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27 January
On January 27, 1945, the Soviet Army released the prisoners from the Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau system of 45 concentration camps, which was based near Oswiecim in Poland.
In January, 1945, Soviet forces, under the command of Marshal Ivan Konev, defeated the Germans near Krakow, Poland, and headed for the industrial area of Silesia. There was a small town named Oswiecim in the way of the troops. The concentration camps were situated near that town, and the main camps were Auschwitz and Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II. The territory of these two camps was 468 hectares, with more than 620 barracks in them.
When the administration of the camps learned about the approach of the Soviet forces, they burned the archives, exploded the ovens in the crematoria, and were going to kill all the prisoners, but did not have time to finish this task. When, on January 27, the Lvovskaya infantry division under the command of General-Major Fyodor Krasavin, entered Auschwitz, there were 7,000 prisoners there.
All the participants of the attack on Oswiecim agree that the high command was not aware of the concentration camps. According to the memoirs of retired colonel Vasiliy Gromadsky, the soldiers realized Auschwitz was a concentration camp only when they saw the prisoners. Maria Karakosova, a former medical orderly, remembered that the scouts had informed Krasavin about the camps only a few days before the attack.
Ivan Martynushkin, who was the company captain in 1945, at first sight mistook the prisoners for Nazis, but then the prisoners started to greet the soldiers in different languages from behind the barbed wire. When Ivan’s company entered the camp, all the prisoners tried to shake the soldiers’ hands. Genrikh Koptev, one of the soldiers of his company, found Russian-speaking people among the prisoners, and told them that they were free.
Auschwitz was founded in 1940. The first group of prisoners arrived there in June, 1940, and in two years, the number of the prisoners reached 20,000. The prisoners were hardly fed, and they had to work all day through. Those who violated camp rules were tortured and executed. On September 3, 1941 in Auschwitz, Nazi scientists conducted a test of the poison gas “Zyklon B”. They tested it on 600 Soviet war prisoners.
When people speak about Auschwitz, they usually mean Auschwitz II or Birkenau. Auschwitz II was built in 1942. There, in one-floored wooden barracks, hundreds of thousands prisoners were kept. Most of them were Jewish, but there were also Russians, Gypsies, Poles and people of many other nations.
The camp personnel, headed by the scientist Dr. Joseph Mengele, divided all the prisoners who arrived to Auschwitz II into four groups. The first group consisted of women, children, the ill and old people. The Nazis executed them in the gas chambers right after arrival. Every day, about 20,000 people were killed that way. All the prisoners had to undress before entering the gas chamber, and the gas chambers looked like shower cubicles, so the prisoners did not panic – they thought, they just had to wash themselves.
The second group consisted of prisoners, chosen by the Nazis to be their private slaves. They also sorted clothes taken from other prisoners – the camp administration sent these clothes to Germany. The people from the third group were made to work at German plants. Many German plants used the labor of the prisoners, and about 305,000 people died from hard work.
The fourth group consisted of twins, dwarfs and people with different deformities. Mengele was interested in physiological anomalies, so he used people from this group as subjects for some of his notorious experiments. Because of those experiments, Mengele went down in history under the name of “Angel of Death”.
The Nazis destroyed the majority of the documents, so the exact number of victims of the death camps is still unknown. According to the information about deportations, more than 1.5 million people died in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
