Usually, after visiting an interesting museum, there are many different thoughts in my head, a feeling of satisfaction. After leaving the territory of this museum complex, there is a feeling of deep devastation and depression. I've never seen anything like this before. I never really read into the historical details of this place, I did not imagine how large-scale the policy of human cruelty could be.

The entrance to the Auschwitz camp is crowned with the famous inscription "Arbeit macht frei", which means "Work gives liberation".

Arbeit macht frei is the title of a novel by German nationalist writer Lorenz Diefenbach. The phrase was placed as a slogan at the entrances of many Nazi concentration camps, either as a mockery or as a false hope. But, as you know, labor did not give anyone the desired freedom in this concentration camp.

Auschwitz 1 served as the administrative center of the entire complex. It was founded on May 20, 1940 on the basis of brick two- and three-story buildings of the former Polish, and earlier Austrian barracks. The first group, consisting of 728 Polish political prisoners, arrived at the camp on June 14 of the same year. Over the course of two years, the number of prisoners varied from 13,000 to 16,000, and by 1942 reached 20,000. The SS selected some prisoners, mostly Germans, to spy on the rest. The prisoners of the camp were divided into classes, which was visually reflected by the stripes on their clothes. 6 days a week, except Sunday, the prisoners were required to work.

In the Auschwitz camp, there were separate blocks that served various purposes. In blocks 11 and 13, punishments were made for violators of the rules of the camp. People were placed in groups of 4 in so-called "standing cells" measuring 90 cm x 90 cm, where they had to stand all night. More severe measures meant slow killings: the guilty were either put in a sealed chamber, where they died from lack of oxygen, or simply starved to death. Between blocks 10 and 11 there was a torture yard, where prisoners were simply shot at best. The wall near which the shooting was carried out was reconstructed after the end of the war.

On September 3, 1941, on the orders of the deputy head of the camp, SS-Obersturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the first test of gas etching was carried out in block 11, as a result of which about 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 other prisoners, mostly sick, died. The test was deemed a success and one of the bunkers was converted into a gas chamber and crematorium. The chamber functioned from 1941 to 1942, and then it was rebuilt into an SS bomb shelter.

Auschwitz 2 (also known as Birkenau) is what is usually meant when talking about Auschwitz itself. In it, in one-story wooden barracks, hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles and Gypsies were kept. The number of victims of this camp amounted to more than a million people. The construction of this part of the camp began in October 1941. Auschwitz 2 had 4 gas chambers and 4 crematoria. New prisoners arrived daily by train to the Birkenau camp from all over occupied Europe.

This is what prison barracks look like. 4 people in a narrow wooden cell, there is no toilet in the back, you can’t leave the back at night, there is no heating.

The arrivals were divided into four groups.
The first group, which accounted for about ¾ of all those brought, went to the gas chambers for several hours. This group included women, children, the elderly and all those who did not pass the medical examination for full fitness for work. More than 20,000 people could be killed in the camp each day.

The selection procedure was extremely simple - all newly arrived prisoners lined up on the platform, several German officers selected potentially able-bodied prisoners. The rest went to the showers, so people were told ... No one ever had a panic. Everyone undressed, left their belongings in the sorting room and entered the shower room, which in reality turned out to be a gas chamber. The Birkenau camp contained the largest gas shop and crematorium in Europe, which was blown up by the Nazis during their retreat. Now it is a memorial.

Jews who arrived in Auschwitz were allowed to take up to 25 kg of personal belongings, respectively, people took the most valuable. In the sorting rooms for things after the mass executions, the camp staff confiscated all the most valuable things - jewelry, money that went to the treasury. Personal items were also sorted. Much went into the re-circulation of goods to Germany. In the halls of the museum, some stands are impressive, where the same type of things are collected: glasses, prostheses, clothes, dishes ... THOUSANDS of things piled up in one huge stand ... someone's life stands behind each thing.

Another fact was very striking: hair was cut from the corpses, which went to the textile industry in Germany.

The second group of prisoners was sent to work as slaves in industrial enterprises of various companies. From 1940 to 1945, about 405 thousand prisoners were assigned to factories in the Auschwitz complex. Of these, more than 340 thousand died from illness and beatings, or were executed.
The third group, mostly twins and dwarfs, went to various medical experiments, in particular to Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the "angel of death."
Below I have given an article about Mengele - this is an incredible case when a criminal of this magnitude completely escaped punishment.

Josef Mengele, the most famous of the Nazi criminal doctors

After being wounded, SS Hauptsturmführer Mengele was declared unfit for military service and in 1943 was appointed chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

In addition to their main function - the destruction of "inferior races", prisoners of war, communists and simply dissatisfied, concentration camps performed another function in Nazi Germany. With the advent of Mengele, Auschwitz became a "major research center".

"Research" went on as usual. The Wehrmacht ordered a topic: to find out everything about the effects of cold on the body of a soldier (hypothermia). The experimental methodology was the most straightforward: a prisoner from a concentration camp is taken, covered with ice on all sides, "doctors" in SS uniform constantly measure body temperature ... When an experimental person dies, a new one is brought from the barracks. Conclusion: after cooling the body below 30 degrees, it is most likely impossible to save a person.

The Luftwaffe, the German air force, commissioned research on the effect of high altitude on pilot performance. A pressure chamber was built in Auschwitz. Thousands of prisoners took a terrible death: at ultra-low pressure, a person was simply torn apart. Conclusion: it is necessary to build aircraft with a pressurized cabin. By the way, none of these aircraft in Germany took off until the very end of the war.

On his own initiative, Josef Mengele, who in his youth was carried away by racial theory, conducted experiments with eye color. For some reason, he needed to prove in practice that the brown eyes of Jews under no circumstances could become the blue eyes of a "true Aryan." He injects hundreds of Jews with blue dye - extremely painful and often leading to blindness. The conclusion is obvious: a Jew cannot be turned into an Aryan.

Tens of thousands of people became victims of Mengele's monstrous experiments. What are some studies of the effects of physical and mental exhaustion on the human body! And the "study" of 3,000 infant twins, of which only 200 survived! The twins received blood transfusions and transplanted organs from each other. Sisters were forced to have children from brothers. Sex reassignment operations were carried out. Before starting the experiments, the kind doctor Mengele could stroke the child on the head, treat him with chocolate ...

Last year, one of the former prisoners of Auschwitz sued the German pharmaceutical company Bayer. The creators of aspirin are accused of using concentration camp prisoners to test their sleeping pills. Judging by the fact that shortly after the start of the "testing" the concern additionally acquired another 150 prisoners of Auschwitz, no one could wake up after a new sleeping pill. By the way, other representatives of German business also cooperated with the concentration camp system. The largest chemical concern in Germany, IG Farbenindustry, produced not only synthetic gasoline for tanks, but also Zyklon-B gas for the gas chambers of the same Auschwitz.

In 1945, Josef Mengele carefully destroyed all the collected "data" and escaped from Auschwitz. Until 1949, Mengele worked quietly in his native Gunzburg at his father's firm. Then, according to new documents in the name of Helmut Gregor, he emigrated to Argentina. He received his passport quite legally, through... the Red Cross. In those years, this organization provided charity, issued passports and travel documents to tens of thousands of refugees from Germany. It is possible that Mengele's fake ID was simply not thoroughly verified. Moreover, the art of forging documents in the Third Reich reached unprecedented heights.

Despite the generally negative attitude on the part of the world community to Mengele's experiments, he made a certain useful contribution to medicine. In particular, the doctor developed methods for warming victims of hypothermia, used, for example, in rescue from avalanches; skin grafting (for burns) is also a doctor's achievement. He also made a significant contribution to the theory and practice of blood transfusion.

One way or another, Mengele ended up in South America. In the early 50s, when Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest (with the right to kill him upon arrest), Iozef moved to Paraguay. However, all this was, rather, a sham, a game of catching the Nazis. All with the same passport in the name of Gregor, Josef Mengele repeatedly visited Europe, where his wife and son remained.

In prosperity and contentment, the man responsible for tens of thousands of murders lived until 1979. Mengele drowned in the warm ocean while swimming on a beach in Brazil.

The fourth group, predominantly women, were selected in the "Canada" group for personal use by the Germans as servants and personal slaves, as well as for sorting the personal property of prisoners arriving at the camp. The name "Canada" was chosen as a mockery of 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. Auschwitz was partially serviced by prisoners who were periodically killed and replaced with new ones. About 6,000 members of the SS watched everything.
By 1943, a resistance group had formed in the camp that helped some of the prisoners escape, and in October 1944 the group destroyed one of the crematoria. In connection with the approach of Soviet troops, the administration of Auschwitz began the evacuation of prisoners to camps located on German territory. When Soviet soldiers occupied Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they found about 7,500 survivors there.

In the entire history of Auschwitz, there were about 700 escape attempts, 300 of which were successful, but if someone escaped, then all his relatives were arrested and sent to the camp, and all the prisoners from his block were killed. It was a very effective method of thwarting attempts to escape.
It is impossible to establish the exact number of deaths in Auschwitz, since many documents were destroyed, in addition, the Germans did not keep records of the victims sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arrival. Modern historians agree that between 1.4 and 1.8 million people were killed in Auschwitz, most of whom were Jews.
On March 1-29, 1947, a trial took place in Warsaw in the case of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. On April 2, 1947, the Polish Higher People's Court sentenced him to death by hanging. The gallows on which Höss was hanged was placed at the entrance to the main crematorium of Auschwitz.

When Höss was asked why millions of innocent people are being killed, he replied:
First of all, we must listen to the Führer and not philosophize.

It is very important to have such museums on earth, they turn the mind, they are evidence that a person in his actions can go as far as he likes, where there are no boundaries, where there are no moral principles ...

January 27, 1945. A happy and scary day for the small Polish town of Auschwitz. People imprisoned behind barbed wire in a concentration camp were preparing for death, but found hope for life.

Before the eyes of the liberators - the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front, who occupied the camp - a terrible picture of a "death factory" abandoned in a hurry appeared.

Several plots, built up with one-story wooden barracks, around the appellplatz - the main square of the camp. All buildings are surrounded by two rows of barbed wire and watchtowers. The "red" and "white" houses are also located here - buildings that terrified. At first, people were driven there like cattle, the doors were locked, and from above, through pipes, gas was released. Then the Nazis did not yet know how much gas is needed to kill a whole crowd, so they let it in at random. A little bit - there were screams, a little more - groans were heard, and even more - there was silence. In 1943, when the Germans realized that they did not have time to get rid of so many corpses, 4 gas chambers and 4 crematoria were built near the barracks. For the convenience of transporting corpses through the passage of the main watchtower, railroad tracks were laid directly to the crematorium.

The barracks of the Auschwitz concentration camp. January 1945. Photo: RIA Novosti

Many Poles, Russians, Gypsies, French, Hungarians and, of course, Jews, of all ages - men, women, children - then traveled from all over occupied Europe to this destination without a return ticket. Many went voluntarily, with bales full of things, because they were assured that this was a simple resettlement. Upon arrival, the “settlers” were immediately ordered to leave all their property and line up. The selection has begun. Children, weak women, old people were immediately taken away in trucks. Within the next hour they were destroyed as unnecessary material. Someone with the help of a gas chamber, someone was injected with phenol when the crematoria were rebuilt, often people were burned alive in them.

Those who were not killed immediately were beaten out with a serial number on their hand, and then sent to the barracks. "Freaks", twins and midgets were waiting in his office for the "angel of death" Dr. Mengele. He conducted experiments in a concentration camp, which, according to him, were aimed at increasing the birth rate and reducing the number of genetic abnormalities in the Aryan race. Legends are still made up about these experiments and horror films are made based on them.

All those selected for life were shaved bald and dressed in striped robes. Women's hair was then transferred to production - they stuffed mattresses for sailors.

Auschwitz. Bench for executions. Photo: RIA Novosti

Day after day, the prisoners were fed a gruel of rotten vegetables. The prisoners said to the new arrivals: "Whoever survives on rottenness and almost without sleep for three months, he will be able to live here for a year, and two, and three." But there were only a few such "lucky ones" ...

At the end of 1944, when the Soviet troops were not far from Auschwitz, the camp authorities announced the evacuation of prisoners to German territory. The prisoners themselves called this evacuation a "death march" - those who could not walk lagged behind, fell, the Nazis shot and killed. The column left behind hundreds of corpses. In total, the Germans managed to take out about 60 thousand prisoners.

On January 24, the Soviet army was already on its way. Then the Germans began to destroy the camp. They destroyed crematoria, set fire to warehouses with things taken from the prisoners, and mined the approaches to Auschwitz.

On January 26, 1945, Soviet troops were already advancing 60 kilometers from Krakow. The military leaders sent their soldiers according to the available map. According to the map, 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. Outside the gates of the "bastion" silhouettes could be seen. Few people knew about the existence of a concentration camp in Auschwitz. Therefore, the presence of any buildings came as a surprise to the Soviet troops.

The military leadership warned that the Germans were cunning, they often arranged a masquerade, disguised themselves, impersonating those who they were not. The soldiers, seeing strangers in the distance, cocked their guns. But soon an urgent message came - prisoners were ahead, it was allowed to shoot only as a last resort.

Prisoners of Auschwitz before the liberation of the camp by the Soviet Army, January 1945. Photo: RIA Novosti / Fishman

On January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers were able to break open the gates of the camp. Prisoners in huge, oversized, prison overalls, women in bathrobes, fled in different directions: someone towards the soldiers, someone, on the contrary, in fright from them. The Germans left about 7.5 thousand people in Auschwitz - the weakest, unable to overcome the long road. They were planned to be destroyed in the coming days ...

Then, according to the most conservative estimates, the number of deaths in Auschwitz totaled within 2 million people. In 2010, the FSB declassified some documents of that time, according to which there were already 4 million dead. But no one will ever know the exact number of those who were tortured and died a terrible death - the Germans did not count those who were immediately sent to the gas chambers upon arrival. “I never knew the total number of those destroyed and did not have any opportunity to establish this figure,” admitted at the Nuremberg trials Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz.

About what life was like in Auschwitz - in a joint project of the Arguments and Facts publishing house and the Russian Jewish Congress. Read more>>

Photo album of the concentration camp "Auschwitz Birkenau" (Auschwitz)

"Album of Auschwitz" - about 200 unique photographs of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, compiled into an album by an unknown SS officer, will be exhibited at the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography in Moscow.

Historians rightly regard the Auschwitz album as one of the most important testimonies of the fate of the millions who were killed. The Auschwitz album is essentially a one of a kind archive of documentary photographs of the active camp, with the exception of a few photographs of its construction in 1942-1943, and three photographs taken by the prisoners themselves.

The Auschwitz concentration camp was the largest Nazi death camp. More than 1.5 million people of different nationalities were tortured here, of which about 1.1 million were European Jews.

What is the Auschwitz concentration camp?

The complex of buildings for the detention of prisoners of war was built under the auspices of the SS on the directive of Hitler in 1939. The Auschwitz concentration camp is located near Krakow. 90% of those contained in it were ethnic Jews. The rest are Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies and representatives of other nationalities, who in the total number of those killed and tortured amounted to about 200 thousand.

The full name of the concentration camp is Auschwitz Birkenau. Auschwitz is a Polish name, it is customary to use it mainly in the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Nearly 200 photographs of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were taken in the spring of 1944, and methodically compiled into an album by an unknown SS officer. Subsequently, this album was found by a survivor of the camp, nineteen-year-old Lily Jacob, in one of the barracks of the Mittelbau-Dora camp on the day of his liberation.

Arrival of the train to Auschwitz.

In the pictures from the Auschwitz album we see the arrival, selection, forced labor or killing of Jews who entered Auschwitz in late May - early June 1944. According to some sources, these photographs were taken on the same day, according to others - over several weeks .

Why was Auschwitz chosen? This is due to its convenient location. First, it was on the border where the Third Reich ended and Poland began. Auschwitz was one of the key trading hubs with convenient and well-established transport routes. On the other hand, the closely approaching forest helped to hide the crimes committed there from prying eyes.

The first buildings were erected by the Nazis on the site of the barracks of the Polish army. For the construction, they used the labor of local Jews who fell into their bondage. At first, German criminals and Polish political prisoners were sent there. The main task of the concentration camp was to keep people dangerous to the well-being of Germany in isolation and use their labor. The prisoners worked six days a week, and Sunday was a day off.

In 1940, the local population living near the barracks was forcibly expelled by the German army in order to build additional buildings on the vacated territory, where later there were a crematorium and chambers. In 1942, the camp was fenced with a strong reinforced concrete fence and high voltage wire.

However, even such measures did not stop some of the prisoners, although cases of escape were extremely rare. Those who had such thoughts knew that if they tried, all their cellmates would be destroyed.

In the same year, 1942, at the NSDAP conference, it was concluded that the mass extermination of the Jews and the "final solution of the Jewish question" were necessary. At first, German and Polish Jews were sent to Auschwitz and other German concentration camps of the Second World War. Then Germany agreed with the Allies to conduct a "cleansing" in their territories.

It should be mentioned that not everyone easily agreed to this. For example, Denmark was able to save its subjects from imminent death. When the government was informed about the planned "hunt" of the SS, Denmark organized a secret transfer of Jews to a neutral state - Switzerland. Thus, more than 7 thousand lives were saved.

However, in the general statistics of the 7,000 people who were destroyed, tortured by hunger, beatings, overwork, diseases and inhuman experiments, this is a drop in the sea of ​​shed blood. In total, during the existence of the camp, according to various estimates, from 1 to 4 million people were killed.

In mid-1944, when the war unleashed by the Germans took a sharp turn, the SS tried to transport prisoners from Auschwitz west to other camps. Documents and any evidence of a merciless massacre were massively destroyed. The Germans destroyed the crematorium and gas chambers. In early 1945, the Nazis had to release most of the prisoners. Those who could not run were wanted to be destroyed. Fortunately, thanks to the advance of the Soviet army, several thousand prisoners were saved, including children who were being experimented on.

Camp structure

In total, Auschwitz was divided into 3 large camp complexes: Birkenau-Oswiecim, Monowitz and Auschwitz-1. The first camp and Birkenau were later merged into a complex of 20 buildings, sometimes several stories high.

The tenth unit was far from the last place in terms of terrible conditions of detention. Medical experiments were carried out here, mainly on children. As a rule, such "experiments" were not so much of scientific interest as they were another way of sophisticated bullying. Especially among the buildings, the eleventh block stood out, it caused horror even among the local guards. There was a place for torture and executions, the most negligent were sent here, tortured with merciless cruelty. It was here that attempts were made for the first time to mass and most “effective” extermination with the help of the Zyklon-B poison.

An execution wall was constructed between these two blocks, where, according to scientists, about 20,000 people were killed. Several gallows and burning stoves were also installed on the territory. Later, gas chambers were built that could kill up to 6,000 people a day. The arriving prisoners were divided by German doctors into those who were able to work, and those who were immediately sent to death in the gas chamber. Most often, weak women, children and the elderly were classified as disabled. The survivors were kept in cramped conditions, with little to no food. Some of them dragged the bodies of the dead or cut off the hair that went to textile factories. If a prisoner in such a service managed to hold out for a couple of weeks, they got rid of him and took a new one.

Some fell into the "privileged" category and worked for the Nazis as tailors and barbers. The deported Jews were allowed to take no more than 25 kg of weight from home. People took with them the most valuable and important things. All things and money left after their death were sent to Germany. Before that, the belongings had to be dismantled and sorted out everything of value, which was what the prisoners were doing in the so-called "Canada". The place acquired this name due to the fact that earlier "Canada" was called valuable gifts and gifts sent from abroad to the Poles. Labor on the "Canada" was relatively softer than in general in Auschwitz. Women worked there. Food could be found among the things, so in "Canada" the prisoners did not suffer from hunger as much. The SS did not hesitate to molest beautiful girls. Often there were rapes.

Living conditions of the SS in the camp

auschwitz concentration camp auschwitz polandAuschwitz concentration camp (Oswiecim, Poland) was a real town. It had everything for the life of the military: canteens with plentiful good food, cinema, theater and all human benefits for the Nazis. While the prisoners did not receive even the minimum amount of food (many died of starvation in the first or second week), the SS men feasted incessantly, enjoying life.

Concentration camps, especially Auschwitz, have always been a desirable place of duty for the German soldier. Life here was much better and safer than that of those who fought in the East.

However, there was no place more corrupting all human nature than Auschwitz. A concentration camp is not only a place with good maintenance, where nothing threatened the military for endless murders, but also a complete lack of discipline. Here the soldiers could do whatever they wanted and to which one could sink. Huge cash flows flowed through Auschwitz at the expense of property stolen from deported persons. Accounting was done carelessly. And how could it be possible to calculate exactly how much the treasury should be replenished, if even the number of arriving prisoners was not taken into account?

The SS men did not hesitate to take their precious things and money. They drank a lot, alcohol was often found among the belongings of the dead. In general, employees in Auschwitz did not limit themselves to anything, leading a rather idle lifestyle.

Doctor Josef Mengele

After Josef Mengele was wounded in 1943, he was deemed unfit for further service and sent as a doctor to Auschwitz, the death camp. Here he had the opportunity to carry out all his ideas and experiments, which were frankly insane, cruel and senseless.

The authorities ordered Mengele to conduct various experiments, for example, on the topic of the effects of cold or height on a person. So, Josef conducted an experiment on temperature effects by enclosing the prisoner on all sides with ice until he died of hypothermia. Thus, it was found out at what body temperature irreversible consequences and death occur.

Mengele liked to experiment on children, especially on twins. The results of his experiments was the death of almost 3 thousand minors. He performed forced sex reassignment surgeries, organ transplants, and painful procedures in an attempt to change the color of his eyes, which eventually led to blindness. This, in his opinion, was proof of the impossibility for a "non-purebred" to become a real Aryan.

In 1945, Josef had to flee. He destroyed all reports of his experiments and, having issued fake documents, fled to Argentina. He lived a quiet life without deprivation and oppression, without being caught and punished.

When Auschwitz collapsed

At the beginning of 1945, the position of Germany changed. Soviet troops began an active offensive. The SS men had to begin the evacuation, which later became known as the "death march". 60,000 prisoners were ordered to walk to the West. Thousands of prisoners were killed along the way. Weakened by hunger and unbearable labor, the prisoners had to walk more than 50 kilometers. Anyone who lagged behind and could not move on was immediately shot. In Gliwice, where prisoners arrived, they were sent in freight cars to concentration camps in Germany.

The liberation of the concentration camps took place at the end of January, when only about 7 thousand sick and dying prisoners remained in Auschwitz who could not leave.

Transcarpathian Jews are waiting for sorting.

Many trains came from Berehove, Mukachevo and Uzhgorod - the cities of Carpathian Rus - at that time part of Czechoslovakia occupied by Hungary. Unlike the previous trains with the deportees, the wagons with the Hungarian exiles from Auschwitz arrived directly to Birkenau along the freshly laid tracks, the construction of which was completed in May 1944.

Laying paths.

The paths have been extended in order to speed up the process of selecting prisoners for those who can still work and be subject to immediate destruction, as well as to more efficiently sort their personal belongings.

Sorting.

After sorting. Working women.

Workable women after pest control.

Distribution to a labor camp. Lily Jacob is seventh from the right in the front row.

Most of the "able-bodied" prisoners were transferred to forced labor camps in Germany, where they were used in the factories of the military industry, which were under air attack. Others - mostly women with children and the elderly - were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival.

Able-bodied men after pest control.

More than a million Jews from Europe died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops under the command of Marshal Konev and Major General Petrenko entered Auschwitz, which at that time contained more than 7,000 prisoners, including 200 children.

Zril and Zeilek, brothers of Lily Jacob.

The exhibition will also include videos of survivors of Auschwitz, who recall the horror they had to endure as children. Interviews by Lily Yakob herself, who found the album, Tibor Beerman, Aranka Segal and other witnesses of one of the most terrible events in the history of mankind are provided for the exhibition by the Shoah Foundation - Institute for Visual History and Education of the University of Southern California.

Truck with things of newcomers to the camp.

Auschwitz children

Distribution to a labor camp.



After sorting. Unemployable men.

After sorting. Unemployable men.

Prisoners declared unfit for work.

Jews recognized as incapacitated are awaiting a decision on their fate near crematorium No. 4.

Selection of Jews on the Birkenau railway platform, known as the ramp. In the background is a column of prisoners on the road to Crematorium II, the building of which is visible at the top center of the photo.

A truckload of new arrivals' belongings passes a group of women, possibly on their way to the gas chambers. Birkenau functioned as a huge enterprise of extermination and plunder during the period of mass deportations of Hungarian Jews. Often the destruction of some, the disinfestation and registration of others were carried out simultaneously so as not to delay the processing of constantly arriving victims.

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 payroll of the 60th Army on socio-demographic grounds (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 the 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 moving 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 strike, 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.

January 27, 2015

From the editors of "Russia Forever": Arkady Mahler: I wrote this article 5 years ago and some patriots told me then that it was not "relevant" enough.

A photo:January 1945Liberated children from the Auschwitz concentration camp. These children are no longer in danger, except for nightmares at night and memory, from which there is no escape. Of the 1,300,000 Auschwitz prisoners, about 234,000 were children.—220,000 Jewish children, 11,000 Gypsies; several thousand Belarusian, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish. By the day of the liberation of Auschwitz, 611 children remained in the camp.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops under the command of Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Konev (1897-1973) liberated the largest Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz. This event marked the liberation mission of the Russian Soviet army, and in 2005 the UN General Assembly recognized January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Originally, Auschwitz is the name of a Polish city located 60 kilometers west of Krakow, occupied by Nazi Germany in 1939. The Germans called it in their own way - Auschwitz, and under this name it is known throughout the non-Slavic world. In the Auschwitz-Auschwitz area, the German authorities built the famous concentration camp, or rather, a whole complex of concentration camps, which made this a household name.

But today, the memory of crimes against humanity, as the charges against the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials were accurately formulated, disappears along with the last witnesses of these crimes, and not every schoolchild, not only in Germany, but even in Poland and Russia itself, imagines what a concentration camp is and why the memory of this nightmare must never leave the human race, if it still wants to remain human. The idea to isolate this or that category of enemies and prisoners in specially designated premises, and bring them to death with inhuman labor and endless psychobiological experiments has no author - its initiators can be imagined anywhere and anytime, but only in the country of victorious National Socialism, in “ civilized" German Empire of the twentieth century, this idea was fully realized, with German methodicalness and Nordic equanimity.

It is impossible to calculate the exact number of all people who died in Auschwitz, as well as in the entire concentration camp system of any totalitarian state, because the very idea of ​​a concentration camp does not involve statistics.

The idea of ​​exterminating people in gas chambers, which today terrifies any sane person, was then considered the height of progress and even the most “humane” means of all possible, because people had to be killed not one at a time, but in whole hundreds, and preferably without too much blood . The first test of gas persecution in Auschwitz was carried out on September 3, 1941, by order of the deputy camp commandant, SS Obersturmführer Karl Fritzsch, when 600 Soviet prisoners of war and another 250 prisoners died of suffocation in a short time. In the future, more than 20,000 people could be killed in a concentration camp in one day. People died from torture, and from hunger, and from unbearable work, and when trying to escape, and if someone suspected them of disobedience, and from their own attempts to commit suicide in this hell created by human hands.

In general, according to general calculations, about one and a half million (!) People died in Auschwitz alone. At the same time, the commandant of this camp in 1940-43, Rudolf Goess, at the Nuremberg Tribunal, stated that about two and a half million (!) People died, and admitted that no one counted the people themselves. When the Russians liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, about seven and a half thousand prisoners were found on its territory, and 1,185,345 men's and women's suits were found in clothing warehouses. In a short time, the Nazis managed to withdraw and kill more than 58 thousand people.

The meeting of the army of Marshal Konev with Auschwitz can only be compared with the meeting of the army of Scipio with Carthage - just as the Romans suddenly saw the temple of Baal with the bodies of thousands of burnt people sacrificed to this demon, so the Russians suddenly saw the hell that the “enlightened ” Germany. It was a meeting with barbarism posing as culture. And it was necessary to have a very strong will to live and hope for salvation, so that even after this meeting they would continue to pretend that nothing like this had happened. That is why the philosopher Theodor Adorno said that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, for what better are we, the survivors, than those who ended up in this hell?

The experience of Auschwitz shows us what a person can be capable of who has ceased to perceive humanity as a value. The people living in Germany in the 30s and 40s of the twentieth century are no worse than any other people who have ever lived anywhere, but they only managed to create a state that systematically destroys people along ethnic lines and sincerely believes that this is how will continue forever. This is evidence of the abyss of evil in which a person can voluntarily find himself and from which everything that we still call culture is trying to protect him. And today there are a lot of people all over the world who would be ready to arrange more than one Auschwitz if they had such an opportunity, and they perceive our feelings about the past as nothing more than our personal problems,

- after all, it cannot even enter their heads that any new Auschwitz can touch them, and often in the first place.

In the same way, there are more and more people in our world who consider the Great Patriotic War nothing more than “Soviet-Nazi” and are ready to talk with pleasure about all the “charms” of the German occupation. But Auschwitz is exactly what could happen to each of us, and also to each of them, if Nazi Germany defeated Soviet Russia. If they had won World War II, they would have been Baltic nationalists, “Banderites”, the “Galicia” division, the so-called. "Russian Liberation Army" of General Vlasov, etc. If they won, then we would have Auschwitz. That is why, out of hatred for historical Russia, today they are ready to step over the last line and deny even what is recognized in the entire European civilization, of which they so want to consider themselves a part - to deny the tragedy of the Holocaust and the Great Victory of 1945. And how can they call for sympathy for their own historical pain, if the price is complete indifference to the real pain of everyone else.

The fact of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Russian army is still not sufficiently appreciated in world history. In Soviet Russia, this event was regarded as a natural component of the overall victory over Nazi Germany, and in the West, the image of the Russian warrior-liberator was carefully replaced by the American one, so that now the average European schoolchild can be sure that all the concentration camps were liberated by the Americans, and the Russians in It was as if the war had never happened at all. But there are facts that cannot be denied - how exactly Russia won the Second World War in the first place, so it was Russia that liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. This is the greatest achievement of our national history, not only no less, but even more important than the launch of a satellite or the flight of Gagarin, because here we are talking directly about the liberation of living people and the victory over the anti-human regime of all times and peoples, which could one day destroy all of humanity. With the liberation of Auschwitz, Russia once again showed its historical mission, and the Soviet regime for the first time received moral justification, so that the USSR before and after the war are practically two different states. Therefore, the liberation of Auschwitz should become one of the main pages in the textbooks of Russian history, it is we who should make films and programs about it, and this event itself should become a symbol of the universal mission of Russia as a country that has repeatedly saved European humanity from death.

To this day, only three photographs taken by prisoners in the camp have survived. In the first, naked Jewish women are led to the gas chambers. The other two show huge piles of human bodies being burned in the open air.

While liberating the Auschwitz camp, the Soviet Army found about 7 tons of hair packed in bags in the warehouses. These were the remnants that the camp authorities did not have time to sell and send to the factories of the Third Reich. The analysis carried out showed that they had traces of hydrogen cyanide, a special toxic component of the preparations called Zyklon B. From human hair, German firms, among other products, produced a hair tailor's bead. Found in one of the cities, the rolls of beading, which are in the window, were given for analysis, the results of which showed that it was made of human hair, most likely female.

It is very difficult to imagine the tragic scenes that were played out daily in the camp. Former prisoners - artists - tried to convey the atmosphere of those days in their work:

Scenes from the life of the Auschwitz camp. Construction on the verification area

Before being sent to the gas chamber. Artist - former prisoner Wladislaw Siwek

To work

The return of prisoners from work. Some exhausted prisoners are carried by their comrades so that the escorts do not shoot the exhausted man on the spot. Artist - former prisoner Wladislaw Siwek

A brass band, consisting of prisoners, plays a march during the return of prisoners from work to the camp. Artist - Mstislav Koshchelnyak (Miesczyslaw Koscielniak)

The prisoners were allowed to bathe. Artist - Mstislav Koshchelnyak (Miesczyslaw Koscielniak)

Captured fugitives awaiting the death penalty. Artist - Mstislav Koshchelnyak (Miesczyslaw Koscielniak). In the entire history of Auschwitz, there were about 700 escape attempts, 300 of which were successful, but if someone escaped, then all his relatives were arrested and sent to the camp, and all the prisoners from his block were killed. It was a very effective method of thwarting attempts to escape.

The photographs of 14-year-old Czeslawa Kwoka, courtesy of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, were taken by Wilhelm Brasse, who worked as a photographer in Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. In December 1942, the Polish Catholic Czesława, originally from Wolka Zlojecka, was sent to Auschwitz with her mother. They both died three months later. In 2005, photographer (and co-prisoner) Brasset described how he photographed Cheslava: “She was so young and so scared. The girl did not realize why she was here and did not understand what she was being told. And then the capo (prison guard) took a stick and hit her face. This German woman just took out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful, young and innocent creature. She cried, but could not help it. Before being photographed, the girl wiped her tears and blood from her broken lip. Frankly, I felt as if they had beaten me, but could not intervene. For me it would have ended fatally "().

Hard work and hunger led to complete exhaustion of the body. From hunger, the prisoners fell ill with dystrophy, which very often ended in death. These photos were taken after the release; they show adult prisoners weighing from 23 to 35 kg.

In Auschwitz, in addition to adults, there were also children who were sent to the camp with their parents. First of all, 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. A few of them, after careful selection, were sent to the camp, where they were subject to the same strict rules as adults. Some of the children, such as twins, were subjected to criminal experiments.

Children, victims of the experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Archives)

Josef Mengele. Did Mengele consider his experiments to be serious research, given the carelessness with which he worked? Most operations were performed without anesthetics. For example, Mengele once removed part of his stomach without anesthesia. Another time, the heart was removed, and again without anesthesia. It was monstrous. Mengele was obsessed with power.

Experiments on twins

Maps of records of anthropometric data of experimental prisoners in the framework of Dr. Mengele's experiments

Pages of the register of the dead, showing the names of 80 boys who died after being injected with phenol as part of medical experiments

Selection in the cellars of block 11. Artist - former prisoner Wladislaw Siwek

Before the execution at the Wall of Death. Artist - former prisoner Wladislaw Siwek

Execution in the courtyard of block 11 at the Wall of Death

One of the scariest exhibits is a model of one of the crematoria in the Auschwitz II camp. On average, about 3 thousand people were killed and burned in such a building per day ...

In the Auschwitz concentration camp, the crematorium was located 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.

Transportation of the bodies of those executed at the Wall of Death by prisoners from the Sonderkommando. former prisoner Wladislaw Siwek

Tears

Security, guards and support staff of the camp. 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%.

On vacation

SS Choir

Auschwitz. Members of the SS Helferinnen (guards) and SS officer Karl Hoecker are sitting on the fence eating blueberries from cups, accompanied by an accordion player

Resting...

Hard day's Night

After work: Richard Baer, ​​unknown person, camp doctor Josef Mengele, Birkenau camp commandant Josef Kramer (partially obscured) and the previous Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess (not to be confused with the namesake and almost namesake - "flyer" Rudolf Hess)

Liberation of Auschwitz. A Soviet nurse is holding a girl, Zinaida Grinevich, in her arms. Here is how it is described in the material about the rescued girl: "Then there is also an old newspaper clipping. With a photograph taken in Auschwitz shortly after the liberation. Children in prison clothes with an old sad look. Barbed wire, watchtowers. baby blanket - Zinaida.

The picture was taken shortly before she, along with two other children, was sent to Lvov, to an orphanage. The three-year-old child had already been separated from his mother for several months, who was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Bartya and the sisters went to a camp in Lithuania. Zinaida was too weak to travel. In addition, the concentration camp executioners needed her as a guinea pig. She was infected with various diseases over and over again. Rubella, chickenpox. And then the Nazi doctors tested anti-drugs on her. Zinaida is one of those children who survived torture."