Jack Kelly writer
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THE LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ
(AmericanHeritage.com)
On this date in 1945, Soviet troops of the First Ukrainian
Front arrived at the town of Oswiecim in south central
Poland. In a camp there they found several thousand sick
and starving prisoners. Inured to brutality and privation
after many months of campaigning, the soldiers were not
impressed by the discovery. Newspapers barely
mentioned the liberation.
Only later would the world understand that these troops
had arrived at a place where rational, educated and
civilized men and women had cooly implemented the worst
mass murder in human history. They had arrived at the
place that the Germans had renamed Auschwitz.
After invading in 1939, the Nazis had strung barbed wire
around 22 Polish army barracks in the town to form a
prison camp. They locked up local dissidents and Russian
prisoners of war and incorporated Auschwitz into the
network of concentration camps that provided slave labor
for the Reich. Workers toiled in local gravel and coal
mines. Thousands of prisoners were shipped through
Auschwitz to camps like Dachau and Buchenwald in
Germany.
This profitable business was operated by the
Schutzenstaffel or SS, the Nazi security force under the
leadership of Heinrich Himmler. German companies like
Krupp, Siemens, and I.G. Farben set up factories near the
camp to take advantage of the forced labor. The complex
expanded into a metropolis, with three main camps and
dozens of satellites. At its peak, Auschwitz housed more
than 155,000 human beings.
Even in its earliest days, sadistic punishment and summary
execution were commonplace at Auschwitz. In 1940, a
crematorium for disposing of bodies was built in the camp.
Two years later, the first Jews were transported by rail to
Auschwitz. An estimated 10 to 30 percent of them were
selected for forced labor; the majority were murdered
within hours of arrival, many at a new killing center called
Birkenau two miles away. Auschwitz had assumed its role
as the largest of the extermination camps. Over the next
32 months at least 1.1 million persons died there. The
vast majority of them were Jews, but the victims also
included Poles, Russians, Gypsies, and Jehovah’s
Witnesses.
The murder reached its peak in the summer of 1944 when
the Jews of Hungary began to arrive. Train tracks were
extended directly to Birkenau to speed the process. By
that time, five crematoria were operating. Guards forced
victims into sealed rooms where executioners poisoned
them with cyanide gas. This killing method was the
inspiration of a deputy of the camp’s commander, Rudolph
Höss, who pronounced himself “considerably excited by
the efficiency.”
In November 1944, Himmler ordered the killing frenzy to
cease. The Germans, reluctant to leave behind evidence
of their crimes, blew up the crematoria in January and
forced everyone who could walk to head west. About
58,000 souls left the horror of the camp to face an even
more excruciating death march along winter roads.
“Anyone who dared even to bend over,” a survivor
remembered, “who stopped even for a moment -- was
shot.”
The SS guards conducted the last roll call at Auschwitz on
January 17, 1945. They intended to kill all who could not
walk, but air raids and the approach of Soviet troops
forced them to leave behind the sick along with about 200
children who had been subjected to medical experiments
by Auschwitz doctors like Josef Mengele.
Thousands died awaiting their liberators. January 27 was
a “beautiful, sunny winter’s day,” according to the diary of
a survivor. “About 3:00 p.m. we heard a noise in the
direction of the main gate. It was a Soviet forward patrol --
Soviet soldiers in white caps! There was a mad rush to
shake them by the hand and shout our gratitude. We were
liberated!”
Eva Kor, who was ten years old at the time, remembered,
“We ran up to them and they gave us hugs, cookies, and
chocolates. Being so alone, a hug meant more than
anybody could imagine, because that replaced the human
worth we were starving for.”
The Soviet soldiers fed the inmates and arranged for
medical care. Only gradually did they awaken to the extent
of what had happened at Auschwitz. The artifacts held
clues: a pile of shoes as large as a two-story house,
836,255 women’s coats and dresses, 368,820 men’s suits,
7 tons of human hair.
One inmate described Auschwitz as “a mixture of hell and
insane asylum.” Scenes of depravity were routine.
Inmates with unusual eye coloring were murdered so their
eyeballs could be pinned to a wall “like butterflies.” The
Germans used naked young women for target practice.
They threw living infants into open fires.
Equally appalling was the systematic effort to drain inmates
of every vestige of humanity. Though survivors recovered
physically, one former prisoner declared, “the crack in the
foundation of our human existence is far less curable.”
As for those who instigated the crimes, “they were not
monsters,” noted Italian writer Primo Levi, who survived
Auschwitz, “they had our faces.” The banality of the
perpetrators is among the most unsettling facts about the
Holocaust. Rudolph Höss said afterward, “I really never
wasted much thought on whether it was wrong. It simply
seemed necessary.”
Levi noted that the crime was the result not of some grand
evil impulse, but of common human attributes like “mental
laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride.”
It was the dismal outcome of a “smallness of soul.”
Last month, the world reacted with revulsion when Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced a
conference to examine the severity and even existence of
the Holocaust. But Ahmadinejad’s purpose was
transparently political -- to question the legitimacy of Israel
-- and the propaganda of the Holocaust revisionists
inevitably withers in light of the overwhelming historical
evidence.
It is not denial but amnesia that is the real danger. How
many of us are willing to stare into the furnace of Auschwitz
and to contemplate the deeper meaning of this most awful
of historical facts?
“We harbored the vague idea that after Auschwitz
everything would have to change for the better,” a survivor
wrote, “that mankind would learn a lesson from our
experiences. Then we had to realize that people were not
even interested in them.”
# # #
(AmericanHeritage.com)
On this date in 1945, Soviet troops of the First Ukrainian
Front arrived at the town of Oswiecim in south central
Poland. In a camp there they found several thousand sick
and starving prisoners. Inured to brutality and privation
after many months of campaigning, the soldiers were not
impressed by the discovery. Newspapers barely
mentioned the liberation.
Only later would the world understand that these troops
had arrived at a place where rational, educated and
civilized men and women had cooly implemented the worst
mass murder in human history. They had arrived at the
place that the Germans had renamed Auschwitz.
After invading in 1939, the Nazis had strung barbed wire
around 22 Polish army barracks in the town to form a
prison camp. They locked up local dissidents and Russian
prisoners of war and incorporated Auschwitz into the
network of concentration camps that provided slave labor
for the Reich. Workers toiled in local gravel and coal
mines. Thousands of prisoners were shipped through
Auschwitz to camps like Dachau and Buchenwald in
Germany.
This profitable business was operated by the
Schutzenstaffel or SS, the Nazi security force under the
leadership of Heinrich Himmler. German companies like
Krupp, Siemens, and I.G. Farben set up factories near the
camp to take advantage of the forced labor. The complex
expanded into a metropolis, with three main camps and
dozens of satellites. At its peak, Auschwitz housed more
than 155,000 human beings.
Even in its earliest days, sadistic punishment and summary
execution were commonplace at Auschwitz. In 1940, a
crematorium for disposing of bodies was built in the camp.
Two years later, the first Jews were transported by rail to
Auschwitz. An estimated 10 to 30 percent of them were
selected for forced labor; the majority were murdered
within hours of arrival, many at a new killing center called
Birkenau two miles away. Auschwitz had assumed its role
as the largest of the extermination camps. Over the next
32 months at least 1.1 million persons died there. The
vast majority of them were Jews, but the victims also
included Poles, Russians, Gypsies, and Jehovah’s
Witnesses.
The murder reached its peak in the summer of 1944 when
the Jews of Hungary began to arrive. Train tracks were
extended directly to Birkenau to speed the process. By
that time, five crematoria were operating. Guards forced
victims into sealed rooms where executioners poisoned
them with cyanide gas. This killing method was the
inspiration of a deputy of the camp’s commander, Rudolph
Höss, who pronounced himself “considerably excited by
the efficiency.”
In November 1944, Himmler ordered the killing frenzy to
cease. The Germans, reluctant to leave behind evidence
of their crimes, blew up the crematoria in January and
forced everyone who could walk to head west. About
58,000 souls left the horror of the camp to face an even
more excruciating death march along winter roads.
“Anyone who dared even to bend over,” a survivor
remembered, “who stopped even for a moment -- was
shot.”
The SS guards conducted the last roll call at Auschwitz on
January 17, 1945. They intended to kill all who could not
walk, but air raids and the approach of Soviet troops
forced them to leave behind the sick along with about 200
children who had been subjected to medical experiments
by Auschwitz doctors like Josef Mengele.
Thousands died awaiting their liberators. January 27 was
a “beautiful, sunny winter’s day,” according to the diary of
a survivor. “About 3:00 p.m. we heard a noise in the
direction of the main gate. It was a Soviet forward patrol --
Soviet soldiers in white caps! There was a mad rush to
shake them by the hand and shout our gratitude. We were
liberated!”
Eva Kor, who was ten years old at the time, remembered,
“We ran up to them and they gave us hugs, cookies, and
chocolates. Being so alone, a hug meant more than
anybody could imagine, because that replaced the human
worth we were starving for.”
The Soviet soldiers fed the inmates and arranged for
medical care. Only gradually did they awaken to the extent
of what had happened at Auschwitz. The artifacts held
clues: a pile of shoes as large as a two-story house,
836,255 women’s coats and dresses, 368,820 men’s suits,
7 tons of human hair.
One inmate described Auschwitz as “a mixture of hell and
insane asylum.” Scenes of depravity were routine.
Inmates with unusual eye coloring were murdered so their
eyeballs could be pinned to a wall “like butterflies.” The
Germans used naked young women for target practice.
They threw living infants into open fires.
Equally appalling was the systematic effort to drain inmates
of every vestige of humanity. Though survivors recovered
physically, one former prisoner declared, “the crack in the
foundation of our human existence is far less curable.”
As for those who instigated the crimes, “they were not
monsters,” noted Italian writer Primo Levi, who survived
Auschwitz, “they had our faces.” The banality of the
perpetrators is among the most unsettling facts about the
Holocaust. Rudolph Höss said afterward, “I really never
wasted much thought on whether it was wrong. It simply
seemed necessary.”
Levi noted that the crime was the result not of some grand
evil impulse, but of common human attributes like “mental
laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride.”
It was the dismal outcome of a “smallness of soul.”
Last month, the world reacted with revulsion when Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced a
conference to examine the severity and even existence of
the Holocaust. But Ahmadinejad’s purpose was
transparently political -- to question the legitimacy of Israel
-- and the propaganda of the Holocaust revisionists
inevitably withers in light of the overwhelming historical
evidence.
It is not denial but amnesia that is the real danger. How
many of us are willing to stare into the furnace of Auschwitz
and to contemplate the deeper meaning of this most awful
of historical facts?
“We harbored the vague idea that after Auschwitz
everything would have to change for the better,” a survivor
wrote, “that mankind would learn a lesson from our
experiences. Then we had to realize that people were not
even interested in them.”
# # #