Auschwitz Birkenau Nazi concentration camp complex. Liberation of Auschwitz. Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz). Life after release
He ordered the construction of a new camp near the Polish city of Auschwitz (about 60 km west of Krakow). The Auschwitz concentration camp (or Auschwitz in German) quickly became the largest Nazi concentration camp and extermination camp. By the time of liberation, it included three large camps and 45 additional ones.
Auschwitz 1 ("main camp") was the primary camp. It housed the prisoners, there was a place for medical experiments, as well as block 11 (a place of cruel torture) and the Black Wall (a place of execution). Above the entrance to Auschwitz-1 was placed the infamous inscription: "Arbeit macht Frei" ("Work sets you free"). Auschwitz 1 also housed the administration of the entire camp complex.
Auschwitz 2 (or "Birkenau") was built in early 1942 about 3 km from Auschwitz 1 and was the real killing center of the Auschwitz death camp. It was in Birkenau that horrific selections were made on the ramp (railway platform), after which people queued up for the disguised gas chambers. Birkenau was much larger than Auschwitz-1, it housed the most prisoners, including separate sections for women and gypsies.
Auschwitz 3 (or "Buna-Monowitz") was the last to be built as "housing" for prisoner workers at the Buna synthetic rubber plant in Monowitz. 45 other camps also housed prisoners who were used for forced labor.
Arrival and selection at Auschwitz
Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, antisocial citizens, criminals, prisoners of war were collected, stuffed into cattle cars and sent by train to Auschwitz. When trains arrived at Auschwitz 2, or Birkenau, the new arrivals were ordered to leave all their belongings in the car, get off the train, and line up on the railway platform, known as the ramp.
Families who arrived together were immediately severely separated: an SS officer, usually a doctor, divided people into two groups. Most of the women, children, elderly men, and those who looked disabled or ill were sent to form to the left; most of the young men and those who looked strong enough to endure the hard work lined up to the right.
To be on the left meant immediate death in the gas chambers, and those who remained on the right became prisoners of the camp. (Most prisoners will later die from starvation, toil and/or torture.) At the end of the selection, a group of Auschwitz prisoners (it was called "Canada") collected all the things left on the train and sorted them into huge piles, which were then stored in warehouses.
These items (including clothes, eyeglasses, medical supplies, shoes, books, photographs, jewelry, and prayer handkerchiefs) were periodically packaged and shipped back to Germany.
Gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz
The people who were sent to the left were the majority. They did not know that they had been selected for slaughter. The whole system of mass murder was built on keeping this secret. If the victims knew that they were heading towards their death, they certainly would not have obeyed.
But they did not know, so the victims did what the Nazis wanted from them. They were told that they were going to be sent to work and that for this they needed to be disinfected and showered.
They were taken to the first room, where they had to take off all their clothes. Completely naked, men, women and children were led into a large room that looked like a large shower room (there were even mock-ups of shower heads on the walls).
The doors were tightly closed and Zyklon-B pellets were poured into the hole in the roof or in the window, which turned into a poisonous gas as soon as it came into contact with air.
The gas killed quickly, but still not instantly. The victims, finally realizing that this was not a shower room, climbed on top of each other, trying to find under the ceiling clean air. The others scratched at the door, smashing their fingers into blood.
After everyone in the room was dead, the room had to be ventilated and the bodies removed. This was done by special teams (Sonderkommando), assembled from prisoners. It was also their duty to search the bodies and remove all the gold from them, and then place the bodies in the crematorium.
Although there was a gas chamber in Auschwitz 1, most of the massacres took place in Auschwitz 2: there were four main gas chambers in Birkenau, each with its own crematorium. Each of these gas chambers was capable of killing about 6,000 people a day.
Those who were sent to the right during selection on the ramp went through the humiliating procedures of being turned into camp prisoners.
They took away all their clothes and all personal belongings, they shaved their heads. They were given striped prison clothes and a pair of boots, which were often oversized. Then everyone was registered, a number was tattooed on their arm and transferred to one of the Auschwitz camps for work.
The new arrivals were thrown into a cruel, unfair, monstrous camp life. During the first week in Auschwitz, most learned what fate befell their loved ones, those who were sent to the left. Some never recovered from the news.
In the barracks, the prisoners slept on wooden bunks in groups of four. The toilet served as a bucket, which usually overflowed by morning.
In the morning all the prisoners lined up in front of the barracks for roll call. Standing outside for hours during roll call, hot and cold, was torture in itself.
After the roll call, the prisoners walked to the place where they were supposed to work during the day. While some prisoners worked in factories, others worked outside. After many hours of hard work, the prisoners returned to the camp for the next roll call.
Food was scarce and usually consisted of a bowl of soup and bread. Hungry and extremely hard work deliberately brought prisoners to death.
Medical experiments at Auschwitz
In addition, on the ramp, Nazi doctors chose among the newly arrived people objects for experiments. They were most interested in twins and dwarfs, but they selected for experiments and people with any other features, for example, with eyes of different colors.
There was a team of doctors at Auschwitz who did experiments, but the two most famous are Dr. Karl Klauberg and. Dr. Clauberg focused on finding ways to sterilize women using unconventional methods such as x-rays and injections of various substances into the uterus. Dr. Mengele experimented with identical twins, hoping to find the secret to cloning "true Aryans".
When, at the end of 1944, the Nazis realized that the Russians were successfully advancing towards Germany, they decided to destroy the evidence of their atrocities in Auschwitz. Himmler ordered the destruction of the crematoria, and the human ashes were buried in huge pits and covered with grass. Many warehouses were emptied and their contents sent back to Germany.
In mid-January 1945, the Nazis took the last 58,000 prisoners out of Auschwitz and sent them on a death march. They planned to drive these exhausted prisoners to camps closer to or inside Germany.
On January 27, 1945, the Russians reached Auschwitz. When they entered the camp, they found 7,650 prisoners who had been left behind. The camp was liberated, the prisoners were free.
wrote February 6 at 14:44Yes, remember that it is no longer there, like the USSR. Breaking up is common property empires, sooner or later.
Lara, you constantly always and everywhere write that the USSR collapsed, since all empires are disintegrating. I agree, there is nothing eternal in the world. I’m not sure that you even need my comment here, it’s impossible to convince anyone on the Internet, but I’ll write it anyway.
The collapse of the USSR was not due to a collapse in oil prices. No, this, of course, also played a role, but this is rather the tenth case, if not the twentieth. In 1990 There was a referendum in which 70% of the country's population voted for the Union. Yeltsin repeatedly stated that Russia would never leave the Union, even if it remained alone in it.
So what happened? It is no longer a secret that our American friends have invested a lot of money in the project of dismembering the USSR.
Where did they go? In such cases, the press is necessarily hired, which begins to distort history, hammering people into the right opinion.
Secondly, their own people in the economy are beginning to engage in sabotage. Here, the products are hidden, and the goods are no longer shipped where they need to be shipped. Gorbachev himself once stated that in the autumn of 1991. about 20 echelons with meat could not get to Moscow.
What about Gorbachev. My uncle worked as a truck driver then. So, he is going to Moscow from Belgorod, carrying meat. For 100 km. in front of Moscow at the traffic police post he is stopped by incomprehensible people and asked what he is carrying. Upon learning, they are ordered to return back. And the police stand nearby and just watch.
So was there a conspiracy? No one will write anywhere at the present time - I am such and such a spy, I participated in the dismemberment of the USSR. American money is gone, isn't it just in the sand?!
Even Dostoevsky in "Demons" described how five revolutionaries can make a complete mess in the city. Dostoevsky was in a revolutionary circle and he took all this from life. If there were secret societies then, why couldn't they reappear in the 80s in the USSR?
However, you deny the conspiracy theory, and to prove something to you here is simply unrealistic.
Now about history. About how historical documents are forged, I already wrote to you. In any case, you remained of your opinion - Stalin and everything connected with him is bad and terrible. I don't see the point in returning to this topic.
I propose to consider how people are brainwashed by the topic of Afghanistan - today is just the day for the withdrawal of troops.
Why did an empire called the USSR send troops there? To nip in the bud the processes that are now going on throughout the East, from Kyrgyzstan to Tanzania, and from China to Mauritania. The USSR wanted to put Afghanistan on a peaceful footing. There were just not very many of these same Mujahideen, but here, again, the Good Empire helped. We fought with them, or rather not with them, but with their mercenaries - everything is clear here.
The war lasted almost 10 years, although in a good way it real war still cannot be named. In any case, the USSR withdrew its troops.
Have we lost the war? I would not say so, because then Najibula was firmly seated there for almost 4 years.
From the Kremlin, they promise to the last, pull rubber, and then they simply throw their faithful ally. Although, in a good way, Najibula would have found fuel himself. So was there a betrayal from Moscow? Definitely! But at present, the media somehow do not like to discuss this topic, because here a thinking person will begin to spin the thread further. Why did the Russian government suddenly decide to saw off one leg on a stool by a chair?.... It was after this that we got Chechnya with the Wahabis and Dagestan?.... There can be no emptiness in the world. Either you advance and dictate your own rules, or you will live by someone else's rules. Lara, you live in Israel, I think you understand this like no one else.
No one will ever say - I'm a fool, I was fooled from the TV. At the same time, many people do not know a lot of things, but in an aggressive form they submit their own opinion. How to call them? Only zombies - they honestly and sincerely think that they lived not under Brezhnev, but under Stalin. Zombies think only in a given direction, repeating like a mantra: Stalin, Beria, Gulag .....
The village of Brzezinka is located just three kilometers from Auschwitz. Here, in October 1941, after there was no longer enough space for newly residing prisoners, work began on the construction of another concentration camp, called Auschwitz II, which was destined to become the largest in the Nazi death camp system. After the end of the war, this place became one of the worst symbols of the Holocaust. , also known as Birkenau, was immediately built as a death camp and was aimed at the mass extermination of prisoners - wagons with prisoners flocked here from all the territories occupied by the Nazis, and the merciless servants of the SS killed up to 20 thousand people here daily. The events that unfolded here are really shocking, and walking through the vast deserted territory of the camp, it sometimes seemed to me that I was surrounded by thousands of silent souls, brutally tortured on 175 hectares of Polish land...
In 1942, the construction of the first section of the camp was completed, where trains with future prisoners began to arrive. Upon arrival, everyone was divided into four groups. Most of the prisoners brought to Auschwitz II - mostly old people, women and children, as well as those who were declared unfit for work - were immediately sent to the gas chambers. The second, smaller group of prisoners went to the hardest work at the enterprises of the Third Reich. Another part of the prisoners - mostly dwarfs and twins - went to one of the laboratories for medical experiments, which was in charge of Josef Mengele, nicknamed the "Angel of Death". Finally, some women were selected in the fourth group, called "Canada" - they were used as servants, as well as to sort the personal property of prisoners.
Auschwitz is a city that has become a symbol of the ruthlessness of the fascist regime; the city where one of the most senseless dramas in the history of mankind unfolded; a city where hundreds of thousands of people were brutally murdered. In the concentration camps located here, the Nazis built the most terrible death conveyors, destroying up to 20 thousand people every day ... Today I begin to talk about one of the most terrible places on earth - the concentration camps in Auschwitz. I warn you, the photos and descriptions below can leave a heavy mark on the soul. Although I personally believe that every person should touch and pass through these terrible pages of our history...
There will be very few of my comments on the photos in this post - this is too delicate a topic, to express my point of view on which, it seems to me, I have no moral right. I honestly admit that visiting the museum left a heavy scar on my heart, which still does not want to heal...
Most of the comments on the photos are based on the guidebook (
The concentration camp in Auschwitz was the largest Nazi concentration camp for Poles and prisoners of other nationalities, whom Hitler's fascism doomed to isolation and gradual destruction by hunger, hard work, experiments, and also to immediate death as a result of mass and individual executions. Since 1942 the camp has become largest center extermination of European Jews. Most of the Jews deported to Auschwitz died in the gas chambers immediately after their arrival, without being registered or marked with camp numbers. That is why it is very difficult to establish the exact number of those killed - historians agree on a figure of about one and a half million people.
But back to the history of the camp. In 1939, Auschwitz and its environs became part of the Third Reich. The city was renamed Auschwitz. In the same year, the fascist command came up with the idea of creating a concentration camp. The empty pre-war barracks near Auschwitz were chosen as the place for the creation of the first camp. The concentration camp is named Auschwitz I.
The education order is dated April 1940. Rudolf Goess is appointed commandant of the camp. On June 14, 1940, the Gestapo sends the first prisoners to Auschwitz I - 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnow.
The camp is entered by a gate with a cynical inscription: "Arbeit macht frei" (Work makes free), through which the prisoners went to work daily and returned ten hours later. In a small square next to the kitchen, the camp band played marches that were supposed to speed up the movement of prisoners and make it easier for the Nazis to count them.
At the time of its foundation, the camp consisted of 20 buildings: 14 one-story and 6 two-story. In 1941-1942, one floor was added to all one-story buildings by the forces of prisoners and eight more buildings were built. Total number There were 28 multi-story buildings in the camp (except for the kitchen and utility buildings). The average number of prisoners fluctuated between 13-16 thousand prisoners, and in 1942 it reached over 20 thousand. The prisoners were placed in blocks, using attic and basement rooms for this purpose.
Along with the growth in the number of prisoners, the territorial volume of the camp increased, which gradually turned into a huge plant for the destruction of people. Auschwitz I became the base for a whole network of new camps.
In October 1941, after there was no longer enough room for newly relocated prisoners in Auschwitz I, work began on the construction of another concentration camp, called Auschwitz II (it is also known as Biereknau and Brzezinka). This camp was destined to become the largest in the system of Nazi death camps. I .
In 1943, another camp, Auschwitz III, was built in Monowitz near Auschwitz on the territory of the IG Ferbenindustrie plant. In addition, about 40 branches of the Auschwitz camp were built in 1942-1944, which were subordinate to Auschwitz III and were located mainly near metallurgical plants, mines and factories that use prisoners as cheap labor.
The clothes and all personal items were taken away from the arriving prisoners, they were cut, disinfected and washed, and then they were given numbers and registered. Initially, each of the prisoners was photographed in three positions. Since 1943, prisoners began to be tattooed - Auschwitz became the only Nazi camp in which prisoners were tattooed with their number.
Depending on the reasons for the arrest, the prisoners received triangles of different colors, which, along with the numbers, were sewn onto camp clothes. Political prisoners were supposed to have a red triangle, 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. Black triangles were received by gypsies and those prisoners whom the Nazis considered anti-social elements. Purple triangles were sewn on for Jehovah's Witnesses, pink ones for homosexuals, and green ones for criminals.
The scanty striped camp clothes did not protect the prisoners from the cold. Linen was changed at intervals of several weeks, and sometimes even at monthly intervals, and the prisoners did not have the opportunity to wash it, which led to epidemics of various diseases, especially typhus and typhoid fever, as well as scabies.
The hands of the camp clock ruthlessly and monotonously measured the time of the prisoner's life. From the morning to the evening gong, from one bowl of soup to the next, from the first check to the moment when the prisoner's corpse was counted for the last time.
One of the disasters of camp life was verification, which checked the number of prisoners. They lasted for several, and sometimes more than a dozen hours. The camp authorities very often announced penal checks, during which the prisoners had to squat or kneel. There were also cases when they were ordered to keep their hands up for several hours.
Along with executions and gas chambers, hard work was an effective means of exterminating prisoners. Prisoners were employed in various sectors of the economy. At first, they worked in the construction of the camp: they built new buildings and barracks, roads and drainage ditches. A little later, the cheap labor of prisoners increasingly began to be used by the industrial enterprises of the Third Reich. The prisoner was ordered to do the work by running, without a second of rest. The pace of work, meager portions of food, as well as constant beatings and mockery increased mortality. During the return of the prisoners to the camp, the dead or wounded were dragged or carried on wheelbarrows or carts.
The calorie content of the prisoner's daily ration was 1300-1700 calories. For breakfast, the prisoner received about a liter of "coffee" or a decoction of herbs, for lunch - about 1 liter of lean soup, often boiled from rotten vegetables. Dinner consisted of 300-350 grams of black clay bread and a small amount of other toppings (eg 30g sausage or 30g margarine or cheese) and a herbal drink or "coffee".
In Auschwitz I, most of the prisoners lived in two-story brick buildings. Housing conditions at all times of the existence of the camp were catastrophic. The prisoners brought in by the first echelons slept on straw scattered on the concrete floor. Hay bedding was later introduced. About 200 prisoners slept in a room that could barely fit 40-50 people. Three-tiered bunks installed later did not improve living conditions at all. Most often, 2 prisoners lay on one tier of bunks.
The malarial climate of Auschwitz, poor living conditions, hunger, scanty clothing, unchangeable for a long time, unwashed and unprotected from the cold, rats and insects led to massive epidemics that drastically reduced the ranks of prisoners. A large number of patients who applied to the hospital were not accepted due to its overcrowding. In this regard, SS doctors periodically carried out selection among both patients and prisoners located in other buildings. Weakened, and not promising a quick recovery, they were sent to death in the gas chambers or killed in the hospital by injecting a dose of phenol directly into their hearts.
That is why the prisoners called the hospital "the threshold of the crematorium." In Auschwitz, the prisoners were subjected to numerous criminal experiments conducted by SS doctors. So, for example, Professor Karl Clauberg, in order to develop a rapid method for the biological destruction of the Slavs, conducted criminal sterilization experiments on Jewish women in building No. 10 of the main camp. 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 grafting was performed ... During these experiments, hundreds of prisoners and prisoners died.
Despite the difficult living conditions, constant terror and danger, the prisoners of the camp carried out secret underground activities against the Nazis. She took different forms. Establishing contacts with the Polish population living in the area around the camp made possible the illegal transfer of food and medicine. Information about crimes committed by the SS was transmitted from the camp, surname lists prisoners, SS men and physical evidence of crimes. All parcels were hidden in different, often specially designed objects, and correspondence between the camp and the centers of the resistance movement was encrypted.
In the camp, work was carried out to help prisoners and explanatory work in the field of international solidarity against Nazism. Cultural activities were also carried out, consisting in the organization of discussions and meetings, at which the prisoners recited the best works domestic literature, as well as in the secret conduct of worship.
Verification area - here the SS men checked the number of prisoners.
Public executions were also carried out here on a portable or common gallows.
In July 1943, the SS hanged 12 Polish prisoners on it for maintaining relations with the civilian population and helping 3 comrades escape.
The courtyard between buildings No. 10 and No. 11 is fenced with a high wall. Wooden shutters put on the windows in Block 10 were supposed to make it impossible to observe the executions taking place here. In front of the "Wall of Death" the SS shot several thousand prisoners, mostly Poles.
In the dungeons of building No. 11 there was a camp prison. In the halls on the right and left sides of the corridor, prisoners were placed awaiting the verdict of the military field court, which came to Auschwitz from Katowitz and, during a meeting that lasted 2-3 hours, passed from several dozen to over a hundred death sentences.
Before being shot, everyone had to undress in the washrooms, and if the number of those sentenced to death was too small, the sentence was carried out right there. If the number of those sentenced was sufficient, they were taken through a small door to be shot to the "Wall of Death".
The system of punishment that the SS applied in Hitler's concentration camps was one of the fragments of a well-planned deliberate extermination of prisoners. A prisoner could be punished for everything: for picking an apple, urinating while working, or for pulling out his own tooth to exchange it for bread, even for work that was too slow, according to the SS man.
Prisoners were punished with whips. They were hung by their twisted arms on special poles, placed in the dungeons of the camp prison, forced to perform penalty exercises, racks, or sent to penalty teams.
In September 1941, an attempt was made here to mass exterminate people with the poisonous gas Zyklon B. Then about 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick prisoners from the camp hospital died.
In the cells located in the basements, prisoners and civilians were placed who were suspected of having connections with prisoners or assisting with escapes, prisoners sentenced to starvation for escaping a cellmate and those whom the SS considered guilty of violating camp rules or against whom an investigation was conducted. .
All the property that the people deported to the camp brought with them was taken away by the SS. It was sorted and stacked in huge barracks in Aušivce II. These warehouses were called "Canada". I'll talk more about them in my next post.
The property located in the warehouses of concentration camps was then exported to the Third Reich for the needs of the Wehrmacht.Gold teeth, which were removed from the corpses of dead people, were melted down into ingots and sent to the SS Central Sanitary Directorate. The ashes of the burned prisoners were used as manure or they were covered with nearby ponds and riverbeds.
Items that previously belonged to people who died in the gas chambers were used by SS men who were part of the camp staff. For example, they turned to the commandant with a request to issue prams, things for babies and other items. Despite the fact that the loot was constantly taken out by entire trains, the warehouses were overflowing, and the spaces between them were often filled with piles of unsorted luggage.
As the Soviet Army approached Auschwitz, the most valuable things were urgently removed from the warehouses. A few days before the liberation, the SS men set fire to the warehouses, erasing the traces of the crime. 30 barracks burned down, and in those that remained, after the liberation, many thousands of pairs of shoes, clothes, toothbrushes, shaving brushes, glasses, prostheses were found ...
Freeing the camp in Auschwitz, Soviet army found about 7 tons of hair packed in bags in 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 contained traces of hydrogen cyanide, a special poisonous component of drugs 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.
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.
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 ...
And this is the crematorium in Auschwitz-I. It was located behind the camp fence.
The largest room in the crematorium was the mortuary, which was converted into a temporary gas chamber. Here, in 1941 and 1942, Soviet prisoners and Jews from the ghettos organized by the Germans in Upper Silesia were killed.
In the second part, there are two out of three furnaces reconstructed from preserved genuine metal elements, in which about 350 bodies were burned during the day. In each retort, 2-3 corpses were placed at the same time.
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 Potentially able-bodied prisoners were selected. 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 in Nazi Germany and one more feature. 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.
Luftwaffe, air Force Germany, ordered research on the topic: the impact of high altitude on the performance of the pilot. 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, which helped some of the prisoners escape, and in October 1944, the group destroyed one of the crematoria. Due to the approach Soviet troops The Auschwitz administration began evacuating prisoners to camps located on German territory. When January 27, 1945 soviet soldiers occupied Auschwitz, they found about 7.5 thousand 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 them 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 penalty through 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 ...
