After the ghettoization, which took place with unprecedented speed, in just a few weeks, between mid-May and early July, the entire rural Jewry Auschwitz-Birkenauba deported. The Jews of the Hungarian countryside faced immediate destruction in the Birkenau camp. Even among the small number of people deemed able to work, only a few survived the ordeal: only a few tens of thousands of the hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Hungarian countryside returned. Due to the loss of their family and community, the survivors often decided that they might not start a new life in their former place of residence, so they tried to continue their lives in peace in the capital, in larger cities, or by emigrating abroad.
“When I passed through the gate, I saw the undead…human beings who had been beaten, starved, tortured, stripped of everything that made life possible. They were people of bone and skin, with skeletal faces and sunken eyes. Their heads were shaved bald, and many supported each other, so that they don’t fall. Many of them had ulcers on their bodies. One man held out his hands from the ulcers. As they stumbled towards me, I said to myself: ‘What are these people? And what did they do to make other people treat them like this?'” This is the testimony of Sergeant Leon Bass, an American soldier who was among the first to reach the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945.
Bass’s unit was just one of the American, British, and Soviet armies to encounter such a sight as World War II drew to a sad end. world War.
Russian troops were the first to find the darkest secret of the Third Reich when they reached Majdanek in Poland in July 1944. The Germans, surprised by the rapid Soviet advance, attempted to demolish the camp and destroy all evidence of the killings. They set fire to the huge crematorium in which the bodies of the victims were burned. However, the gas chambers where the murders were carried out remain.
Later, during the summer, the Red Army also occupied the death camps of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, although the Germans closed them in 1943: since they had already exterminated three million Jews in Poland, they were not needed.
In January 1945, when Russian troops occupied Auschwitz in southwestern Poland, they found evidence that the Nazis had carried out the killings on an industrial scale. As the last of the eight Nazi extermination camps, it operated even in the final months of the war. It was the site of the largest mass murder in history – more than 1.1 million people were killed here.
The surviving prisoners of the fleeing Germans in Auschwitz were called the so-called they were driven to the west in “death marches”. But Soviet soldiers found more than 7,000 more corpse-like prisoners trying to stay alive and reporting unimaginable atrocities. Among the survivors were approximately 180 children who were subjected to extreme experiments by the camp’s sadistic doctors, including the infamous Dr. Mengele.
There was other evidence of massive misdeeds. The Russians found warehouses full of personal belongings (suitcases, glasses, tons of human hair) – all of which once belonged to people who have now disappeared, their ashes scattered in the wind.
How did these nightmarish places come to be, and as Bass asked, how did these people serve such a fate?
The first concentration camp in Germany was opened in 1933, just 15 days following Hitler came to power. The concentration camp was not a new invention. It was called so because a large number of prisoners were concentrated in a closed place.
About The concept has been known since 1838when the US government used them to intern Native Americans, and Germany used them in Namibia before World War I.
Bavaria is the first in Germany Dachauban, was established in a disused factory. It was originally created to house 5,000 prisoners who posed a threat to the new regime, initially holding political prisoners here. However, as the Nazi regime expanded, others soon joined: gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies and, from 1935, with the introduction of the Nuremberg Racial Laws, many Jews.
As the war approached, several camps were established across Germany: Sachsenhausen 1936-ban, Buchenwald 1937-ben, Flossenbürg 1938-ban, Bergen-Belsen was established a year later.
With the occupation of Poland in September 1939, the Nazis gained new territories where they might build even larger complexes, far from the German public.
Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis are known to have established approximately 40,000 camps and prison centers. Many were simply used to supply the regime with armies of forced laborers, or to hold prisoners of war taken in various blitzkriegs.
Others, however, such as Auschwitz, developed into institutions specifically designed for mass murder.
Originally built for Polish prisoners of war in May 1940, Auschwitz was soon expanded to house political prisoners and other “undesirables”. In the beginning it was a labor camp.
However, in January 1942, the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was drawn up, the extermination of Europe’s Jewish population became official state policy, and Auschwitz was transformed into the most notorious killing center of the concentration camp system.
Gas chambers and crematoriums were not unusual elsewhere, but the huge Auschwitz complex had eight gas chambers and 46 incinerators – capable of exterminating 42,000 people a week. Zyklon-B poison gas was used here for the first time. The prisoners were led into the gas chambers under the pretense that they were communal showers, then locked in and SS guards poured Zyklon-B pellets through holes in the roof. Upon contact with air, the pellet became gaseous and hydrogen cyanide gas was released.
This very effective killing method was dreamed up by SS-Captain Karl Fritzsch, deputy of camp commander Rudolf Höß, while he was conducting experimental executions on Soviet prisoners of war at the end of August 1941.
Auschwitz was the most abominable example, the discovery of which proved how far Hitler’s holocaust had gone, but it was not the last.
In the months following the liberation of the camp, the Soviets occupied other camps in Poland, the Baltic countries, and finally in Germany itself.
Meanwhile, in the west, advancing US forces liberated additional German camps. They arrived in Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, where more than 20,000 prisoners were freed. Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Dachau on April 29 followed in quick succession. By then, nearly 32,000 people had been murdered in the latter.
During this time, British troops liberated camps in northern Germany, including Bergen-Belsen on April 5, 1945. About 60,000 prisoners were found here, most of them terminally ill from a typhus epidemic. More than 10,000 of them died within a week following the camp was liberated.
If possible, the fate of the residents of the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg was even more tragic. On April 26, around 10,000 prisoners were loaded onto four prison ships anchored in the Baltic Sea and the Bay of Lübeck. The British received information that they were carrying SS soldiers bound for Norway, so on 3 May four squadrons of RAF Typhoons attacked the unarmed ships and sank three.
As the terrified survivors tried to swim ashore, RAF pilots peppered the water with machine gun fire until all movement ceased. The British soldiers who arrived shortly followingwards were greeted by a ghastly sight – thousands of corpses washed ashore by the water.
The war that caused these horrors ended just five days later.
Gallery
Holocaust Remembrance Day: dramatic photos then and now – This is what Auschwitz looks like now
2024.04.16.
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