Beyond the Gates of Hell: How the Red Army Liberated Auschwitz
On January 27, 1945, units of the 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army liberated Auschwitz from the Nazi occupiers. Dozens of kilometers of barbed wire up to three meters high, hundreds of wooden barracks, crematoria and ominous medical rooms were revealed to the liberators. How it was - recalled "Izvestia".
Auschwitz (Auschwitz in German) is a Polish city located near ancient Krakow. The 107th Infantry Division of the 60th Army, the troops of Colonel Vasily Petrenko, entered the city. The Germans mined the entrances to the camps. But the sappers did their job perfectly.
Only about 8 thousand prisoners remained alive in the camps. "Hungarians, Italians, French, Czechoslovaks, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Romanians, Danes, Belgians. There are a great many of our Soviet citizens. All of them look extremely exhausted, graying old men and young boys, mothers with infants and teenagers, almost all half undressed," General Konstantin Krainyukov, a member of the military council of the 1st Ukrainian Front, wrote to Moscow. This town became a crime scene long ago.
The place where people were turned into ashes
The first camp in Auschwitz was founded in the spring of 1940, on the site of the former barracks, by order of Josef Himmler. The camp's inmates were 728 Polish prisoners. At gunpoint they built Auschwitz barracks and houses for the German "masters of life". Then Polish and Hungarian Jews, gypsies and communists were added to them. The Germans saw this camp as a tool for the realization of their racist plans.
Everyone who entered the camp was greeted by an inscription on the gate: "Labor leads to freedom." But the commandant of the camp, Rudolf Hess, was much more explicit, saying that there was only one way out of Auschwitz - through the crematorium chimney. Prisoners were taken daily to Auschwitz on trains, in packed cars. Many arrived already dead - they were immediately burned. During the years of Auschwitz's existence, the majority of its prisoners were Jews - mainly from the USSR, Poland and Hungary. For the slightest offense, those who retained the ability to have their own opinion were beaten to a pulp with sticks. Already in July 1941, the first Soviet prisoners - several hundred people - were brought to Auschwitz. They were all executed within a few days.
Main entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp grounds
In the first year and a half of the camp's existence, people were shot near specially dug pits and buried there - 200 people at a time. The prisoners called this part of the camp Hitler's Alley. Then they built crematorium ovens, where corpses were turned into ashes in 8-9 minutes. In September 1941 in Auschwitz for the first time tested on people deadly gas "Cyclone B". The victims were 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 Poles. They were locked in the cellars of block number 12 and let the poisonous gas in. People tried to escape, but the Germans barricaded the exit. After 12 hours, the guards checked on the experiment. Some of the victims were alive. The Nazis locked the cellar again, letting in a new portion of "Cyclone B". After that they began to use more gas - and the destruction of prisoners in this way was put on a stream. The gas chambers were disguised as showers. Those prisoners who were deemed unfit for work were sent there directly from the echelons. Prisoners who had served their time were also destroyed there.
A Soviet officer and former prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp near boxes with containers of poison gas "Cyclone-B".
The SS formed a special "sonderkommando" from prisoners. They disassembled corpses after gas poisoning, took them to the ovens, and then disassembled the ashes. The Germans destroyed and changed the members of this team (there were about 200 people) every two months. The Nazis made sure that no one was privy to the order that reigned in Auschwitz.
Himmler visited Auschwitz several times, noting the innovative work of the local executioners.
Death Combine
In 1942, the SS evicted the inhabitants of the village of Brzezinka in order to build Auschwitz-Birkenau, an expanded camp complex, in its place. It was a real death factory. In 1943, four new large crematoria were erected in Auschwitz II. The capacity of the gas chambers of these monstrous units allowed to destroy 12 thousand people in five hours. The Germans were proud: technological progress helped them to solve the task of exterminating "inferior people" and those who stood in the way of "superhumans" with Aryan blood in their veins. The SS scattered human ashes in the surrounding fields as fertilizer, without explaining anything to the locals.
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Auschwitz
Auschwitz III was built as a labor camp. Its prisoners did the dirty work of producing synthetic rubber. The factory belonged to the largest German chemical company, IG Farben. German capital often became an investor in the death factories - the industrialists profited from the slave labor of the prisoners. Workers were entitled to 300 grams of bread and a bowl of rutabaga soup a day. Those who were no longer able to work were transferred to the death camp, and there they were shot, exterminated in gas chambers or burned in crematoria. Often weakened people were simply killed by the guards with rifle butts. By the middle of the Great Patriotic War, Auschwitz had become a smoothly operating conglomerate of several death camps.
In 1943, a man whose name became synonymous with medical crimes arrived at Auschwitz. A convinced Nazi, Dr. Mengele was engaged in medical experiments that were supposed to help increase the longevity, fertility, and stamina of true Aryans. In addition, Mengele sought new ways to sterilize "subhumans" - Jews, Gypsies, Slavs. When asked how his conscience allowed him to exterminate so many people, Mengele replied, "What? Conscience? My conscience is Adolf Hitler."
Josef Mengele
Viktor Netkachev, a surviving prisoner of Auschwitz and Soviet chemist, testified against Mengele, whose underlings castrated children between the ages of 9 and 14. "I could not look into the eyes of these boys without pain. There was lifelessness in them, and they themselves were apathetic and slow," Netkachev recalled.
Izuverov in 1945 managed to escape retribution and hide in Latin America. There he lived on someone else's documents until 1979.
The first resistance group in Auschwitz was organized by Soviet prisoners of war led by Red Army commanders Alexander Lebedev and Fyodor Skiba. They managed to organize the only mass escape in the camp's history. More than 100 people took part in the underground action. Only a few survived... In 1943, a new small underground resistance group emerged in the camp. They managed to get weapons and escape. The SS caught up with them and shot them.
Warriors-liberators
Before Auschwitz, the Red Army had already liberated several death camps in Poland and the Baltic States. The frontline press wrote about the crimes that the Nazis committed against the prisoners. But it is impossible to get used to such murderous combinations, and the liberators of Auschwitz were shocked. It was a real hell on earth, created by people who considered themselves heirs of the chivalrous "Teutonic" culture.
The territory of the Nazi concentration camp Majdanek (Poland) after liberation by the Red Army soldiers
Before escaping, the Germans tried to cover their tracks. They blew up crematoria, took 50 thousand prisoners to Germany, hundreds of people exhausted by torture and medical experiments were hastily burned and shot. The Red Army soldiers who entered the camp feared that German troops were hiding there in the shelters. Therefore, what they saw behind the barbed wire surprised the most experienced fighters. But those who were sent on reconnaissance, meticulously checked all corners of the camps. There were no Hitlerites there. Immediately they sent for doctors and field kitchen.
Immediately after the liberation, a therapeutic field hospital was set up in Auschwitz, headed by the military doctor Margarita Zhilinskaya, who had previously organized therapeutic hospitals in besieged Leningrad and knew well what dystrophy and nervous exhaustion were. There, under the supervision of Soviet doctors, they brought back to life exhausted prisoners of Auschwitz, who did not have the strength to return home immediately. Zhilinskaya collected unique photographs and German medical documents exposing German war criminals.
Doctors examine freed prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp
One of the first to write about Auschwitz was writer and war correspondent Boris Polevoy, author of "A Tale of a Real Man." His articles were translated into all the languages of the anti-Hitler coalition countries. But official London and Washington did not believe the terrible truth about the German death camps. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill considered the articles by Polevoy and his colleagues to be fabrications, of which there are many during the war years. German experiments on human beings and smoothly running murder conveyor belts looked too monstrous.
Only after the liberation of Buchenwald, when the Americans saw the traces of heinous crimes of Nazism, they realized that the Russians in their "propaganda" did not exaggerate. Even while inspecting a branch of the camp, American General George Patton vomited at what he saw. Barracks, emaciated people, ashes from human remains, piles of bones. Furnaces that were destroying people. All of this appeared before the eyes of the Americans, many of whom experienced nervous breakdowns. It was completely consistent with what Soviet journalists wrote about Auschwitz.
It is still unknown exactly how many unfortunate people died in Auschwitz. Historians give different figures - from one to four million. At least one million more - died of diseases earned in the camp, committed suicide, died in accidents.
In 1947, on the territory of the concentration camp, a museum dedicated to the victims of Nazism was created. Alas, today they prefer not to talk about the role of the Red Army in the liberation of Auschwitz.
Visitors tour the former concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland
The author is deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine "Historian"
