By Jacek Lepiarz, DPA /Oswiecim/Warsaw
Hunger, dread, terror and death held sway at Auschwitz for 1,689 days. When the first Soviet troops reached the infamous Nazi concentration camp on the afternoon of January 27, 1945, they found many corpses and few survivors behind the barbed wire.
“Germantsev nyet (“There are no Germans”)! You’re free!” a Soviet officer called out to the now ex-prisoners.
“That was the most wonderful day of my life,” a former inmate from France told historians years later. In spite of his exhaustion, he gratefully flung his arms around the neck of the soldier with the red star. Others did, too.
About 7,000 inmates lived to see the day of liberation. Not all of them were able to rejoice at their good fortune, however. Many lay dying. Others stared apathetically at the ground as though not comprehending that the Nazi nightmare was over.
Some inmates gorged themselves - the camp had more than enough German tinned meat - and died excruciatingly painful deaths because their digestive systems had weakened after years of starvation rations.
In the space of four and a half years, the Nazis murdered at least 1.1mn people at Auschwitz and the nearby concentration camp in the town of Birkenau. Most of the victims were Jews from the German-occupied countries of Europe.
The Moscow poet Yuri Ilinsky, who in 1945 was a 19-year-old Red Army lieutenant, wrote that he had experienced many terrible things in three years of fighting but nothing comparable to Auschwitz.
He recalled seeing a stack of emaciated corpses, dead children among them, under a thin layer of snow at the side of a building.
Children who were “emaciated, in rags, ill and hungry”, including two- and three-year-old girls and boys, gathered behind the barbed wire, Ilinsky reported after the war.
Although the strategic situation of German forces on the Eastern front became critical after the start of the Soviet offensive on January 12, 1945, the killing at Auschwitz continued. Shortly before the Germans retreated from Auschwitz-Birkenau, members of the SS (short for Schutzstaffel, or Defence Squad, the military corps that controlled the Nazis’ security system) shot about 600 inmates dead.
Ten days earlier, Fritz Bracht, the Gauleiter, or Nazi governor, of the region of Upper Silesia (once largely German, it now lies mainly in southwestern Poland), had ordered the evacuation of some 60,000 inmates. During the westward “death marches”, at least 10,000 prisoners either froze or were shot.
SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the construction of the concentration camp at Auschwitz, as the southern Polish town of Oswiecim is known in German, in April 1940 following Nazi Germany’s annexation of the area the previous year.
It was originally meant to hold Polish patriots who resisted German occupation.
The first inmates - 728 political prisoners - arrived on June 14, 1940. Among them was Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, an 18-year-old high school graduate who would later become Poland’s foreign minister and a pioneer of German-Polish reconciliation.
Now 87, Bartoszewski recalled in his memoirs that guards herded the prisoners through the gate with the German inscription “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Makes (One) Free”).
“I felt relieved - it seemed like encouragement,” he wrote.
But he quickly realised the Auschwitz camp was more sinister than that. Bartoszewski fell seriously ill and was released a half-year later thanks to intervention by the Red Cross.
It was not until the war’s third year that the Nazis made Auschwitz the main death camp in their systematic attempt to exterminate European Jewry.
In March 1941 they decided to build Auschwitz II in Birkenau (in Polish: Brzezinka). The following September they used the poisonous gas Zyklon-B for the first time. Some 600 Soviet prisoners of war asphyxiated in agony.
By 1942, the Birkenau camp had become the Nazis’ principal mass-murder installation. They killed 1mn Jews there before war’s end in 1945. Most of the victims were herded into the gas chambers immediately after arrival. Poles, Gypsies, Soviet POWs and people from many other countries also suffered and died at the camp.
The first commandant of Auschwitz I, Rudolf Hoess, initially evaded arrest but was finally captured, tried and then hanged in April 1947.
Three months later, Poland’s parliament created the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which serves as both a memorial and centre for education about the Holocaust.
Nearly 65 years after the end of World War II, Auschwitz-Birkenau remains a symbol worldwide of Nazi Germany’s genocide against Europe’s Jews.
As Andrzej Przewoznik, the head of the Polish government agency that oversees war memorials, noted: “It’s not an ordinary museum, but a cemetery.”
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