What words were written on the gates of Buchenwald. Stolen inscription from Auschwitz gate discovered
Weimar is a city in Germany, where J. Goethe, F. Schiller, F. Liszt, J. Bach and other outstanding people of this country were born and lived. They turned a small town into a German cultural center. And in 1937, highly cultured Germans erected a concentration camp nearby for their ideological opponents: communists, anti-fascists, socialists and others objectionable to the regime.
The inscription on the gates of Buchenwald translated from German meant “to each his own,” and the word “Buchenwald” itself literally means “beech forest.” The camp was built for especially dangerous criminals. Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Slavs, mulattoes and other racially “inferior” people, “subhumans,” appeared later. In the term “subhuman”, true Aryans meant that this is a similarity to a person, which is spiritually much lower than a beast. This is a source of unbridled passions, the desire to destroy everything around, primitive envy and meanness, which is not covered up by anything. But the most important thing is that these are not individuals of some people, but entire nations and even races. The Nazis believed that as a result, the country was ruled by the most degenerate people on Earth, and the communists were born criminals. After the attack on the USSR, Soviet prisoners began to arrive at the camp, but almost all of them were shot.
So, in a few days in September 1941, 8,483 people were killed. At first, no records were kept of Soviet prisoners, so it is impossible to establish how many people were shot. The reason for the executions is trivial. The International Red Cross could supply prisoners of war with parcels from home, but the USSR had to provide lists of those captured, and no one needed prisoners. Therefore, by the spring of 1942, there were 1.6 million Soviet prisoners left, and in 1941 there were 3.9 million people. The rest were killed, died of hunger, disease, and froze in the cold.
Documents were read out according to which the Nazis were going to exterminate the population in the occupied territories: 50% in Ukraine, 60% in Belarus, up to 75% in Russia, the rest were to work for the Nazis. In September 1941, Soviet prisoners of war appeared in Germany. They were immediately forced to work, including in military factories. Professional military men and patriots did not want to work for the enemy. Those who refused were sent to concentration camps. And the inscription on the gates of Buchenwald was intended for them. The weak and professionally unfit were destroyed, and the rest were forced to work.
If you work, you get fed, if you don’t work, you go hungry. And so that the “non-humans” would understand, the inscription on the gates of Buchenwald was made so that it could be read from the inside. The Nazis did what they wanted. For example, the wife of the camp director, Elsa Koch, selected newcomers with interesting tattoos and made lampshades, wallets, etc. from their skin, and gave written advice on this procedure to her friends - the wives of guards at other camps. The heads of some of the dead were dried to the size of folded fists. Doctors tested anti-frostbite, typhoid, tuberculosis and plague vaccines on people. They conducted medical experiments, organized epidemics and tested means of combating them. They pumped out blood for the wounded, and not 300 - 400 grams, but all at once. To describe even some of the horrors that the prisoners experienced
The inscription on the gates of Buchenwald must be taken into account the highly educated German society. For him, only the Aryans were people, and everyone else was subhuman, “untermensch”, they were not even people, but only similar to people. Their fate with the complete victory of National Socialism is only slavery and life as working animals. And no democracy. This is the idea from which the inscription on the gates of Buchenwald was born. From the beginning of April 1945, under the leadership of an underground international resistance organization, prisoners ceased to obey the camp administration. And two days later, hearing cannonade from the west, the camp rose in rebellion. Having torn live barbed wire fences in many places, the prisoners captured the SS guard barracks and almost 800 guards. Most of them were shot or torn to pieces, and 80 people were taken prisoner. On April 11, at 15:15, the independently liberated camp was occupied by a battalion of Americans. They restored the fence, herded the prisoners into barracks and ordered them to surrender their weapons. Only the battalion of Soviet prisoners did not surrender their weapons. On April 13, the gates of Buchenwald opened wide - Soviet troops entered the camp. This is the end of Hitler's history of Buchenwald. Of the 260,000 people who ended up in the camp, the Germans killed almost 60,000. And in total, almost 12 million people were killed in German concentration camps during the Second World War.
ALL PHOTOS
The famous inscription Arbeit Macht Frei - "Work makes you free" - mysteriously disappeared from the gates of the Auschwitz memorial complex in Poland. Unknown criminals removed a metal part of the gate of the Auschwitz memorial complex (Auschwitz-Birkenau), NEWSru Israel reports with reference to the Israeli radio station Kol Israel.
It remains unclear how the cast iron inscription Arbeit Macht Frei, which is one of the symbols of the death camp, was stolen. During World War II, the Nazis killed up to one and a half million people here. Museum employees have already reported the theft to the police, RIA Novosti reports.
The police have already examined the crime scene. The sniffer dog initially picked up the scent, but lost it near the highway, from where the criminals most likely left by car.
The gates of the former concentration camp are constantly monitored by surveillance cameras, but they, judging by the available information, did not record the moment of the theft of the inscription, as stated by police spokesman Dariusz Nowak. It is also unclear who and why might need this museum exhibit.
At the entrance to Auschwitz there were several cast iron inscriptions "Arbeit Macht Frei": one above the main entrance, others on the side gates. Apparently, one of the side inscriptions was stolen.
The theft was discovered in the morning by security officers, who called the police. The thieves, having penetrated the gate and climbed to a height of several meters, unscrewed the fastenings that held the table with the inscription, and then lowered it to the ground and stole it.
The stolen inscription was still one of the main symbols of the museum and its main exhibit, ITAR-TASS reports. By order of the Nazis, it was made in 1940 by Polish political prisoners thrown into a concentration camp.
The police find it difficult to say whether this crime was the work of hunters for non-ferrous metals or whether the theft has a political connotation. The situation is complicated by the fact that already in January 2010 the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by Soviet troops will be celebrated at a wide international level in Poland.
Meanwhile, the museum management does not consider the theft of the table with the inscription Arbeit macht frei an accident. “We simply cannot believe that such a thing could be stolen in such a place,” says museum spokesman Jaroslav Mensfelt. “This was done by someone who knew well what he was going to do.”
The vandal had to know how to enter the museum, how to find the table and how the guards move around. “The attacker should have been well prepared,” the spokesman added.
A saying with an ominous meaning
Arbeit Macht Frei is the title of a novel by the German nationalist writer Lorenz Diefenbach, published in Vienna in 1872. The phrase eventually became popular in nationalist circles.
In 1928, it was adopted by the government of the Weimar Republic as a slogan praising the desired policy of large-scale public works programs to end unemployment. She also parodied the medieval expression "Stadtluft Macht Frei" ("City air sets you free" - the custom by which a serf who lived in the city long enough became free). When the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) came to power in 1933, it continued to use this slogan.
As a slogan, this catchphrase was placed at the entrance of many Nazi concentration camps, either as a mockery or to give false hope. Although the use of this type of inscription above the entrances of various institutions was common in Germany, this particular slogan was placed on the orders of SS General Theodor Eicke, head of the German concentration camp system and commandant of the Dachau concentration camp.
The largest concentration camp
During World War II, columns of prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp went to work every day under the slogan “Work sets you free” and to the sounds of a symphony orchestra.
From 1940 to 1945, Auschwitz-Birkenau in Auschwitz was Hitler's largest concentration camp for mass extermination during World War II. It is located 70 kilometers from Krakow, in southern Poland.
The camp was created by order of Himmler on April 27, 1940. Starting from June 14, 1940, transport with political prisoners and Poles from overcrowded prisons began to arrive here.
Camp Birkenau was divided into several zones and sectors. The total number of prisoners in August 1944 reached over 100 thousand people. There was no water in the camp, and the prisoners lived in terrible sanitary conditions.
On the territory of the camp, the Nazis built four crematoria with gas chambers and two temporary gas chambers, as well as pits and fire pits.
The concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was a place of mass extermination of people - primarily Jews - from Poland, the USSR, Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Greece, Holland, Yugoslavia, Norway, Romania, Italy, Hungary.
In the spring of 1942, the first experiments on the use of Cyclone-B gas were begun on Soviet prisoners and sick prisoners. At first, the corpses were buried and later burned in crematoria and specially dug trenches. Pseudo-medical experiments were also performed on prisoners.
Hello, friends. Andrey is with you.
Their only pre-planned stop was an overnight stay in the Polish town of Auschwitz. There is probably no need to say that of all the possible vacation options, this particular place was not chosen by chance. Yes, my son and I planned to visit, perhaps the most famous, the Auschwitz concentration camp, turned into a museum complex.
A few historical facts
The Auschwitz concentration camp (Polish: Oświęcim, German: Auschwitz) was not the first camp created. The first was Dachau, opened in March 1933. Auschwitz, or Auschwitz, as this place came to be called after the German occupation of Poland, began its history on May 20, 1940, when the decision was made to transform the Polish, and previously Austrian, barracks into a concentration camp, which was destined to become one of the symbols that era, those events, everything that was done by people against people.
In March 1941, Himmler issued an order to expand the camp and build a new one nearby, near the village of Brzezinka, or in German translation - Birkenau.
On October 6, the first train with Russian prisoners of war arrives at the camp. They were used to build the Auschwitz 2/Birkenau camp.
In January 1942, mass extermination of Jews began.
In October of the same year, construction began on the Auschwitz III camp.
Since 1943, medical experiments began to be carried out in this camp under the leadership of Joseph Mengele.
In November 1944, taking into account the offensive of the Soviet troops, Himmler gave instructions to destroy the crematoria and gas chambers.
In April 1947, the first commandant of the camp, Rudolf Höss, was hanged on the territory of Auschwitz-1.
The creation of the museum began at the same time.
A short introduction
I will not list further numbers, facts, evidence... All this is available on the Internet. You can also find as many photographs as you like. What you cannot get on the World Wide Web are your own impressions, which are only available through a personal visit. And we’re not just talking about this place, saturated with horror, cruelty, blood, remembering the smoke of burned human bodies.
I'm not going to give a tour. A virtual visit can never replace a real one, it will never give those impressions that remain after you have seen, heard, felt everything yourself, live... Somehow this word, “live,” does not fit well with a place created to take life, don't you think so?
I also thought that a certain mood is desirable for any event. Several years ago, when visiting Dachau, the weather was cloudy and a little rainy. Maybe the fact that it was my first visit to such places also played a role, but I remember that trip well. And the impressions remained for life.
This time it was also August, but the sun was shining and there were few clouds in the blue sky. I thought how dissonant this was with the place we were going to. Here there is life, the sun, there there is hopelessness, suffering, death, which often becomes a deliverance from all this suffering.
Everyone reacts differently to a visit. Probably, for some it’s just another tick on the list of visited attractions, for others it’s a reason to think about it. I can’t say that I came out shocked, depressed, full of thoughts. Rather, it comes later. It seemed that it took time for everything seen to be deposited in memory, to take its place, thoughts to form, and a personal view of such things to appear.
So…
So I'll just reminisce a little bit about that trip. As I already said, our hotel was located on the other side of the river flowing through the town. We only had to cross it on a nearby bridge, drive a little along the river, and there, as the owner of the hotel where we were staying explained, “don’t miss it.” Actually, it's really hard to miss.
It all starts, as it should, from the parking lot.
Auschwitz concentration camp. Parking
We went to the opening, so there were still few tourist buses and cars. The nondescript brick building immediately sets the mood that this is not an entertainment attraction.
We didn't take any excursions and went on our own.
Having passed through the building, we find ourselves on the territory.
Auschwitz concentration camp. Entrance to the territory
The fence of pipes in the background is simply a former kitchen. And in general, this is not quite the camp itself. Everyone knows that you have to go through the well-known gate with an equally famous inscription. By the way, there they are, right behind the kitchen building.
Auschwitz concentration camp. Gates
Let's come closer...
The inscription on the gate at the Auschwitz concentration camp
“Arbeitmachtfrei” (“Work sets you free”) reads the inscription above them. You will never know how many people passing through the gate believed this inscription. Right behind the gate is this fence.
The kitchen seen earlier remains on the right.
Auschwitz concentration camp. Kitchen
The barracks begin on the left.
Auschwitz concentration camp. Barracks
There were, and still are, 24 barracks in total. Many of them are open and house exhibitions.
The dishes and personal belongings collected, or rather taken from the prisoners, are impressive. Even dentures.
But every pair of shoes, every suitcase is a human life that ended earlier than it was prescribed from above.
Prisoner's daily ration.
Daily ration of a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp
The cells themselves where the prisoners were kept.
Of course, there are a lot of documents and photographs hung on the walls.
Take a closer look at the photographs. These people have been gone for a long time, they only remained here, on the wall of the block in which they may have lived their last days. I have always been interested in the question, why are the eyes of those looking at these photos so piercing? What are these, the peculiarities of the shooting conditions, the specifics of photographic equipment and materials that existed at that time? Or should the words “horror frozen in his eyes” be illustrated this way? Hopelessness, the realization that this is the end, that no amount of work will liberate you, seems to be written in your gaze. Although, of course, this is my personal opinion.
And this is one of the most “famous” places in the camp - the courtyard between the 10th and 11th blocks. The windows of block 10 (on the left) are tightly boarded for good reason. This is the courtyard in which the executions took place, and in the distance you can see the wall against which the sentences were carried out.
Probably, if we add the firing squad here, then this is the last thing the condemned saw.
Block 11 ("Death Block") was a camp prison, and in the basements you can see cells into which several people were crammed, and in which you could only stand. The living stood, and the dead stood, as there was nowhere to fall.
And along the entire perimeter there are towers, fences, rows of energized barbed wire, security... and death. Many probably even desired her.
Here is the gallows where the life of the first camp commandant ended.
Auschwitz concentration camp. Gallows
To the left of it is an inconspicuous, half-underground building, which was once a vegetable storage facility, but since the early 40s has radically changed its purpose. Probably, a large pipe visible behind the trees is a sufficient clue as to what it is.
But, it’s time to finish visiting the Auschwitz-1 camp. We didn’t have much time, we had already spent an hour and a half, but in order to go around everything, look at everything carefully, we needed more time. Moreover, a continuation awaits us, the Auschwitz 2/Birkenau camp, located a few kilometers away. We leave this place filled with horror, leaving a painful feeling. We go out to the parking lot.
There are clearly more buses and cars.
The next type is probably known to everyone.
This is exactly the famous gate that we are now looking at from the outside, from the side of freedom. What is behind them, where do they lead? In hell?
This is the second camp, the largest. We will also enter, only from the side, and not through the main gate, we will not disturb the memory of those who were destined to cross this invisible border, enter the arch in a carriage for transporting prisoners, and leave it already on the side that for the majority actually turned out to be “ that side from which it was no longer destined to come out.
By the way, one of the carriages still stands there.
In this camp there are no longer such capital buildings as in the previous one, and the further it grew, the worse the barracks became, the more difficult the living conditions were. Conventionally, Birkenau was supposed to consist of 3 camps. And if in the first one, it is to the left of the entrance, the buildings are quite solid
There, in the distance, behind the trees, there was a complex of crematoriums, which we never reached, and they were not preserved.
From many barracks, only the skeletons of the stoves and the foundation remained.
Like millions of victims, only memory remains.
Auschwitz concentration camp. Conclusion
How many people died in this camp during its entire existence? Once upon a time some numbers were called, then others.
Serious people, scientists, specialists in various fields are seriously studying the capacity of the furnaces used in the camp crematoria, the possibility and effectiveness of the Zyklon B gas, etc., etc. The once cited figures of 2.5 (or more) million dead are questioned. Having made calculations, carried out an analysis, comprehensively measured everything, calculated, it is stated that, well, there was no way we were talking about millions here. So, 700 thousand, no more...
Come to your senses! What is the difference between 700 thousand and several million? Is it about the price of a house, the cost of an airplane, or the distance from Earth to some space object? These are human lives. Is it really a significant difference that only a few hundred thousand people died, and not a couple of million people? Does this somehow calm you down, disturb your conscience a little, and don’t burden your memory?
No matter how trivial it may be, all this does not teach people anything. The trajectory of the spirals along which human history constantly moves is traditionally laid along the same rake. How long does it take to forget one war, and, hypocritically shaking your head, clucking your tongue, be ready to take up arms again, begin redividing the world, destroy peoples, cultures, redistribute resources? It seems to me that quite a bit.
How would you like a look like this?
would not be the last for anyone, would not become a symbol of the end of earthly existence, the collapse of hopes, plans, separation from loved ones, would not mean an inevitable imminent death.
Sixty-five years ago, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated prisoners of Auschwitz, the most famous concentration camp of World War II, located in southern Poland. One can only regret that by the time the Red Army arrived, no more than three thousand prisoners remained behind the barbed wire, since all able-bodied prisoners were taken to Germany. The Germans also managed to destroy the camp archives and blow up most of the crematoria.
There is no way out
The exact number of Auschwitz victims is still unknown. At the Nuremberg trials, an approximate estimate was made - five million. The former camp commandant Rudolf Hoess (Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höß, 1900-1947) claimed that there were half as many dead. And historian, director of the Auschwitz State Museum (Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oświęcimiu) Frantisek Piper believes that about a million prisoners did not receive freedom.
The tragic history of the death camp, called Auschwitz-Brzezinka by the Poles and Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Germans, began in August 1940. Then, in the small ancient Polish town of Auschwitz, sixty kilometers west of Krakow, construction of the grandiose concentration complex Auschwitz I began on the site of former barracks. Initially it was designed for 10,000 people, but in March 1941, after the visit of the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler (Heinrich Luitpold Himmler, 1900-1945) its capacity was increased to 30,000 people. The first prisoners of Auschwitz were Polish prisoners of war, and it was with their efforts that new camp buildings were erected.
Today, on the territory of the former camp there is a museum dedicated to the memory of its prisoners. You enter it through an open gate with the infamous inscription in German “Arbeit macht Frei” (“Work sets you free”). In December 2009, this sign was stolen. However, the Polish police showed efficiency, and soon the loss was found, although it was sawn into three parts. So a copy of it now hangs on the gate.
Who did labor free from this hell? Surviving prisoners write in their memoirs that they often heard: there is only one way out of Auschwitz - through the pipes of the crematorium. Andrei Pogozhev, a former prisoner of the camp, one of the few who managed to escape and survive, says in his memoirs that only once did he happen to see a group of prisoners leaving the protected area not in prison uniforms: some were wearing civilian clothes, others were wearing civilian clothes. black cassocks. They rumored that, at the request of the Pope, Hitler ordered the transfer of the clergy who were in the concentration camp to Dachau, another concentration camp with “milder” conditions. And this was the only example of “liberation” in Pogozhev’s memory.
Camp order
Residential blocks, administrative buildings, camp hospital, canteen, crematorium... A whole block of two-story brick buildings. If you don’t know that there was a death zone here, everything looks very neat and, one might say, even pleasing to the eye. Those who recalled their first day outside the gates of Auschwitz wrote about the same thing: the neat appearance of the buildings and the mention of an imminent lunch misled them, even delighted them... At that moment, no one could imagine what horrors awaited them.
January of this year was unusually snowy and cold. The few visitors, covered with flakes of snow, gloomy and taciturn, quickly ran from one block to another. The doors opened with a creak and disappeared into dark corridors. In some rooms, the atmosphere of the war years has been preserved, in others, exhibitions have been organized: documents, photographs, stands.
The residential blocks resemble a dormitory: a long dark corridor on the sides of the room. In the middle of each room there was a round stove for heating, lined with iron. Moving from room to room was strictly prohibited. One of the corner rooms was allocated for a washroom and a latrine, and it also served as a mortuary. You were allowed to go to the restroom at any time - but only by running.
Three-tier bunks with mattresses made of paper fabric stuffed with straw, prisoners’ clothes, rusty washstands - everything is in its place, as if the prisoners left this room a week ago. Trying to convey in words how heavy, perhaps eerie, oppressive an impression every meter of this museum makes is unlikely to succeed. When you are there, your mind resists with all its might, refusing to accept on faith the fact that all this is reality, and not a scary set for a war film.
In addition to the memories of the surviving prisoners, three very important documents help to understand what life was like in Auschwitz. The first is the diary of Johann Kremer (1886-1965), a doctor who was sent to serve in Auschwitz on August 29, 1942, where he spent about three months. The diary was written during the war and, apparently, was not intended for prying eyes. No less important are the notes of camp Gestapo officer Pery Broad (1921-1993) and, of course, the autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, written by him in a Polish prison. Hoess held the position of commandant of Auschwitz - could he not have known about the order that reigned there.
Museum stands with historical information and photographs clearly tell how the life of prisoners was organized. In the morning, half a liter of tea - a warm liquid without a specific color or smell; in the afternoon - 800 g of something like soup with traces of the presence of cereals, potatoes, and rarely meat. In the evenings, a “brick” of earthy-colored bread for six with a smear of jam or a piece of margarine. The hunger was terrible. For entertainment, the sentries often threw rutabaga over the barbed wire into the crowd of prisoners. Thousands of people, losing their minds from hunger, pounced on the pathetic vegetable. The SS men liked to organize “mercy” actions at the same time in different parts of the camp; they liked to watch how, lured by food, prisoners rushed inside a confined space from one guard to another... The maddened crowd left behind dozens of crushed and hundreds of crippled ones.
At times, the administration arranged “ice baths” for prisoners. In winter, this often led to an increase in cases of inflammatory diseases. More than a dozen unfortunate people were killed by guards when, in a painful delirium, not understanding what they were doing, they approached the restricted area near the fence, or died on a wire that was under high voltage current. And some simply froze, wandering unconscious between the barracks.
Between the tenth and eleventh blocks there was a wall of death - from 1941 to 1943, several thousand prisoners were shot here. These were mainly anti-fascist Poles captured by the Gestapo, as well as those who tried to escape or establish contacts with the outside world. In 1944, the wall, by order of the camp administration, was dismantled. But a small part of it was restored for the museum. Now it's a memorial. Near him are candles dusted with January snow, flowers and wreaths.
Inhuman experiences
Several museum exhibitions tell about the experiments that were carried out on prisoners at Auschwitz. Since 1941, the camp tested means intended for the mass extermination of people - so the Nazis were looking for the most effective way to finally solve the Jewish question. The first experiments in the basements of block No. 11 were carried out under the leadership of Karl Fritzsch himself (Karl Fritzsch, 1903-1945?) - Hess’s deputy. Fritsch was interested in the properties of Zyklon B gas, which was used to control rats. Soviet prisoners of war served as experimental material. The results exceeded all expectations and confirmed that Zyklon B can be a reliable weapon of mass destruction. Hoess wrote in his autobiography:
The use of Zyklon B had a calming effect on me, because soon it was necessary to begin the mass extermination of Jews, and until now neither I nor Eichmann had any idea how this action would be carried out. Now we have found both the gas and the method of its action.
In 1941-1942, the surgical department was located in block No. 21. It was here that Andrei Pogozhev was taken after he was wounded in his hand on March 30, 1942 during the construction of the Brzezinka camp. The fact is that Auschwitz was not just a concentration camp - that was the name of an entire camp enclave, which consisted of several independent detention zones. In addition to Auschwitz I, or Auschwitz itself, which is in question, there was also Auschwitz II, or Brzezinka (after the name of a nearby village). Its construction began in October 1941 with the hands of Soviet prisoners of war, among whom was Pogozhev.
On March 16, 1942, Brzezinka opened its gates. Conditions here were even worse than in Auschwitz I. Prisoners were kept in approximately three hundred wooden barracks, originally intended for horses. More than four hundred prisoners were crammed into a room designed for 52 horses. Day after day, trains with prisoners arrived here from all over occupied Europe. New arrivals were immediately examined by a special commission that determined their suitability for work. Those who did not pass the commission were immediately sent to the gas chambers.
The wound that Andrei Pogozhev received was not industrial, he was simply shot by an SS man. And this was not the only case. We can say that Pogozhev was lucky - at least he survived. His memoirs contain a detailed account of hospital everyday life in block No. 21. He remembers very warmly the doctor, the Pole Alexander Turetsky, who was arrested for his beliefs and acted as clerk of the fifth room of the camp hospital, and Dr. Wilhelm Türschmidt, a Pole from Tarnow. Both of these people made a lot of efforts to somehow alleviate the hardships of sick prisoners.
Compared to the hard excavation work in Brzezinka, life in the hospital could seem like paradise. But it was overshadowed by two circumstances. The first is regular “selection”, the selection of weakened prisoners for physical destruction, which the SS men carried out 2-3 times a month. The second misfortune was an SS ophthalmologist who decided to try his hand at surgery. He chose a patient and, in order to improve his skills, performed an “operation” on him - “cut what he wanted and how he wanted.” Many prisoners who were already recovering died or became cripples after his experiments. Often, after the “trainee” left, Türschmidt put the patient back on the operating table, trying to correct the consequences of barbaric surgery.
Thirst for life
However, not all Germans in Auschwitz committed atrocities like the “surgeon.” The prisoners' records preserve memories of the SS men who treated the prisoners with sympathy and understanding. One of them was a blockführer nicknamed the Guys. When there were no outside witnesses, he tried to cheer up and support the spirit of those who were losing faith in salvation, sometimes warning against possible dangers. The guys knew and loved Russian proverbs, tried to apply them to the point, but sometimes it turned out awkward: “Those who don’t know, God helps them” - this is his translation of “trust in God, but don’t make a mistake yourself.”
But, in general, the will of the Auschwitz prisoners to live is amazing. Even in these monstrous conditions, where people were treated worse than animals, the prisoners tried to lead a spiritual life without plunging into the sticky impersonality of despair and hopelessness. Oral retellings of novels, entertaining and humorous stories were especially popular among them. Sometimes you could even hear someone playing the harmonica. One of the blocks now displays preserved pencil portraits of prisoners made by their comrades.
In block No. 13, I was able to see the chamber in which Saint Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941) spent the last days of his life. This Polish priest became Auschwitz prisoner No. 16670 in May 1941. In July of the same year, one of the prisoners escaped from the block where he lived. To prevent such disappearances, the administration decided to punish ten of his neighbors in the barracks - to starve to death. Among those sentenced was the Polish sergeant Franciszek Gajowniczek (1901-1995). He still had a wife and children at large, and Maximilian Kolbe offered to exchange his life for his own. After three weeks without food, Kolbe and three other suicide bombers were still alive. Then, on August 14, 1941, it was decided to kill them with an injection of phenol. In 1982, Pope John Paul II (Ioannes Paulus II, 1920-2005) canonized Kolbe as a holy martyr, and August 14 is celebrated as the feast day of St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe.
About a million visitors from all over the world come to Auschwitz every year. Many of them are people whose family history is somehow connected with this terrible place. They come to honor the memory of their ancestors, to look at their portraits on the walls of the blocks, to lay flowers at the Wall of Death. But many come just to see this place and, no matter how hard it may be, to accept that this is a part of history that can no longer be rewritten. It is also impossible to forget...
Partner news
The history of Auschwitz, a small city located sixty kilometers west of Krakow, did not stand out in any way among the annals of other settlements in Poland until January 1945. During the Vistula-Oder operation, Soviet troops reached the lines specified by the order, occupying the area of Auschwitz and Birkenau (names adopted by the Germans after seizing the territory in 1939). What the soldiers saw shocked them.
No, it was not the very fact of the existence of a death camp that caused confusion among Soviet soldiers and officers. Some of our military men knew, sometimes from their own life experience, that there were institutions of a similar profile in the USSR, and not only in Kolyma. The shock was caused by the pedantry and systematic nature of the process of mass deprivation of life. The cynical inscription on the gates of Auschwitz read: “Work makes you free.” Everything was set up on a broad industrial scale; the belongings of the murdered prisoners were stored systematically. Toothbrushes, shoes, suitcases, cut hair (they were used to insulate the strong hulls of submarines), suits, dresses and much more were sorted and loaded into separate storage facilities. Behind the crematorium, the Soviet military discovered a whole lake, but instead of water it was filled with human fat. The ash served as fertilizer for agricultural land. As it turned out later, there were several similar camps in Nazi Germany, and each of them had its own “motto”. For example, above the gates of Buchenwald there was an inscription: “To each his own.”
General information about the organization
The camp was organized in German style. After his release, part of it was even used by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs for about two years for its intended purpose. The history of this place of mass extermination of “subhumans” began in 1939, after part of the Polish territory became part of the Reich. The majority of the remaining occupied lands retained their occupied status throughout the war. In May 1940, work began here to rebuild the old barracks of the Polish (and earlier Austro-Hungarian) army to isolate “undesirable elements” such as Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, resistance members, etc. Second floors were built, locals were evicted residents, buildings for special purposes appeared. Since February 1942, new prisoners appeared in the camp - Soviet prisoners of war, mostly political workers. A reliable barbed wire fence was erected, to which high voltage was supplied, and at the same time an inscription appeared on the gates of Auschwitz. Actually, there was not just one camp here, but a whole network, which included three main camp points, divided, in turn, into divisions. Each category of prisoners was kept separately, with the exception of those whose labor could not be profitably used. These were destroyed immediately.
Thus, constantly expanding and improving technology, the largest concentration camp in the Third Reich, Auschwitz, increased its productivity. The death factory operated at full capacity, its crematoria could not always cope with the load, and then the corpses were burned in ditches. Every day, several trains with “human material” entered the gates, filtration was immediately carried out, and those who were of no value were awaited by gas chambers, commissioned in 1943.
Performance
The inscription on the gates of Auschwitz was quite consistent with his murderously busy nature. You really had to work hard. All the hard and dirty work was done by the prisoners themselves, and six thousand guards from the SS “Totenkopf” division only guarded and kept order. The furnaces interrupted their work for three hours a day - at this time the ashes were unloaded from them. There were 46 of them in total, 30 in the first two crematoria and another 16 in the “second stage”. The overall average productivity was eight thousand burned corpses per day.
It was difficult to estimate the number of victims of this death factory; the Nazis tried to hide the scale of the crime. Even the camp commandant had no idea about the number of people he destroyed, citing an approximate figure of two and a half million during the Nuremberg trials. According to historian J. Weller, more than 1.6 million prisoners entered the gates of Auschwitz and did not return, of which 1.1 million were Jews.
Medical experiments
It was here that the sinister Doctor Mengele conducted his research. Under his leadership, other doctors, who without any stretch of the imagination can be called killer doctors, did unthinkable things to prisoners. They infected prisoners with deadly viruses, performed amputations and abdominal operations without anesthesia, just for training. Experiments were carried out on mass deprivation of childbearing functions through irradiation, sterilization and castration. The effects of chemicals on the body, the consequences of freezing were studied, and many other anti-human experiments were carried out. Most of the fanatics suffered a well-deserved punishment. The first commandant of the camp, R. Hess, hoped to escape retaliation by surrendering to the Allies, but was handed over by the British to the Poles. He was hanged near Crematorium No. 1 in 1947. Well, to each his own.
Story with inscription
Collectors are strange people; in their passion they sometimes violate the boundaries of reason. Who could have imagined that some of them were haunted by the inscription on the gates of Auschwitz, which became an open-air museum? However, at the end of 2009 she disappeared. Five people took part in the theft: they cut off a fragment of the fence and sawed it into pieces. The mastermind of the crime was a Swedish citizen who has so far managed to avoid responsibility. How much he promised to pay the performers remains a mystery to this day.
After restoration, the famous ominous inscription will take its place in the Auschwitz museum exhibition; they will not replace it.
