Discovering Auschwitz
On this date in 1945, January 27, Soviet troops of the First Ukrainian Front arrived at the town of Oswiecim in south central Poland. In a camp there they found several thousand sick and starving prisoners. Inured to brutality and privation after many months of campaigning, the soldiers were not initially very impressed by the discovery. Newspapers barely mentioned the liberation.
Only later would the world understand that these troops had arrived at a place where rational, educated, and civilized men and women had coolly implemented the worst mass murder in human history. They had arrived at the place that the Germans had renamed Auschwitz.
After their invasion in 1939, the Nazis had strung barbed wire around 22 Polish army barracks in the town to form a prison camp. They locked up local dissidents and Russian prisoners of war and incorporated Auschwitz into the network of concentration camps that provided slave labor for the Reich. Workers toiled in local gravel and coal mines. Thousands of prisoners were shipped through Auschwitz to camps like Dachau and Buchenwald in Germany.
This profitable business was operated by the Schutzenstaffel, or SS, the Nazi security force under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler. German companies like Krupp, Siemens, and I.G. Farben set up factories near the camp to take advantage of the forced labor. The complex expanded into a metropolis, with three main camps and dozens of satellites. At its peak, Auschwitz housed more than 155,000 human beings.
Even in its earliest days, sadistic punishment and summary execution were commonplace at Auschwitz. In 1940 a crematorium for disposing of bodies was built in the camp.
Two years later, the first Jews were transported by rail to Auschwitz. An estimated 10 to 30 percent of them were selected for forced labor; the majority were murdered within hours of arrival, many at a new killing center called Birkenau two miles away. Auschwitz had assumed its role as the largest of the extermination camps. Over the next 32 months at least 1 million people died there. The vast majority of them were Jews, but the victims also included Poles, Russians, Gypsies, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The murder reached its peak in the summer of 1944 when Hungarian Jews began to arrive. Train tracks were extended directly to Birkenau to speed the process. By that time, five crematoriums were operating. Guards forced victims into sealed rooms where executioners poisoned them with a hydrogen cyanide gas. This killing method was the inspiration of a deputy of the camp’s commander, Rudolph Höss, who pronounced himself “considerably excited by the efficiency.”
In November 1944, with the war going against Germany, Himmler ordered the killing to cease. The Germans, reluctant to leave behind evidence of their crimes, blew up the crematoriums in January and forced everyone who could walk to head west. About 58,000 souls left the horror of the camp to face an even more excruciating death march along winter roads. “Anyone who dared even to bend over,” a survivor remembered, “who stopped even for a moment—was shot.”
The SS guards conducted the last roll call at Auschwitz on January 17, 1945. They intended to kill all who could not walk, but air raids and the approach of Soviet troops forced them to leave behind the sick along with about 200 children who had been subjected to medical experiments by Auschwitz doctors, Josef Mengele among them.
Thousands died awaiting their liberators. January 27 was a “beautiful, sunny winter’s day,” according to the diary of a survivor. “About 3:00 p.m. we heard a noise in the direction of the main gate. It was a Soviet forward patrol—Soviet soldiers in white caps! There was a mad rush to shake them by the hand and shout our gratitude. We were liberated!”
Eva Kor, who was 10 years old at the time, remembered, “We ran up to them and they gave us hugs, cookies, and chocolates. Being so alone, a hug meant more than anybody could imagine, because that replaced the human worth we were starving for.”
The Soviet soldiers fed the inmates and arranged for medical care. Only gradually did they awaken to the extent of what had happened at Auschwitz. The artifacts held clues: a pile of shoes as large as a two-story house, 836,255 women’s coats and dresses, 368,820 men’s suits, seven tons of human hair.
One inmate described Auschwitz as “a mixture of hell and insane asylum.” Scenes of depravity were routine. Inmates with unusual eye colorings were murdered so their eyeballs could be pinned to a wall “like butterflies.” The Germans used naked young women for target practice. They threw living infants into open fires.
Equally appalling was the systematic effort to drain inmates of every vestige of humanity. Though most survivors recovered physically, one former prisoner declared that “the crack in the foundation of our human existence is far less curable.”
As for those who instigated the crimes, “they were not monsters,” wrote the Italian writer Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, “they had our faces.” This is among the most unsettling facts about the Holocaust. Rudolph Höss said afterward, “I really never wasted much thought on whether it was wrong. It simply seemed necessary.”
Levi believed the crime was the result not of some grand evil impulse but of common human attributes like “mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride.” It was the outcome of a “smallness of soul.”
Last month the world reacted with revulsion when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced a conference to examine the severity and even existence of the Holocaust. But Ahmadinejad’s purpose was transparently political—to question the legitimacy of Israel—and the propaganda of the Holocaust revisionists inevitably withers in light of the overwhelming historical evidence.
It is not denial but amnesia that is the real danger. How many of us are willing to stare into the furnace of Auschwitz and to contemplate the deeper meaning of this most awful of historical facts?