On January 27th, 1945, the Soviet soldiers entered Auschwitz.
The camp had finally been reached and the prisoners had been found.
But what had seemed like the end of a horror story turned out to be the opening of something far larger.
A machinery of murder so organized that even the soldiers standing inside it could barely believe what they were seeing.
The Auschwitz concentration camp was located in southern Poland near the town of Oświęcim.
Germany occupied the area in September 1939, just 1 week after invading Poland.
A few months later, SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered a concentration camp to be built on the site of an old Polish army barracks.
Construction began in May 1940.
The first prisoners arrived on June 14th, 1940.
There were 728 of them, mostly Polish political prisoners, including teachers, priests, and members of the resistance.
They were given identification numbers tattooed on their left forearms.
The first registered prisoner was Polish soldier Stanisław Wajniak.
He received prisoner number 31.
That number reveals something important.
The Nazis expected the camp to grow far larger from the very beginning.
In March 1941, Himmler visited Auschwitz and ordered a massive expansion.
The plan was so large that it required an entirely new camp.
Auschwitz II, known as Birkenau, was built about 3 km away on cold marshy land.
Auschwitz III, called Monowitz, was built later to provide slave labor for the nearby IG Farben chemical factory.
IG Farben was one of the most powerful companies in Germany.
The company paid the SS 4 Reichsmarks per day for each unskilled male prisoner and 3 for each woman.
Eventually, the entire Auschwitz complex covered around 40 square kilometers.
Running it required about 7,000 SS personnel working there full-time.
The first mass killings at Auschwitz did not use gas chambers.
Instead, SS medics injected phenol directly into the hearts of prisoners who were considered too sick to work.
This practice began in 1941 and killed thousands of people before the SS decided it was too slow.
In September 1941, the SS tested a different method.
Around 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick Polish prisoners were locked inside a basement room in Block 11 at Auschwitz 1.
The SS then released a pesticide called Zyklon B through openings in the room.
Zyklon B had originally been made to kill lice in buildings.
Everyone inside was dead within about 15 minutes.
SS commandant Rudolf Höss, who ran Auschwitz from May 1940 to November 1943, later described the experiment as a relief.
He believed mass shootings were causing psychological strain among his men.
Gas allowed killing to be carried out more efficiently and with greater distance from the victims.
By early 1942, four large crematoria with gas chambers attached were being built at Birkenau.
The gas chambers were disguised as shower rooms.
Fake shower heads were installed in the ceilings.
Prisoners were told they were being disinfected before entering the camp.
They were even instructed to remember the hook where they hung their clothes so they could supposedly find them afterwards.
Crematorium 2 at Birkenau could process about 1,440 bodies every 24 hours.
Crematorium 3 had the same design and capacity.
Crematoria 4 and 5 were smaller.
Together, they gave the SS the ability to kill and dispose of thousands of people each day while leaving very little evidence above ground.
The operation required coordination between German government ministries, the railway system, and the SS bureaucracy.
Trains arrived from France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Hungary, and occupied Poland.
Germany’s national railway, Reichsbahn, charged the SS transportation fees for deportees.
The price was calculated like a group ticket.
Children under 10 were transported at half fare.
Every train that arrived at Birkenau went through the same process.
It was called the Selektion or selection, and it took place on a platform inside the camp known as the ramp.
As prisoners stepped off the trains, SS doctors waited at the end of the platform.
Most people had spent days packed inside sealed cattle cars without enough food or water.
Once the doors opened, they were ordered into two lines, men in one line, and women and children in the other.
The doctors then walked past and pointed left or right.
The decision often only took a few seconds.
Prisoners considered fit for labor, usually men between 15 and 45 and women between 15 and 35 who appeared physically strong, were sent to the right.
Everyone else was sent to the left.
Going left meant immediate death.
Elderly people, children under 14, pregnant women, mothers who refused to leave their children, and anyone who looked weak or sick were sent left.
They were loaded onto trucks and taken to the gas chambers, often within 2 hours of arriving at Auschwitz.
SS doctor Josef Mengele regularly carried out selections after arriving at Auschwitz in May 1943.
He was 32 years old at the time.
Survivors often remembered his white gloves and calm demeanor.
Some said he even whistled while making life or death decisions.
Mengele also selected prisoners, especially twins and people with dwarfism, for medical experiments.
These experiments included injecting chemicals into children’s eyes in attempts to change their color, deliberately infecting people with diseases, and performing surgery without anesthesia.
For the prisoners who survived selection, Auschwitz became a slower path to death.
Newly registered prisoners were tattooed, shaved, stripped of their belongings, and issued prison uniforms >> >> made from thin striped cloth.
It didn’t matter what the season was.
During winter, temperatures at Auschwitz often dropped below -20°C.
Prisoners slept on wooden bunks stacked three levels high, often with two or three people sharing a single sleeping space, and little or no bedding.
A normal daily food ration consisted of about half a liter of watery soup at midday and 300 g of bread in the evening.
Most prisoners lost between 10 and 15 kg during their first 2 months.
Many died within months from starvation, disease, exhaustion, or any combination of the three.
The SS maintained control through constant fear.
Random beatings were common.
Public hangings took place in the roll call square, and all prisoners were forced to watch.
Anyone caught trying to escape was executed.
Prisoners from the same barracks as the escapee were often forced to stand at attention for hours as collective punishment.
A special group of prisoners known as the Sonderkommando, meaning special unit in German, were forced to work in the crematoria.
Their duties included removing bodies from gas chambers, >> >> pulling gold teeth from corpses with pliers, shaving hair from the dead, and operating the furnaces.
They were kept separate from the rest of the prisoners to eliminate witnesses.
The SS usually killed Sonderkommando members every 3 to 4 months and replaced them with new prisoners.
In October 1944, members of the Sonderkommando launched an armed revolt.
They had secretly obtained gunpowder from four young Jewish women working in a nearby munitions factory, including Rosa Robota, Ester Wajcblum, Regina Safirstein, and Ella Gartner.
Using the explosives, they destroyed crematorium four and killed three SS guards before the uprising was crushed.
All four women were publicly hanged on January 6th, 1945.
For most of the war, people outside Nazi-occupied Europe only had pieces of information about what was happening at Auschwitz.
In 1942, reports describing the mass murder of Jews in occupied Poland reached the Polish government in exile in London.
The Polish government passed the information to the British government >> >> and the BBC.
The BBC mentioned it in a radio broadcast in June 1942.
Very few people paid attention.
In April 1944, two Slovak Jewish prisoners, Rudolf Vrba, who was 19, and Alfred Wetzler, who was 25, managed to escape from Auschwitz.
They spent 3 days hiding inside a specially prepared hiding place within the camp perimeter before slipping away.
They then walked about 80 miles to Slovakia, where they gave Jewish community leaders a detailed 32-page report.
It described the camp’s layout, the gas chambers, the crematoria, and the systematic killing of people arriving on transports.
They even included information about Zyklon B, including a label from a canister they had memorized.
By May 1944, the Vrba-Wetzler report had reached Jewish leaders in Budapest, the Vatican, the International Red Cross, and the US War Refugee Board.
For the first time, Allied governments had a detailed picture of Auschwitz.
It was no longer just reports of atrocities.
It was evidence of a functioning industrial killing center, including information about how it operated and how many people it could kill.
The response was limited.
Allied leaders discussed bombing the railway lines leading to Auschwitz or destroying the crematoria.
In August 1944, US Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy rejected the idea.
He argued that it would require too many aircraft and might not work.
At the very same time, American bombers were already attacking industrial targets less than 5 km from the gas chambers.
Between May 15th and July 1944, while these discussions were taking place, about 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
Around 320,000 were sent directly to the gas chambers after arrival.
It was the largest and fastest deportation operation of the entire Holocaust.
The railway lines were never bombed.
By the autumn of 1944, the Soviet Red Army had pushed into Eastern Poland.
Nazi leaders knew that Auschwitz could soon be captured.
Orders were given to destroy the evidence.
On November 25th, 1944, Heinrich Himmler ordered the gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau to be demolished.
SS engineers placed explosives inside crematoria two and three.
The ovens, Zyklon B ventilation systems, underground changing rooms, and other equipment were dismantled or destroyed.
The buildings were then blown up.
Crematorium four had already been badly damaged during the Sonderkommando revolt in October.
Crematorium five continued operating until January 1945.
For weeks, the SS burned documents.
During the camp’s existence, about 400,000 prisoners had been officially registered by name.
But the approximately 1.
1 million people who were murdered immediately after arrival had never been registered at all.
The Nazis considered them condemned the moment they arrived.
In early January 1945, the SS also began clearing out warehouses known by prisoners as Canada.
Prisoners used this nickname because the warehouses were filled with valuables and belongings taken from murdered victims.
And Canada was seen as a wealthy country.
There were 35 of these warehouses at Birkenau.
The SS loaded as much as possible onto trains bound for Germany.
On January 23rd, 1945, they set fire to the rest.
30 of the 35 warehouses were burned.
Five warehouses survived.
Everything inside them was still there when the Soviet troops arrived 4 days later.
On January 17th, 1945, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz.
About 56,000 prisoners were forced to march west through snow and freezing temperatures towards camps deeper inside Germany.
These evacuations became known as the death marches.
Temperatures in southern Poland during these months were around minus 20° C.
The prisoners leaving Auschwitz were still wearing the same thin striped uniforms they’d worn inside the camp.
Most had no coats.
Many had shoes that didn’t fit properly.
They had already spent months or years surviving on starvation rations.
The prisoners were forced to march long distances.
Their destinations were camps in Germany and Austria, including Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen.
Even the shortest routes were more than 60 km.
SS guards shot anyone who slowed down, stumbled, or left the line.
Prisoners who asked to rest were shot.
Prisoners who sat down in the snow were shot.
Prisoners who knocked on farmhouse doors looking for food were shot.
In some cases, local Polish civilians who tried to give food to the prisoners were also shot.
The Soviet soldiers approaching Auschwitz had no idea what they were about to find.
They belonged to the Soviet 60th Army, part of Marshal Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front.
Soviet forces had been advancing rapidly through southern Poland during the Vistula-Oder Offensive, which began on January 12th, 1945.
Auschwitz was only one of many locations being captured as the front moved west.
Units from the 100th Infantry Division, the 107th Infantry Division, and the 322nd Rifle Division reached the camp from different directions on January 27th.
The SS guards were gone.
The fences were no longer electrified.
There was no fighting.
What the soldiers found were about 7,000 prisoners who’d been left behind.
They were people too sick to join the death marches and too close to death for the SS to bother shooting.
During the final days, the SS had discussed killing all the remaining prisoners before leaving.
They simply ran out of time.
The survivors were scattered throughout the camp.
Many couldn’t stand.
Some couldn’t even speak.
Soviet soldiers later described people so thin that they barely looked human.
Men and women weighing less than 30 kg, children whose faces looked decades older than their age, prisoners covered in lice, sores, untreated wounds, and gangrene.
Among the survivors were about 180 children, most younger than 15 years old.
Many were twins who’d been used in Josef Mengele’s medical experiments.
Some carried surgical scars.
Some had been blinded.
The five surviving Canada warehouses were still standing.
Soviet investigators opened them and found 836,200 women’s coats and dresses, 348,000 men’s suits, 38,000 pairs of men’s shoes and more than 7 metric tons of human hair.
The hair had been shaved from prisoners, often after death, and packaged for industrial use in products such as mattresses, felt, and rope.
German company records showed it was sold for 50 Reichsfenning per kilo.
7 tons.
Soviet forces quickly turned the former SS barracks into field hospitals.The military doctors faced a medical crisis unlike anything they’d ever seen.
The problem was not just disease and starvation.
Many prisoners were so malnourished that feeding them too much too quickly could kill them.
This condition, known as refeeding syndrome, happens when food is suddenly reintroduced to a severely starved body causing dangerous changes in electrolytes.
Doctors had to increase food very slowly over days and weeks.
Even with careful treatment, hundreds of liberated prisoners died after liberation.
Within days, the Soviet State Extraordinary Commission arrived in Auschwitz.
The organization had been created in 1942 to investigate Nazi war crimes.
Investigators began collecting evidence immediately.
They recovered surviving documents from SS offices, >> >> interviewed survivors, examined the camp structures, and recorded everything found inside the warehouses.
They also inspected the ruins of the crematoria.
Although the SS had tried to destroy the evidence, much of the physical proof remained.
Investigators found the foundations of the underground changing rooms, steel door frames from the gas chambers, and ventilation openings built into the concrete ceilings.
Later chemical tests on the walls of crematorium one detected traces of hydrogen cyanide, the poison released from Zyklon B, embedded in the brickwork.
Investigators and later researchers also discovered hidden manuscripts buried around the crematoria of ruins.
These documents had been written by Sonderkommando prisoners who secretly recorded what they witnessed before they expected to be killed.
Zalman Lewental, a Polish Jew from Ciechanów, buried his manuscript in a jar near crematorium 3.
Zalman Gradowski, a Lithuanian Jew from Suwałki, buried two separate manuscripts.
Marcel Nadjari, a Greek Jew from Thessaloniki, buried his writings inside a thermos.
Nadjari’s manuscript was discovered in 1980, but it had deteriorated so badly that about 90% of the texts could not be read.
In 2017, researchers at the University of Amsterdam used digital image enhancement technology to recover much of the missing text.
These men knew they were unlikely to survive.
They buried the evidence anyway.
The first Soviet estimate of the death toll at Auschwitz was 4 million people.
Later research by independent historians showed the number was lower.
During the 1990s, Polish historian Franciszek Piper, head of historical research at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, carried out a detailed study of deportation records and population losses across Europe.
His conclusion, which is now accepted by most historians, was that approximately 1.
1 million people were killed at Auschwitz.
The Nuremberg trials began on November 20th, 1945 in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany.
22 senior Nazi leaders stood trial before judges from the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.
The chief American prosecutor was former US Attorney General Robert H.
Jackson.
Of the 22 defendants, 12 were sentenced to death.
One was Hans Frank, the governor general of occupied Poland, who had overseen the implementation of the final solution in Polish territory.
Another was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who became head of the SS Main Security Office after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, and directly supervised the death camps.
Both men were executed by hanging on October 16th, 1946 at Nuremberg Prison.
Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz’s first and longest-serving commandant, was captured separately by British forces on March 11th, 1946.
He’d been hiding on a farm in Schleswig-Holstein under a false identity and working as a farm laborer.
After testifying at Nuremberg in April 1946, he was handed over to Poland.
He was tried in Warsaw, found guilty, and sentenced to death.
On April 16th, 1947, he was hanged at Auschwitz I on a short-drop gallows built beside the crematorium he had once controlled.
Josef Mengele was never brought to trial.
He died on February 7th, 1979 after he suffered a stroke while swimming.
The approximately 7,000 people found alive at Auschwitz returned to a world that no longer existed.
Many remained silent about their experiences for decades.
Trauma and the challenge of rebuilding their lives in new countries caused many to keep their memories private.
Some did not tell their own children what had happened until the 1970s or 1980s.
The liberation didn’t mark the end of anything.
It marked the beginning of a reckoning that the world is still working through.
