"We ran up to them, and they hugged us, handed out cookies and chocolate. When you're so lonely, someone's hug means more than you think, because it restored our human dignity, which we were so lacking. We were not only hungry, but also craved friendly feelings, and those soldiers gave us at least a little of it..." (Eva Mozes Kor, quoted in Laurence Ress, "Auschwitz. The Nazis and the Final Solution", translated by Paweł Stachura, Warsaw 2005, p. 199).
This is how Eva Mozes, not yet eleven years old, remembered the appearance of Red Army scouts outside her barracks. She and Miriam, her twin sister, among the few surviving victims of the pseudo-medical experiments of the notorious "angel of death," Dr. Josef Mengele, were finally free. On January 27, 1945, units of the 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front (100th and 322nd Rifle Divisions) entered the Auschwitz concentration camp complex.
Although from today's perspective we know that the Red Army soldiers, by destroying Nazi totalitarianism, were simultaneously bringing the terror of Stalinism, and their behavior was often not much different from that of the occupiers they had driven out, in that place and time, among the barbed wire of Auschwitz, they were seen as simply liberators.
Irena Szczypiorska, a Polish prisoner of Auschwitz, remembered the arrival of the Red Army soldiers this way.
"On January 27th, at three in the afternoon, a Russian woman I knew came running to my block, shouting, 'Iroczka, ours are in the camp!' But I strained my eyes in vain in the direction she pointed. I saw nothing but snowdrifts. Suddenly... yes, one of them moved noticeably. They were scouts in white overalls. After an enthusiastic outburst of greetings, they told us, 'Women, go to the blocks, take the children, don't hang around here, the camp is rigged. We'll come back tomorrow.'"
They arrived that same evening. One of them, wounded, simply called for a piece of bandage, re-wrapped his arm, and ran on. They rushed in groups. We threw our arms around their necks with cries of joy, and shins rose from our beds, blowing them kisses. But they didn't stop for long. They ran after the fleeing Germans. Only on January 28th did larger Red Army units arrive. We took bread straight from the carts."
(quoted from: http://lekcja.auschwitz.org/11_wyzwolenie/ ; accessed: 24/01/2022)
Czech prisoner Terezie Freundova-Jírová describes similar experiences:
"Only on January 27th, after a nine-day interregnum, did the first signs of the arrival of long-awaited Soviet soldiers appear. It was a joy! It's impossible to describe. After all this, we finally felt like free people. Yes. People! Until then, we had been given the "stamp" of lesser value by the SS. We were worth less than cattle."
(quoted from: http://lekcja.auschwitz.org/11_wyzwolenie/ ; accessed: 24/01/2022)
Eva, Miriam, Irena, and Terezie were very lucky. They were among the more than 7 prisoners left in the camp. Had they been deemed fit by the Germans to march, they would have joined the approximately 56 prisoners who, from January 17th to 21st, were led out of the camp and, as part of the "evacuation," driven westward on murderous death marches. Two main routes were designated. One, nearly 50 kilometers long, led to the railway station in Gliwice (Gleiwitz), while the other, 65 kilometers long, led to the station in Wodzisław Śląski (Loslau). Those prisoners who managed to complete the entire route were loaded onto open-top wagons and sent to camps in Germany and Austria. Years later, participants in these marches recalled them as the worst experience of their time in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex; so intense that it surpassed all the other horrors of the camp.
The situation of the prisoners left behind in the camp was also dire. Not only were they extremely physically exhausted, but most also suffered from starvation diarrhea and, very often, tuberculosis. A few days after the liberation of Auschwitz, the Red Army opened two field hospitals, which began providing first aid. The first Polish volunteers, primarily members of the Polish Red Cross, quickly began arriving, organizing the Polish Red Cross Camp Hospital in early February 1945. A total of over 4500 prisoners, including 400 children, were cared for in these hospitals.
Initially, the liberation of Auschwitz did not generate much interest in the contemporary press. Only on February 2nd did the Moscow daily Pravda publish a report by its correspondent, Boris Polevoi (later a well-known writer in the USSR), which was reprinted a few days later by the London weekly The Jewish Chronicle. However, the event itself did not attract as much attention as the discovery of the German Majdanek (KL Lublin) camp in the summer of 1944. The scale of the crimes committed at Auschwitz was not yet known, and it was initially treated as a "second Majdanek." The scale of what had happened there was revealed only later. The only ones fully aware of it from the very beginning were the camp staff. The impending defeat of the Third Reich presented them with the prospect of being held accountable for their actions—a responsibility they desperately wanted to avoid.
When the SS at Auschwitz realized that the arrival of the Red Army was only a matter of time, they attempted to erase all traces of what was happening in the camp. Just before the Red Army entered, the Germans blew up the crematoria and gas chambers and set fire to the so-called Canada, a large warehouse where the belongings of the murdered were sorted and stored. Prisoner files and registers were burned, and prisoner negatives and photographs were also destroyed. Although part of the camp archives fell into the hands of the Red Army, the exact number of Auschwitz victims has not yet been determined.
Aware of the scale of their crimes, the camp staff members tried to disappear as quickly as possible into the chaos of the war's end, concealing the fact of their service there. Some succeeded, while others were discovered. Of those identified, three examples are worth mentioning.
The camp's founder and first commandant, Rudolf Höss, attempted to cover his tracks. He donned a Kriegsmarine uniform and posed as an ordinary naval officer. Because his identity was not verified, he was eventually released from the prisoner-of-war camp. The Allies gradually learned of Höss's role in the Holocaust as they gathered testimonies from prisoners at the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany, which they had liberated. It turned out that prisoners "evacuated" from the Auschwitz concentration camp complex were also sent there. However, attempts to find the criminal were unsuccessful. In this situation, Allied investigators decided to resort to a ruse. They assumed that the hiding former camp commandant was contacting loved ones. Therefore, they sought out the criminal's family and arrested his wife, Hedwig Höss. Interrogated for five days, whenever asked about her husband, she invariably replied that he was dead. On the sixth day, a train stopped on the railway tracks next to the prison where Hedwig Höss was being held. At that moment, investigators announced that the train would be transporting one of her sons, Klaus, to Siberia. They left her a note and a pencil, and gave her ten minutes to reveal her husband's location and the name he was hiding under. The bluff worked. The most famous commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau was arrested on March 11, 1946, at the Gottrupel farm near Flensburg, where he had been hiding under the name Franz Lang. He was caught unawares at 11:00 PM, already in his pajamas, preparing for bed. After his arrest, Rudolf Höss served as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials, in the cases of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Oswald Pohl, and the executives of the German chemical company IG Farben. He was later extradited to Poland. After a three-week trial, he was sentenced to death by hanging on April 2, 1947. The sentence was carried out on April 16, 1947, at the camp he managed.
After the war, a search was also underway for Josef Mengele, a doctor from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. At the end of the war, he disguised himself as a regular soldier and, captured by the Americans, was placed in a prisoner-of-war camp near Munich. After leaving, he successfully hid in Europe until 1949, when, with the help of a smuggling network organized by Archbishop Alojz Hudal, a German intelligence agent in the Vatican, he managed to reach Argentina. In 1959, he moved to Paraguay and then to Brazil. There, he died on February 7, 1979, most likely after suffering a stroke and drowning while bathing. He was buried under the name Wolfgang Gerhard. DNA tests conducted in 1992 confirmed Mengele's identity.
The fate of Oskar Gröning, known as the "Auschwitz bookkeeper," was quite different. He served as a camp accountant, responsible for sorting the belongings of both prisoners and the murdered, as well as for counting and dividing looted money by currency. He did not go into hiding and did not change his name. In 1944, at his own request, he was transferred to the SS military units fighting in the Ardennes. When he was captured by the British in June 1945, he concealed his camp service, claiming to have worked at the SS Administrative and Economic Office in Berlin. After his release in 1947, he returned to Germany and took up work in a factory. He told his family he did not wish to discuss his activities in the camp. For many years, he was not held accountable for his activities at Auschwitz. Until one day, at a philatelic club, he struck up a conversation with a man who began to convince him that the Holocaust… never happened. Then he came across a pamphlet questioning the historicity of what he had seen and experienced. He annotated it with ironic comments and sent it back to his interlocutor at the philatelic club. It turned out that the comments had been published in a neo-Nazi magazine, and Gröning began to be contacted by people who denied the genocide of the Jews. Irritated, Oskar Gröning wrote down his memoirs and agreed to an interview with the BBC, in which he recounted what he had witnessed. In 2014, he appeared before a court in Lüneburg, accused of aiding and abetting the murder of 300,000 people during his service at Auschwitz. In 2015, he was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. Because he was 94 years old at the time of his sentencing, his defense appealed, but in 2016, the Federal Court of Justice upheld the conviction. At that time, Gröning's defense argued that, due to his health, serving a prison sentence could be life-threatening. The prosecutor's office then called in a medical expert, who examined the former SS man in 2017 and assessed him as fit to serve his sentence. However, Oskar Gröning was never imprisoned. He died in 2018, shortly before his sentence was to begin.
Despite the passage of 77 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, the history of Germany's most notorious concentration and extermination camp remains unfinished. This event brought an end to the ongoing tragedy, but to this day, it has not been fully understood or told. Most of the camp documentation was destroyed, and few of the victims survived. Their testimonies and accounts are understandably fragmented. Although they form a coherent picture, supported by archival sources, there remain gaps waiting to be filled. Most of the camp's perpetrators have disappeared, and although bringing them to justice is now becoming increasingly unlikely, thanks to the efforts of researchers into Nazi crimes, their names and the roles they played in the extermination machinery are gradually being revealed. Knowing and telling the stories of the camp's victims and their perpetrators as fully as possible remains a pressing challenge for researchers of Auschwitz and its sub-camps.
Dr. Jacek Konik
