The liberation of Auschwitz

On Saturday 27 January 1945 soldiers of the Soviet 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front entered the Auschwitz camp complex near Oświęcim. In the morning they reached the camp at Monowitz (Monowice), and in the afternoon the main camp and Birkenau. There they found some 7,000 prisoners, most of them sick and utterly emaciated, several hundred unburied bodies, crematoria that had been blown up, and half-burnt storehouses full of the clothes, shoes and hair of the murdered. It was the largest German concentration camp and the largest site of the extermination of the Jews in occupied Europe.

Liberation did not come suddenly. For a week the camp had had no regular garrison. The SS had marched most of the prisoners out ten days earlier on death marches, and since the autumn of 1944 the Germans had been trying to erase the most important traces of their crimes. For many survivors, as they later wrote, there was no single moment of freedom. There was a succession of days of fear, hunger and uncertainty that ended with the sight of the first Soviet soldiers.

The camp in its last months

Auschwitz was set up in 1940 as a camp for Polish political prisoners. In the spring of 1941 Heinrich Himmler ordered its expansion, and in 1942–1944 Birkenau became the main site for the murder of Jews deported from all over Europe. In the summer of 1944 most of Hungary’s Jews died there; in August the Gypsy family camp was liquidated, and on 7 October members of the Sonderkommando staged an armed revolt and set fire to Crematorium IV.

In the autumn of 1944 the SS began to wind down the machinery of extermination. Gassing stopped, and the equipment of the gas chambers and the furnaces of Crematoria II and III was dismantled and largely shipped off into the interior of the Reich. The pits containing ashes were filled in and sown with grass, and card indexes and transport lists were burnt in the offices. From August 1944 prisoners, above all those fit for work, were also sent to camps in Germany. According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, some 65,000 people had been removed in this way by mid-January 1945. Yet several tens of thousands of prisoners still remained in the main camp, in Birkenau, in Monowitz and in several dozen subcamps in Upper Silesia.

The death marches

On 12 January 1945 the Red Army launched its great offensive from the bridgeheads on the Vistula. The German front in Poland collapsed within days. On 17 January the last roll call was held at Auschwitz. It counted 67,012 prisoners in the main camp, Birkenau, Monowitz and the subcamps. That same day the SS doctor Josef Mengele, who since May 1943 had carried out selections and criminal experiments on twins there, left the camp.

On the evening of 17 January and over the following days, on the orders of the Higher SS and Police Leader in Breslau, Ernst-Heinrich Schmauser, columns of several hundred to several thousand people were marched out of the camps. According to the Auschwitz Museum this amounted to about 56,000 prisoners. They walked in frost and snow, in wooden clogs and striped camp uniforms, for several days and nights. The main routes led to Wodzisław Śląski, 63 kilometres away, and to Gliwice, about 55 kilometres away. There the prisoners were loaded into open coal wagons and taken to camps in the Reich, among them Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen. Trains from Wodzisław travelled via Ostrava, among other routes.

The SS escorts killed on the spot those who could not keep up, who fell or who tried to escape. Hundreds of bodies were left along the roads leading west. The inhabitants of nearby villages helped some of the escapees, hiding and feeding them, although this was punishable by death. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum estimates that between 9,000 and 15,000 Auschwitz prisoners died on the death marches and in the transports. Many more died in the overcrowded camps in Germany where they ended up in the last months of the war.

Nine days without masters

More than 9,000 prisoners who were unable to walk remained in the camp, among them several hundred children. According to the Museum, the SS intended to kill them, and only the haste of the retreat and a chance combination of circumstances meant that most survived. Not all did. In the days between the departure of the last columns and the arrival of the Red Army, SS men murdered some 700 Jewish prisoners in Birkenau and in the subcamps at Wesoła, Gliwice, Czechowice and Blachownia Śląska.

From 18 January camp records were burnt on a massive scale. On 20 January the ruins of Crematoria II and III were blown up. On 20 or 21 January most of the guards abandoned the watchtowers. SS detachments still patrolled the camp grounds, and passing Wehrmacht units joined the SS men in plundering the camp stores. On 23 January the complex of storehouses holding the property stolen from the victims, which the prisoners called “Kanada”, was set on fire. The barracks burned for several days. On 26 January Crematorium V, the last to have been in operation until shortly before, was blown up.

The prisoners left behind had to fend for themselves. The sick lay in unheated barracks without water or light. The stronger ones gathered food from abandoned stores, melted snow and carried out the dead. Lying in the camp hospital at Monowitz at the time, ill with scarlet fever, was the Italian chemist Primo Levi. He described those last days in the chapter “The Story of Ten Days” of his book If This Is a Man: a dozen or so sick men in one room, a stove cobbled together from scraps, shared bread and dying neighbours whom there was no longer anyone to carry out.

27 January

The offensive of Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front was driving towards Silesia from the Baranów–Sandomierz bridgehead. On 18 and 19 January his troops took Kraków, and over the following days General Pavel Kurochkin’s 60th Army advanced westwards along the Vistula towards Oświęcim and the Upper Silesian Industrial Region. According to the Auschwitz Museum, the Soviet command received more detailed information about the camp only after taking Kraków. Liberating the prisoners was not an objective of the operation. The camp simply lay on the axis of the advance, and the fighting for the town and the surrounding villages lasted several days.

The first to enter the camp at Monowitz, next to the IG Farben works, were soldiers of the 100th Rifle Division (PL), on the morning of 27 January. Some accounts name its 454th Rifle Regiment. At about 3 p.m. units of the 322nd Rifle Division and other formations of the 60th Army reached the main camp and Birkenau, which lay by the village of Brzezinka. According to the Museum, more than 230 Soviet soldiers fell in the fighting for the camps, Oświęcim and the surrounding area, among them the commander of the 472nd Rifle Regiment, Colonel Semyon Besprozvanny. Most of them were buried in the municipal cemetery in Oświęcim.

Who first opened the camp gate can no longer be established with certainty. The first is often said to have been Major Anatoly Shapiro, a Ukrainian Jew and battalion commander in the 100th Division, on whom Ukraine posthumously conferred the title of Hero of Ukraine in 2006. Other soldiers and officers left similar accounts. The commander of the 107th Rifle Division, Vasily Petrenko (PL), recalled years later that although he saw death at the front every day, he was shaken by the hatred with which the Germans had treated the prisoners, turned into living skeletons. He added that he truly learned of the fate of the Jews only at Auschwitz.

The prisoners greeted the soldiers in different ways. Some wept and threw their arms around them; others, terrified, hid, taking them for another SS trap. Primo Levi remembered the first four soldiers on horseback who rode up to the hospital at Monowitz at noon. According to his later account, they neither greeted the prisoners nor smiled. They were silent, as if weighed down by shame at the sight of another’s crime. In the main camp Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, who was lying in the camp hospital, lived to see the liberation. His wife had died in Birkenau at the beginning of January, and his daughters had earlier been taken to Bergen-Belsen.

What the soldiers found

According to the Auschwitz Museum, the Soviet soldiers found some 7,000 prisoners in the main camp, Birkenau and Monowitz. About 500 more were liberated, earlier or in the days that followed, in subcamps including Jaworzno, Libiąż, Jawiszowice, Wesoła, Świętochłowice and Blachownia Śląska. Some accounts give a total of about 7,500 survivors. They were citizens of more than twenty countries, most of them Jews, along with Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners of other nationalities. Among the survivors were more than 400 children, including the Jewish twins on whom Mengele had experimented.

In the main camp and Birkenau lay about 600 bodies of prisoners shot by the SS during the retreat or dead from exhaustion. In the storage barracks that had survived the fire the soldiers found, according to the findings of a Soviet commission, some 370,000 men’s suits, some 837,000 women’s coats and dresses, tens of thousands of pairs of shoes and about 7 tonnes of human hair, packed in bales for dispatch. Later tests of the hair at the Institute of Forensic Research in Kraków revealed traces of hydrogen cyanide, the main component of Zyklon B. There were also heaps of spectacles, prostheses, toothbrushes and suitcases bearing the names and addresses of the deportees.

Most of the camp records had been burnt or removed. Parts of the card indexes, hospital registers and death registers survived, however, and in the ground near the crematoria manuscripts buried by Sonderkommando prisoners had survived and were found in the years that followed. The ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria, though blown up, kept a recognisable shape and became one of the main pieces of evidence of the crime.

Help for the survivors

First aid was given to the liberated prisoners by Soviet doctors and orderlies. Soon two Soviet field hospitals arrived at the camp. Polish volunteers also hurried to help, from Oświęcim, Brzeszcze and the surrounding area and later from other parts of the country, chiefly members of the Polish Red Cross. At the beginning of February the Polish Red Cross Camp Hospital was set up on the initiative and under the direction of the Warsaw surgeon Dr Józef Bellert (PL). Before larger-scale help arrived, a few doctors and a dozen or so nurses looked after some 2,200 sick people in Birkenau. The sick were gradually moved to the brick blocks of the main camp, which had been turned into hospital wards.

According to the Museum, more than 4,500 people came under the care of the Soviet hospitals and the Red Cross hospital, most of them bedridden with starvation diarrhoea, tuberculosis and other diseases of emaciation. Nurses scrubbed filth and excrement from the bunks. The sick were accustomed to food gradually, starting from a few spoonfuls of mashed-potato soup a day. For many weeks bread was still found under the straw mattresses, hidden by former prisoners for the next day because they could not believe they would get another ration. Despite the care, about 600 of the hospitalised died, most of them in February and March 1945.

The stronger ones left the camp immediately after liberation, on foot or on whatever transport they could find. The rest left over the next three or four months. Some Jews from Western and Southern Europe made their way home by a roundabout route through the USSR, for instance by train to Odessa and from there by ship to Marseille. In February and March the children were taken to orphanages and care homes. Only a few were found by their parents. In June 1945 some 300 former prisoners too weak to be moved were still in the camp.

Documentation and silence

In the first weeks after the liberation a Soviet military film crew shot footage for a documentary known as Chronicle of the Liberation of Auschwitz, which is still shown at the Museum today. Some scenes, including the children in striped uniforms walking out behind the barbed wire, were filmed later as reconstructions with the participation of survivors. Soviet and Polish commissions of inquiry also came to the camp, questioning witnesses, securing documents and carrying out expert examinations.

The liberation of Auschwitz attracted little attention at the time. The first extensive report, by the war correspondent Boris Polevoy, was published in Moscow’s Pravda only on 2 February. In keeping with the line of Soviet propaganda, it did not mention that most of the victims were Jews. It wrote of “victims of fascism” and of citizens of various nations. The report of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, published in May 1945, gave a figure of at least 4 million murdered. For decades this inflated figure appeared on the plaques of the memorial at Birkenau. The Western press gave the liberation of the camp only marginal coverage. Only in April 1945, when American and British troops entered Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, did photographs and reports from the camps go round the world.

Place in the history of the war

Auschwitz was the last of the great extermination camps on Polish soil to fall into Allied hands. The Germans had liquidated and camouflaged Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka as early as 1943, and Majdanek, taken in July 1944, was the first camp whose crimes the world could see with its own eyes. At Auschwitz the scale was incomparably greater. According to the findings of the Auschwitz Museum historian Franciszek Piper, at least 1.3 million people were deported to the camp and at least 1.1 million died there. Around a million of the victims were Jews. Besides them, some 70,000–75,000 Poles, about 21,000 Roma and Sinti, about 14,000 Soviet prisoners of war and some 10,000–15,000 prisoners of other nationalities died there. Piper’s research, published in the early 1990s, replaced the Soviet figure of 4 million, and the new plaques at Birkenau now give about one and a half million victims.

Liberation did not end the ordeal of the prisoners who had been marched out on the death marches. Tens of thousands of them died in the camps of the Reich in the last months of the war. Nor did it end the history of the place itself. The Auschwitz Museum draws attention to a paradox of history: freedom was brought to the prisoners of Nazi totalitarianism by the soldiers of the Stalinist state. In 1945 the NKVD set up transit camps on the grounds of the main camp and Birkenau, in which, according to some accounts, German prisoners of war and civilians from Upper Silesia and the Podbeskidzie region were held before being deported deep into the USSR. The plant of the chemical works at Monowitz was dismantled and shipped to the Soviet Union.

The surviving documents, witness testimony and the commissions’ expert findings became the basis for post-war trials. The camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, was tried by the Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw and hanged on the grounds of the main camp on 16 April 1947. In the same year forty members of the camp staff stood trial before the Tribunal in Kraków. Josef Mengele fled to South America and was never brought to trial. He died in Brazil in 1979. Further trials, including the Frankfurt trials of the 1960s, went on for decades.

In 1947 the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim was established on the site of the camp. In 1979 the camp was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. In 2005, on the 60th anniversary of the liberation, the UN General Assembly designated 27 January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. All over the world the name Auschwitz has become a symbol of the Holocaust and of Germany’s crimes in the Second World War.