On January 27, 1945, the Soviet soldiers of the Red Army arrived in the Polish city of Auschwitz (Oświęcim in Polish) discovering the enormous concentration and extermination camp used during the Nazi genocide, which had previously been evacuated: thus ended the largest mass murder in history occurred in one place. On 1 November 2005, a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly officially established Remembrance Day on this day to remember the victims of the Holocaust, that is, the extermination of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, political prisoners and other ethnic and religious minorities by part of Nazi Germany and its allied countries during World War II.
In the years in which the Auschwitz camp was operational, 1.3 million people were locked up there, and only a few thousand survived: according to data from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the most important body that collects data on the Holocaust, the German SS (paramilitary group that operated on the orders of the Nazi regime) killed there at least 960 thousand Jews, 74 thousand Poles, 21 thousand Roma, 15 thousand Soviet prisoners of war and 10 thousand people of other nationalities. Many were killed in the gas chambers or summarily, others died from diseases contracted in the camp, from hunger or from the backbreaking work to which they were subjected. Still others were killed during medical experiments in which they were used as guinea pigs. More people died in Auschwitz than in any other Nazi concentration camp.
What was Auschwitz?
After the invasion of Poland by Germany in September 1939 – which marked the beginning of the Second World War – and after the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Germans (June 1941), the SS began to put into practice mass elimination operations of entire Jewish communities. In 1941, the use of mobile gas chambers mounted on trucks was introduced and the Nazis opened several extermination camps. The Auschwitz camp played a fundamental role in the so-called “final solution”, as it was part of a larger complex that also included the Birkenau extermination camp and the Monowitz labor camp. At Auschwitz-Birkenau in the late spring of 1943, four gas chambers operated using the toxic substance known as Zyklon B.
The Auschwitz camp – known as Auschwitz I – was purely a concentration camp (concentration camp) which could contain around 20 thousand prisoners and served as the administrative center of the entire complex. Mainly Polish political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, German common criminals, prostitutes, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Jews were held here. It is estimated that around 70 thousand people were killed in total in this structure. Furthermore, it was at the entrance to this camp that the famous writing “work sets you free” (“Work makes you free”).
The Birkenau camp – known as Auschwitz II – was located about 3 km from the main camp and could contain up to 100 thousand prisoners: it was instead a real extermination camp (Extermination camp), and this is where most of the Jewish prisoners were locked up and killed. Monowitz – also known as Auschwitz III – was instead a labor camp (Labor camp) where prisoners were exploited to work on the construction of a large new chemical factory called Buna Werke, which however never went into production.
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The liberation of Auschwitz
In the summer of 1944 the Soviet offensive took the army to the Vistula river, about 200 kilometers from the Auschwitz concentration camp, and at the beginning of 1945 the Vistula-Oder Operation began, the Army’s offensive Red to move towards the center of Germany.
At that moment, the Nazi leaders realized the need to proceed with the dismantling of the concentration camp. Soviet forces entered the Majdanek camp, near Lublin, Poland, in July 1944. In those months the Red Army also conquered the areas where the Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps were located, the largest after that of Auschwitz, which were also in Poland. In November 1944, two months before the liberation, the Nazi Interior Minister Heinrich Himmler ordered the destruction of the gas chambers of Birkenau which were still in operation (but not those of Auschwitz) and on 17 January 1945 in Auschwitz the last general appeal of the prisoners.
The SS began to evacuate the camp in mid-January 1945. Thousands of prisoners were killed while others, around 60,000, were forced to evacuate and take part in what would later become known as “death marches”.
The marches proceeded in two different directions: towards the north-west, up to Gliwice, for 55 kilometers along which prisoners from the subcamps of eastern Upper Silesia (Bismarckhuette, Althammer and Hindenburg) were also collected; and westwards, for about 60 kilometres, in the direction of Wodzislaw. During the journey, the SS shot anyone who gave in and was no longer able to continue: it was calculated that around 15 thousand prisoners died during these marches. Those who survived were instead loaded onto freight trains and taken to concentration camps in Germany.
On January 27, when the first Soviet troops under General Kurockin entered Auschwitz around midday, they found around 7,000 prisoners who had been left in the camp. Many were children and about fifty of them were under eight years old. They had survived because they had been used as guinea pigs for medical research. The soldiers also found piles of clothes and tons of hair ready to be sold. And then glasses, suitcases, kitchen utensils and shoes: the Auschwitz museum, among other things, has more than 100 thousand pairs of shoes.
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The arrival of the Russian soldiers was described by Primo Levi in the first chapter of the book Truce (1963), entitled “The Thaw”. Levi was in the Monowitz concentration camp:
The first Russian patrol arrived in sight of the camp around midday on January 27, 1945. Charles and I were the first to see it: we were transporting the body of Sòmogyi, the first of the dead among our roommates, to the mass grave. We overturned the stretcher on the rotten snow, because the grave was now full, and no other burial was possible: Charles took off his cap, to greet the living and the dead.
They were four young soldiers on horseback, who were proceeding cautiously, with machine guns in their arms, along the road that bordered the camp. When they reached the fences, they stopped to look, exchanging short and timid words, and turning glances linked by a strange embarrassment on the disheveled corpses, on the shattered barracks, and on the few of us alive.
To us they seemed admirably corporeal and real, suspended (the road was higher than the field) on their enormous horses, between the gray of the snow and the gray of the sky, motionless under the gusts of damp wind threatening to thaw.
It seemed to us, and so it was, that the nothingness full of death in which we had been wandering for ten days like extinguished stars had found its solid centre, a nucleus of condensation: four armed men, but not armed against us; four messengers of peace, with rough and childish faces under their heavy fur helmets.
They didn’t say hello, they didn’t smile; they appeared oppressed, as well as by pity, by a confused restraint, which sealed their mouths and captivated their eyes to the funereal scene.
(…) Charles and I stood near the hole full of bruised limbs, while others knocked down the fence; then we returned with the empty stretcher, to bring the news to our companions. For the rest of the day nothing happened, which did not surprise us, and which we had been accustomed to for a long time.
(…) The morning brought us the first signs of freedom. About twenty Polish civilians, men and women, arrived (evidently under orders from the Russians), and with great enthusiasm they began to tinker to bring order and cleanliness to the barracks and clear away the corpses. Around midday a frightened child arrived, dragging a cow by the halter; he made us understand that he was for us, and that the Russians had sent her, then he abandoned the beast and fled like a flash. I couldn’t say how, the poor animal was slaughtered in a few minutes, gutted, quartered, and its remains were scattered throughout all the recesses of the field where the survivors were hiding.
Starting the next day, we saw other Polish girls wandering around the camp, pale with pity and disgust: they cleaned the sick and treated their wounds as best they could. They also lit a huge fire in the middle of the camp, which they fueled with the wreckage of the destroyed barracks, and on which they cooked soup in makeshift containers.
Finally, on the third day, a four-wheeled cart was seen entering the field, joyfully driven by Yankel, a Häftling: he was a young Russian Jew, perhaps the only Russian among the survivors, and as such he had naturally found himself wearing the function of interpreter and liaison officer with the Soviet commands. Between loud cracks of the whip, he announced that he had the task of bringing all the living among us to the central concentration camp of Auschwitz, now transformed into a gigantic hospital, in small groups of thirty or forty a day, starting with the most seriously ill.