On an order from Himmler to cease extermination operations across the Reich all gassing systems were shut down in November 1944; the previous month 40,000 people had been murdered. The Sonderkommando had to dismantle the killing installations and remove all traces of the crimes. The corpse-burning trenches had to be cleared and levelled, and hollows in the camp grounds which had been filled with the ashes and bones of the murdered prisoners were to be emptied, covered with turf and planted over. Crematorium I in the parent camp was turned into an air raid bunker. The chimney and the holes in the ceiling through which the Zyklon B was thrown in disappeared, the ovens were dismantled, and the passageway between the gas chamber and the incineration room was closed. The SS had crematorium IV, badly damaged during the Sonderkommando uprising, pulled down. Usable parts of the other equipment, including the incineration ovens of crematoria II and III, were transported to other camps, presumably to Gross-Rosen, possibly to Mauthausen, where the ventilation equipment from the gas chambers also ended up.
In January 1945 the Red Army encircled German troops after a surprise offensive near Cracow, took over the Upper Silesian industrial belt almost undamaged, and pushed as far as Brieg and Steinau on the Oder below Breslau. Gauleiter Fritz Bracht, who as Reich Defence Commissar responsible for the region had for a long time refused to abandon his policy of holding out until the very end, ordered the evacuation of the district capital, Kattowitz, and extended the clearance order to the whole region. Detailed guidelines established at the end of December 1944 governed the evacuation of the Auschwitz camp. The aim was to send the prisoners westwards in columns, first on foot and later by rail, so that they could still be used for forced labour in the Old Reich. Two routes were established for the parent camp and Birkenau: one via Pless and Rybnik, the other via Tychy and Gleiwitz; prisoners from the sub-camps had to march via Beuthen, Tost and Oppeln.
On 17 January 1945, with the evacuation of some 58,000 prisoners, the second and final phase of the clearing of the camp complex began; about 20,000 of them came from the parent camp and Birkenau, and all the rest from Monowitz and the sub-camps. A very few were taken away by train in goods trucks, but most were marched on foot in the winter cold along the roads of Upper and Lower Silesia. Thousands died on the death march. Anyone who weakened or fell, anyone who tried to rest or flee, was shot by the SS. In some areas, despite the fact that it was strictly forbidden and subject to severe punishment, some civilians handed bread to the people drifting by, or were prepared to take in refugees; in areas inhabited predominantly by Germans such offers of help were not forthcoming.
After several days’ march the prisoners were sent to Gleiwitz and Wodzisław Śląski in open goods trucks. Many froze or starved to death on the way, and in the regions of northern Moravia, northern Bohemia and annexed Austria, through which the trains passed on the way to the Old Reich, corpses were left lying along the tracks. All in all, about 15,000 prisoners died during the evacuation. Around 43,000 arrived in the camps in the west, where as ‘new arrivals’ they were once more at the bottom of the hierarchy of prisoners. Anyone who survived until the spring of 1945, when the SS dissolved the camps inside the Reich as well, was sent on yet another death march. In May 1945 the SS loaded about 7,000 prisoners from Neuengamme on to two German naval vessels, including prisoners from Auschwitz. The Allies, who knew nothing of the human freight, sank the Cap Arcona and the Thielbeck in the bay of Lübeck. There were no survivors.
By the middle of January 1945 the Lager-SS in Auschwitz was feverishly trying to remove the written evidence of mass murder. Files, death certificates, lists and other papers from the camp administration were burned in big rubbish incinerators, boilers and open bonfires in the camp grounds. The dossiers of the political department and the central building administration were hastily packed away and taken to Gross-Rosen and other camps. The X-ray machine that had been used until the spring of 1944 for Horst Schumann’s medical experiments was removed. His colleague Mengele closed down the experimental laboratories and corpse dissection rooms only when he had no ‘human material’ left at his disposal. With the departing prisoners, he left Auschwitz on 17 January 1945, and took the written documentation of his murders with him.
In the chaos of the dissolution of the camp the hundred or so remaining Sonderkommando prisoners were able inconspicuously to join the marching columns. The SS, whose plan it was to murder the last immediate witnesses of mass murder, did not manage to find the men among the evacuated prisoners. They were able to leave the camp, and almost all of them survived the war.
On 20 and 21 January 1945 the SS removed their sentries from the watchtowers; small units still patrolled the grounds. It is not known whether the order to clear the camp and murder the remaining prisoners was given at this time. But within a week, 300 Jews and a further 400 prisoners of different categories were killed in various sub-camps.
What remained of crematoria II and III was blown up on 20 January 1945; components of the killing equipment, ready for transport, were later discovered by the liberators on a building site near the camp. Before they themselves left Auschwitz, the SS guards set fire to the personal effects storeroom ‘Canada’; the camp was still burning days later, and only six out of thirty barracks were left standing. Crematorium V, where executions by shooting in the back of the neck were still taking place, and where corpses were burned, remained ready for operation until the final days; only during the night of 25–6 January 1945 was the last extermination installation blown up.
A day and a few hours later, on the afternoon of 27 January 1945, a Saturday, soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front liberated Auschwitz and its sub-camps. They found at least 600 corpses. In the parent camp, in Birkenau and in Monowitz some 7,000 prisoners were still alive, about 5,800 of them in Birkenau, about 800 in the prisoners’ infirmary building in Monowitz, and 500 in the smaller sub-camps. Many were already so weak that they were barely aware of the event they had so long yearned for.
In the warehouses the liberators found about 370,000 men’s suits, 837,000 women’s coats and dresses, huge amounts of children’s clothing, about 44,000 pairs of shoes, 14,000 carpets, and prostheses, toothbrushes, household goods and, in the former leather factory near the parent camp, 7.7 tonnes of human hair packed ready for transport. They calculated that it must have come from about 140,000 women.
8
The town and the camp after liberation
The end of the ‘model town’
The IG Farben plant was almost ready for production when it was hurriedly cleared ahead of the advancing Soviet troops. What remained behind was the greatest ruined investment of the German Reich in the Second World War. German women and children were evacuated from Auschwitz from the end of October 1944. Administrative officials, IG Farben managers and civilians also left the town on special trains in mid-January 1945. In the chaos of the last days of the war, racial order had still been preserved: the fleeing Reich Germans had precedence over the concentration camp prisoners on the streets and tracks, and the marching columns of the prisoners of war and forced labourers.
The ‘model town’ of Auschwitz met a pitiful end: in September 1945 about 7,300 people still lived in the town, which now belonged to the newly founded Polish state and was once more known as Oświęcim. Poles made up 5,000 of the residents; the rest included 68 Ukrainians, 33 French people, 8 Russians and 4 Czechs. There were also 186 Jews – and about 2,000 ethnic Germans. The latter were probably the Polish inhabitants who had joined the German Volksliste during the occupation, either voluntarily or under pressure. There were no other Germans.
The machines and high-pressure synthesizing plants of the IG Farben factory were swiftly dismantled by the Soviets and moved to Kemerovo in western Siberia, where a coal-hydration complex was being built. In Oświęcim one of the biggest plastics factories in Poland emerged out of the remaining plants. Of the former German residents who returned to the Old Reich little is known. It seems likely that many of t
hem quickly got back on their feet, like the architect Hans Stosberg, who rebuilt the destroyed city of Hanover after the war.
The careers of many surviving Auschwitz prisoners were marked by illness and severe mental problems. Some of them were the only survivors of their sizeable families. The sense of guilt at being alive, a deep sense of alienation in the face of a social environment that was unable to imagine or to grasp what they had been through, and the signs of trauma that still appeared years after the liberation marked them and continue to mark succeeding generations.
Military hospital, prisoner of war camp, memorial
With the support of helpers from the surrounding area the Soviet liberators set up a military field hospital in the former parent camp. In the barracks of Birkenau a field hospital was set up by the Polish Red Cross, which moved after a few weeks to the brick buildings in the parent camp. In day and night shifts doctors, nurses and carers tended to the survivors of the camp, most of them Jews, including around 200 children. In the weeks that followed the liberation many died of the consequences of imprisonment in the camp, perhaps because their emaciated bodies had been unable to cope with too sudden a rush of food. In many cases the psychological effects were even more serious than the physical ones. In some the announcement of bathtime prompted a panic reaction, as did the sight of needles, and some survivors would not stop hiding bread under their pillows. After about three to four months, however, many were capable of returning to their homelands with transport organized by the military authorities, or on their own initiative.
In April 1945 camps of the Soviet political secret police, the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), were set up in the former prisoners’ blocks in the parent camp and in Birkenau women’s camp. Interned in them were Wehrmacht soldiers, civilians from the surrounding area of Upper Silesia, members of the Volkssturm (‘people’sstorm’,i.e.militia) and Germans from Bohemia who had been captured by the Americans and handed over to the Soviets; they also included ethnic German Poles. But few details are known, and it is unclear, for example, how many prisoners were held here before being transferred to the Soviet Union. The NKVD camp in the parent camp was dissolved at the end of 1945, and the prisoner of war camp in Birkenau is thought to have been dissolved in May 1946.
Early in 1946 the Soviet authorities placed most of the former camp grounds under the auspices of the political administration. In March 1946 prisoners’ organizations and the Polish authorities came up with an initiative to set up a museum in the camp grounds. The following year the project became a reality. With the law of 2 July 1947 the state memorial of Auschwitz–Birkenau came into being. Exhibitions were organized, the archive and the library were built up and rebuilding work was undertaken (for example, in the old crematorium). The exhumation of corpses continued until the end of the fifties. In the former Monowitz camp, which remained a factory, a memorial stone recalls the victims of forced labour. The former camp complex, which has been a protected memorial since the foundation of the memorial site, was made a World Cultural Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979. Today the memorial attracts half a million visitors from all over the world every year.
The number of victims
From the very beginning the investigative commissions – a Soviet commission took up the work in February 1945, a Polish one in April – have examined the question of the number of victims. After the compound had been examined, the ruins of the extermination systems studied and the statements of some 200 surviving prisoners recorded, the Soviets made a public statement on 8 May 1945. Four million people, according to the communiqué published in the newspaper Krasnaja Zvezda, were murdered in Auschwitz. It did not mention how many of those were Jews. The quoted figure was based on the estimated incineration capacity of the crematoria, and was quickly broadcast around the world. The Nuremberg Tribunal trying the ‘major war criminals’ picked up the figure, as did the newly founded Supreme National Court in Poland, and textbooks and encyclopaedias quoted the figure of 4 million dead. But since the SS had almost completely destroyed the precise deportation plans at the end of the war, former prisoners had given various figures and Höss spoke of 3 million dead – according to him, 2.5million were killed with gas, and half a million died of hunger and epidemics – different figures were soon in circulation. The figures ranged from less than a million to over 6 million. Today, drawing from far more accurate information, it is certain that at least 1.1million, and possibly up to 1.5million people were murdered in the Auschwitz camp complex. That corresponds to about 20–25per cent of all the Jews killed in the Second World War.
The question of the number of Auschwitz victims is further complicated by the fact that the Lager-SS had a small number of prisoners registered and numbered. No more than about 400,000 prisoners of various nationalities received a prisoner number and about half of those were Jews. The so-called ‘death books’ kept by the camp registry office, which was set up in 1941, contain around 69,000 names, because records were not kept about those killed in the mass extermination operations. Anyone who was selected immediately after arrival as ‘unfit for work’, or who had been transported to the camp for execution (including Soviet prisoners of war, those condemned by the camp court and prisoners from other camps) was killed without having been registered.
It can be proven that the National Socialists murdered 5–6million Jews during the Second World War. The overall figure varies between 5.3and 6.1million – a discrepancy produced by the fact that even today it is impossible to arrive at precise figures for the murdered Soviet Jews. The bulk of the victims, about 3 million, were murdered in the extermination camps, about 1.3million died in mass shootings and about a million in ghettos and concentration camps; almost 700,000 were killed in mobile gas-lorries, and around 800,000 died of hunger and disease in the ghettos.
About 90 per cent of those murdered in Auschwitz, a total of around 960,000, were Jews. Of those, 438,000 came from Hungary, about 300,000 from Poland, 69,000 from France, some 60,000 from the Netherlands, 55,000 from Greece, 46,000 from Bohemia and Moravia, about 27,000 from Slovakia, 25,000 from Belgium, around 23,000 from the Old Reich, 10,000 from Croatia, about 6,000 from both Italy and Belorussia, 1,600 from Austria and some 700 from Norway. Others killed included 70,000– 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 so-called gypsies, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and 10,000–15,000 members of other nations, among them Czechs, Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Yugoslavians, French, Austrians and Germans. About 200,000 further prisoners died from hunger, disease and inhuman working conditions.
These calculations are based on a series of sources that have been found in the interim, which make it possible to determine the number of victims in a much more sophisticated fashion than was possible immediately after the liberation. These include fragments of copies of the accession lists of deported Jews, which provide dates and places of departure of the extermination transports. Also preserved are forms from the company Tesch und Stabenow concerning the delivery of Zyklon B, as well as three reports by the Lager-SS to Berlin authorities, indicating how many members of a transport were destined for labour deployment and how many were to be sent to the gas chambers. Also important are the hand-written notes of Sonderkommando prisoners, which were discovered in the camp grounds in 1952, 1962 and 1980, as well as sketches and drawings by survivors. Also of central importance is the official correspondence from the countries of origin of the deportees. These document the preparation of the transports, as well as detailed train timetables with figures and precise lists of the names of Jews. Architectural blueprints for the crematoria have been available since the opening of the eastern European archives in the early nineties.
There have been intense discussions in the field of contemporary history about the possibility that the number of those murdered could in fact be smaller than statements made after the war might have indicated. The first academic study that critically engaged with the question of numbers, and discussed sources as well as methods of calculation, was
an essay by the French researcher and former Auschwitz inmate Georges Wellers, published in 1983. Independently, the Polish historian Franciszek Piper reached similar conclusions in the book that he published in the early nineties; while Wellers reached a figure of 1.4million victims, Piper was able to make a more precise estimate, based on a wider range of sources, of the number of Polish prisoners killed. Piper concluded that at least 1.1million had been murdered, but did not rule out a maximum figure of 1.5million. The Auschwitz– Birkenau memorial, which had long kept to the figure of 4 million victims, accepted Piper’s figures in the late nineties. The debate about numbers is not a relativization of the crimes, but rather confirms the central importance of Auschwitz–Birkenau in the National Socialist extermination policy.
9
Auschwitz before the courts
Trials in Poland
After the end of the war several hundred members of the Auschwitz SS appeared before various courts in Poland, more than in any other country, but still only a fraction of the 7,000 men and women who had served in the camp. According to estimates, at least 6,300 former SS members were still alive at the end of the war. Between 1946 and 1949 about 1,000 of them had been tracked down, most of them in the American zone of occupied Germany. They had been extradited to Poland in line with the Moscow Declaration of October 1943,in which the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States had announced that they would hand German war criminals over to the countries on whose territories their crimes had been committed. Between 1946 and 1953 the Polish judiciary brought accusations against at least 673 people, 21 of them women. Most of the proceedings were held in district, voivodeship and special criminal courts in Cracow and Wadowice.
Auschwitz: A History Page 10