderkommando group. At the peak of the activity of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, its number was about 1000 people.
Photo taken by one of the members of the Sonderkommando, which shows the process of burning dead people.
In the Auschwitz camp, the crematorium was located behind the camp fence. Its largest room was the mortuary, which was converted into a temporary gas chamber.
Here, in 1941 and 1942, Soviet prisoners of war and Jews from the ghetto located on the territory of Upper Silesia were exterminated.
In the second hall there were three double furnaces, in which up to 350 bodies were burned during the day.
In one retort, 2-3 corpses were placed.
On January 27, 1945, soldiers of the Red Army liberated the prisoners of Auschwitz, the most famous concentration camp of the Second World War, built to exterminate Jews from all over Europe.
The exact number of victims of Auschwitz is still unknown. At the Nuremberg trials, a rough estimate was made - five million. The former commandant of the camp, Rudolf Hess, claimed that there were half as many killed. And today's European historians believe that "only" a little more than a million prisoners did not get freedom.
Well, it is quite possible that the Nazis would have managed to hide the traces of their crimes, but thanks to the quick actions of the Soviet army, the Nazis did not have time to destroy not only the witnesses of the atrocities, but also the murder weapons. Crematoriums and gas chambers, instruments of torture, thousands of kilograms of human hair and ground bones, prepared for shipment to Germany, appeared before the eyes of the soldiers-liberators.
Medical experiments and experiments were widely practiced in the camp. The effects of chemicals on the human body were studied. The latest pharmaceutical preparations were tested. Prisoners were artificially infected with malaria, hepatitis and other dangerous diseases as an experiment. Nazi doctors were trained to perform surgical operations on healthy people. Castration of men and sterilization of women, especially young women, was common, accompanied by the removal of the ovaries.
But above all, Auschwitz was a real enterprise for the Third Reich, a "death factory" that brought the state not only the corpses of "subhumans", but also serious profits. Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler was even proud that every month the "death factory" brought two million marks of net profit to the German treasury. Nothing was lost here that could be used for the benefit of the "thousand-year Reich."
Most of all valuable things, gold and money were collected from trains that brought deported Jews. Every day, the SS seized almost 12 kilograms of gold - basically, these were dental crowns that they pulled out from corpses, and personal belongings of Jews became a reward for the soldiers of the Third Reich.
"Istoricheskaya Pravda" publishes archival photographs of how the Soviet liberators saw this "factory of death".
Railway gate of the camp.
The history of the creation of Auschwitz has its own intrigue. It was conceived as a camp for political prisoners - Poles. The author of the idea is one of the people closest to Himmler, SS Gruppenfuhrer Erich Bach-Zalewski (during the Great Patriotic War he would lead punitive operations against Belarusian partisans, then the suppression of the Polish uprising in Warsaw in 1944. Ironically, already at the end of 50 -x will be released).
Bach-Zalewski proposed the establishment of such a camp in Poland shortly after the outbreak of World War II. His subordinate, SS Oberführer Wigand, at the end of 1939, found a place near Auschwitz. There were already military barracks quite suitable for barracks. An important argument for choosing the site of the future camp was the developed system of railway communication.
The main gate of the camp with the inscription "Work sets you free".
By the beginning of 1941, the Nazis had created 3 categories of camps. To the 3rd, the most terrible, for those who are not fit for "correction" was Mauthausen in Austria. The second category included Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and some other camps in Germany (for those whose "correction is unlikely").
The future Auschwitz-2 fell into the same category. Finally, Auschwitz-1 was assigned to the first category “for the less spoiled”. Initially, the prisoners were really planned to be released into the wild - after the war.
Auschwitz. Photo from the cockpit of an American bomber.
The actual concentration camp for prisoners included 33 barracks (blocks). On the territory of the camp, the construction of industries for various firms and industries for the needs of the Wehrmacht began. Auschwitz was supposed to be profitable...
Auschwitz did not immediately become a "factory of death". Historians call the first period of its functioning (until mid-1942) "Polish". At this point, most of the prisoners were indeed Poles. Some were sent here from Gestapo prisons and other concentration camps to be sentenced to death.
Poles massively fell into Auschwitz and later. So, only 2 months after the defeat of the Warsaw uprising in 1944, 13,000 people were sent here. In total, about 150,000 Poles passed through this camp.
In the summer of 1942, a new plan for the development of the camp was approved, designed for 300,000 prisoners and including a special section for the mass extermination of Jews. According to this plan, in March-July 1943, 4 crematoria and gas chambers were built in Birkenau. Inside, 4 mini-camps were created, which by May 1944 were connected by railroad tracks.
Sending Slovak Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Auschwitz had two functions: a concentration camp for people of different nationalities and a place of extermination. The number of its prisoners constantly grew. On March 26, 1942, a women's camp appears. In February 1943 - a gypsy. By January 1944, there were about 81,000 prisoners in Auschwitz. In July - more than 92 thousand. In August - more than 145 thousand.
Hungarian Jews at the train after arriving at the Auschwitz concentration camp
Jews from Transcarpathia near the train after arriving at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
From the Jews arriving in Auschwitz, they began to select able-bodied people for other concentration camps. This took place after the so-called selection. In total, at least 1 million 100 thousand Jews passed through Auschwitz.
A column of Hungarian prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp at the railroad cars.
Since February 1943, gypsies began to enter Auschwitz. In Birkenau-2, the so-called. family camp for 23,000 gypsies from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Most of them died from disease and starvation.
Arrival of prisoners.
Auschwitz was one of 6 death camps in Poland. But only it was intended to exterminate Jews from all over Europe. The rest worked according to the territorial principle: in Majdanek, Sobibór, Treblinka and Belzec, they exterminated mainly Polish Jews living in the so-called. General Government. In Chełmno - Jews from western Poland, annexed to the Reich. All of them ceased to exist as centers of extermination in 1943.
Arrival of prisoners.
Arrival of the echelon with new prisoners
Children prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp show camp numbers on their hands.
Of the 1,300,000 prisoners of Auschwitz, about 234,000 were children. Of these, 220,000 were Jewish children, 11,000 were Gypsies; several thousand Belarusian, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish. Some children were born in the camp. They also wore the number on the prisoner's striped clothing.
By the day of the liberation of Auschwitz, 611 (!) children remained in the camp.
Prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp at the construction of a chemical plant.
Chemical plant.
Many prisoners also worked at the factory. From 1940 to 1945, about 405 thousand prisoners were assigned to factories in the Auschwitz complex. Of these, more than 340,000 died from disease and beatings, or were executed. There is a known case when the German industrialist Oskar Schindler saved about 1,000 Jews by buying them to work in his factory. 300 of the women on this list ended up in Auschwitz by mistake. Schindler managed to rescue them and take them to Krakow.
Rabbis at the Auschwitz concentration camp
Portrait of prisoners.
Women's bar.
Camp security.
In total, Auschwitz was guarded by about 6,000 SS men. Their personal information has been preserved. Three-quarters had a complete secondary education. 5% are university graduates with advanced degrees. Almost 4/5 identified themselves as believers. Catholics - 42.4%; Protestants - 36.5%.
SS men on vacation
Glasses taken from executed Jews.
The "death factory" in Auschwitz worked with German punctuality and thrift for miraculous property. In total, there were 35 warehouse barracks in the camp, which were full of things taken from the Jews; they were not taken out.
Clothes of the destroyed prisoners.
The Nazis didn't just throw anything away. When Soviet soldiers occupied Auschwitz, they found about 7.5 thousand prisoners there who they did not have time to take away, and in the partially surviving warehouse barracks - 1,185,345 men's and women's suits, 43,255 pairs of men's and women's shoes, 13,694 carpets, a huge number of toothbrushes and shaving brushes, as well as other small household items.
The bodies of the prisoners.
Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss testified:
“Various functionaries of the party and the SS were sent to Auschwitz so that they could see for themselves how the Jews were being exterminated. All of them were deeply impressed. Some of those who had previously ranted about the need for such destruction were left speechless at the sight of the "final solution of the Jewish question". I was constantly asked how I and my people can be witnesses to how we are able to endure all this. To this I always replied that all human impulses must be suppressed and give way to the iron determination with which the orders of the Fuhrer must be carried out. Each of these gentlemen declared that he would not want to receive such a task ... "
