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At the Gates of
Hell
60 Years Since the
Evacuation and Liberation of Auschwitz
by
Dr. Gideon Greif
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Auschwitz, Poland: Reenactment of the camp liberation,
photographed by the Red Army the day after
liberation |
On
the afternoon of 27 January 1945, the 60th Division of
the Red Army entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
The liberating soldiers stumbled upon some 7,000
prisoners—skeletons barely able to lift themselves out of their
squalid bunks—ill, weak and trembling with fear that their German
overlords would return to finish them off.
Among the prisoners were two hundred children, most of them Jewish
twins, victims of SS physician Josef Mengele’s “medical
experiments.” Some of the medical staff of the camp’s “hospitals”
remained with them, treating them in any way possible.
Sick and infirm prisoners such as these were found throughout the
Auschwitz complex; the main camp, Birkenau, Buna-Monovitz, and the
46 sub-camps located mainly in Silesia and Moravia. Unable to join
the 56,000 inmates evacuated by the Nazis on a “death march” into
the heart of Austria and Germany, they had simply been left to
die.
Leave no traces
The evacuation of Auschwitz-Birkenau was carried out in accordance
with SS head Heinrich Himmler’s
order that no prisoners, documents,
items or German property fall into Allied hands. The trauma
of the hasty evacuation of Majdanek and its capture by the Red
Army in June 1944 was still fresh and painful in the German
memory. There the Germans failed to destroy all the evidence in
time, and the Soviets thus obtained documents and other
incriminating evidence of the gas chambers and crematoria. Worst
of all, in German eyes, was that prisoners who remained in the
camp were able to give first-person accounts of the atrocities
perpetrated there.
Until 17 January 1945, some 67,000 prisoners—most of them
Jewish—were living in Auschwitz-Birkenau, working as slave
laborers in factories at Buna-Monovitz (IG Farben plants) and the
industrial areas of Upper Silesia and Dabrowa. However, already
from the latter half of 1944, the Germans’ began to implement a
“scorched earth” policy at the camp, ensuring no traces of what
happened there would be discovered. Many documents no longer in
use—such as card files and prisoner transport lists—were burned,
including lists of Jews who had been sent for immediate murder in
the gas chambers. Only a few secret documents were preserved:
these later enabled modern historians to reconstruct camp life in
detail. In addition, thousands of articles of clothing, building
materials and wood from disassembled barracks were transported
into the Reich domain for reuse.
The Death March – ‘Hell on Earth’
The Red Army offensive that began in the latter half of January
1945 had thrown the Germans into a state of panic. In an effort to
save their skins, they hastily organized the camp’s evacuation.
All those able to walk were hurried out of the camp and marched
westward. In the freezing cold and snow, thousands of prisoners
were forced to walk many kilometers each day until they reached
the train stations to be transported to concentration camps within
the Third Reich. Between 9,000-15,000 prisoners who were unable to
continue were murdered en route, turning the evacuation into a
true march of death.
The march was accompanied by acts of cruelty and murder on a scale
reminiscent of the atrocities committed at the camp itself:
rearguard SS officers opened fire on any prisoner who attempted to
escape or who sat down on the ground even for a moment. The snowy
landscape soon turned red with the victims’ blood. Local
inhabitants who tried to offer the wretched marchers food and
water were warned off by the German guards.
Chaya (Priwes) Rosenbaum, now living in Israel, was a prisoner on
the Auschwitz Death March: “We ran in the snow like madmen,
without knowing where we were going,” she recalled. “We kept on
running until my mother, who was right beside me, reached the end
of her strength and said, ‘Help me sit.’ I didn’t let her, because
I was afraid the Germans would shoot her... That night, having
marched for two days and a night, they let us sleep in a granary.
It was truly a death march, hell on earth.”
First aid
The Red Army soldiers who entered the
camp on 27 January were horrified at the sight of the corpses
piled up beside the barracks, and the half-dead skeletons
languishing in their bunks. Immediately they gave the inmates any
basic food and medical care they could. Unfortunately, many of the
liberated prisoners died from the excess food that their stomachs
were too shrunken to manage.
In addition, Soviet doctors, nurses and
army medics administered first aid to the liberated prisoners. In
early February 1945, the Polish Red Cross established a hospital
on the site of the liberated camp, which operated through
September 1945 alongside Soviet hospitals. Three or four months
after liberation the prisoners who had recovered began to leave.
Documenting German atrocities
In addition to the humanitarian and
medical activities at the newly liberated camp, Soviet and Polish
cinematographers quickly began documenting the atrocities
committed by the Germans. The Soviet team, headed by Michael
Fyodorovitch Oshurkov, produced a film that was broadcast
around the world; an abbreviated
version is screened today in various languages (including Hebrew)
at the Auschwitz Museum.
A few weeks after liberation, a Soviet
government commission began investigating German crimes at
Auschwitz. The commission surveyed the campgrounds and buildings,
thoroughly studied the ruins of the extermination facilities and
examined what remained of the victims’ plundered belongings. Over
200 prisoners testified before them, including two members of the
Sonderkommando who miraculously survived: Shlomo Dragon and
Henryk Tauber. Based on information supplied by Dragon, some of
the secret lists hidden by his fellow Sonderkommando,
Zalman Gradowsky, near Crematorium III were unearthed and
submitted to the Soviet commission. These lists constituted one of
the rarest and most important documents found at Auschwitz; they
documented the mass killing of Jews in the camp’s gas chambers, as
well as the work of the Sonderkommando themselves. The
Soviet commission also investigated the German medical atrocities
committed at Auschwitz; many prisoners who had been victims of the
“medical experiments” gave first-hand testimony.
The Central Commission for the
Investigation of German Crimes in Poland and the District
Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Krakow also
gathered material, used in 1947 by the Special Court in Poland
during the trial of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess.
Approximately 40 additional camp officers were tried with Hoess,
who was sentenced to death and hanged next to the entrance to the
main camp’s crematorium.
It is now known that some1.5 million
people were murdered at Auschwitz. Most of them—over 1.1 million
men, women and children—were Jewish.
The author is an historian and
educator in the International School for Holocaust Studies
Copyright ©2004 Yad Vashem The Holocaust
Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority |
