Auschwitz – the death factory
On January 27 we commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz one of the largest concentration and extermination camps during World War II.
When Red Army soldiers entered the largest Nazi extermination camp on January 27, 1945 they were shocked. They found over 7,000 starving and sick prisoners whom Nazis were unable to move to other camps and that’s why they weren’t killed by the Nazis.
Although the Nazis began liquidating the camp in the summer of 1944 they did not erase all the traces of mass murders. Almost 8 tons of human hair and over a million men’s suits and women’s dresses were found in the camp warehouses. The Nazis destroyed the archives, blew up the crematorium and four of the five gas chambers.
Between January 17 and 21 the Nazis took away 60,000 prisoners from the camp which they needed for slave labor. Some of them were transported by train but most prisoners had to march hundreds of miles in freezing weather without proper clothing and footwear, without food and rest. SS officers shot anyone who could no longer walk. 15,000 prisoners did not survive the transfers and that’s why they named it death marches.
Auschwitz consisted of three separate camps – I, II and III which the Nazis built in the occupied territory in southwestern Poland near the town of Oświęcim. The most people in the history were murdered in this place and the biggest mass murders of Czechoslovak citizens took place here. 3,792 Czech and Moravian Jews died here in the gas chambers on thesingle night from March 8 to 9, 1944.
This camp also became a place where Nazi doctors experimented with humans. These “doctors” experimented, among other things, with the sterilization of Jewish women and performed experiments on children, especially twins. One of the most famous of these “doctors” was Josef Mengele.
After the liberation, Auschwitz turned into a field hospital until the end of the war where poor prisoners recovered from disease and starvation. The nurses would gradually increase their portions of food but many prisoners died from overeating.
According to various estimates 1.2 to 1.6 million people died in Auschwitz.
After the war a number of trials took place in Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany against perpetrators of the Auschwitz crimes. In 1947 Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höß was sentenced to death in Poland. In the same year a trial against 40 other perpetrators took place in Krakow. Between 1963 and 1966 another 22 Germans were convicted in Frankfurt for crimes committed in Auschwitz.
