The liberation of Auschwitz: 80 years on

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Roaming through the camp, the soldiers discovered huge piles of clothes, including more than 360,000 men’s suits and 44,000 pairs of shoes, along with sacks of human hair, prosthetic limbs, spectacles, and stacks of empty, abandoned suitcases. The ground was littered with the bodies of the dead and dying. The squalor and filth were indescribable.

“When I entered the barrack,” wrote one Red Army officer, Georgii Elisavetskii, “I saw living skeletons lying on the three-tiered bunks. As in fog, I heard my soldiers saying: ‘You are free, comrades!’ I sense that they do not understand, and begin speaking to them in Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian dialects; unbuttoning my leather jacket, I show them my medals… They think I am provoking then. They begin to hide.

“And only when I said to them: ‘Do not be afraid, I am a colonel of the Soviet Army and a Jew. We have come to liberate you’… They rushed towards us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs. And we could not move, stood motionless while unexpected tears ran down our cheeks.”

The liberation of Auschwitz did not happen overnight. It took time for the prisoners to be restored to health; a few hundred remained in the camp months later, still too weak to be moved. Many of those who had been liberated, or survived the death marches, had lost their homes and families and joined the many millions of ‘displaced persons’ who fell under the aegis of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, founded in 1943, to be repatriated or found new places to live. The Soviets cared as well as they could for the prisoners they found at Auschwitz, but inevitably many did not survive.

27 January has since become the day on which we choose to remember the Holocaust. But the camp which the Red Army liberated had become by late January 1945 a mere shadow of its former self.

Only 7,000 prisoners remained, along with another 500 in small sub-camps scattered across the area. Most were sick, living in the hospital barracks, elderly, infirm, or children under the age of 15. They had been left behind when the SS had decided to abandon the camp in the face of the Red Army advance. Some 60,000 prisoners had been forced at gunpoint to leave on what subsequently became known as a ‘death march’, on the way to railheads for transportation to other camps further to the west. Several thousand had perished on the way in the extreme winter cold, or been shot by the SS if they fell behind.

• Read more | How did the Nazis justify the Holocaust?

Originally intended for Polish prisoners, the main camp, known as Auschwitz-I, had become a centre for the mass extermination of Jewish prisoners from all over Nazi-dominated Europe after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. A second camp, Auschwitz-II, located at nearby Birkenau, was constructed for this mass murder, which was carried out in gas chambers through the administration of hydrogen cyanide (Zyklon-B). Many other victims perished through maltreatment, starvation or disease.

Altogether, 1.1 million victims, 960,000 of them Jews, were murdered in the camp. Victims also included 15,000 Red Army prisoners of war, 21,000 Romani (or Gypsies), and 74,000 non-Jewish Poles. Many thousands of Jews had been transported from as far away as Nazi-occupied France or the Netherlands or, later, northern Italy, to be killed.

Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi camps, with 34,000 registered prisoners being held in September 1942, out of a total of 110,000 across the camp system as a whole. Two-thirds of the regular inmates of all the Nazi concentration camps who died in August 1942, died at Auschwitz. Some 60 per cent were Jewish.

In addition, huge numbers of unregistered prisoners, above all children, women, the elderly, weak and sick, were being sent straight to the gas chambers as they arrived. Again, the vast majority were Jewish. Particularly striking was the mass murder of some 440,000 Hungarian Jews, almost all transported to Birkenau after the German takeover of Hungary in 1944.

This mass murder had become widely known in Europe and America, and had been publicly condemned by the Allies by the end of 1942, but ignoring this fact, the SS had attempted to destroy the evidence shortly before they abandoned the camp. They blew up the gas chambers and destroyed the crematoria at Birkenau, as well as burning the storerooms and other facilities after removing the most valuable items.

• Read more | A history of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

Too hastily executed and clumsily carried out, the cover-up did not deceive anyone. It was the sheer scale of Auschwitz that gave it such prominence, and the operation of an extermination camp next to the main camp at Auschwitz-I that ensured that it quickly came to symbolise the Nazi camp system as a whole.

Enough former inmates survived to be able to document the atrocities that had taken place there. This was in sharp contrast to other camps purely devoted to gassing and extermination, such as Treblinka, where more than 750,000 Jews were killed, and only 11 survived.

Notable accounts include Elie Wiesel’s Night (1960), Primo Levi’s If This is a Man (1947), and Otto Dov Kulka’s Landscapes of the Metropolosis of Death (2013). The memoir penned by Miklós Nyiszli, a Hungarian prisoner-doctor who was forced to assist in experiments carried out by the infamous camp doctor Josef Mengele, reveals a more compromised experience.

And of course there are the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of the camp, written while he was in prison after the end of the war and published under the title Commandant of Auschwitz (1956). A fictionalized account of his life based on a novel by Martin Amis was filmed as The Zone of Interest in 2023. Höss himself was arrested and put on trial in Poland; sentenced to death for his crimes, he was executed by hanging in the camp on 16 April 1947, an event attended by around 100 witnesses, including many former camp inmates.

Of the 8,200 or so other surviving SS personnel at Auschwitz, some 673 were put on trial for their crimes by Polish courts after the war, while the trial of 25 further camp officers at Frankfurt in the mid-1960s gave massive publicity to the brutal and sadistic offences they had committed. Still, far too many SS officers escaped justice after 1945.

In commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January, we do not just remember the victims; we acknowledge the worst extremes to which racial hatred can reach, and remind ourselves how important it is that we do our best – despite repeated failures in recent decades – to try and ensure that genocidal atrocities do not happen again.

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