THE SEVENTY FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CLOSING OF THE DEATH CAMP IN POLAND

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The death camp was called Auschwitz and it comprised of two sites: Auschwitz I, in an abandoned Polish military base and the larger Auschwitz II, also called Birkenau. An estimated 1.3 million men, women and children were sent to Auschwitz, and 1.1 million of them died there including 960,000 Jews between 1940 and 1945.

Seventy-five years ago (1945) Russian army soldiers arrived at that death camp and rescued the remaining survivors. The Nazi’s largest death camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945.

Those survivors who still had their strength, grabbed a number of camp guards and threw them into the flaming crematorium ovens while they were still alive.

On January 26^th 2020, hundreds of survivors while sitting at the back entrance of the camp (and who were children in 1945) celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the release of the survivors from that death camp. 

One of the survivors said that when he was 17 years old, he and his family arrived at the amp. He said that his mother and little sister were taken to the building where the gas chamber was located. He said that he watched the women and children being marched in a long line towards the gas chamber. He said he was able to watch his mother and sister in the long line of the victims by looking at his little sister`s bright red coat. Soon after, the red coat couldn`t be seen anymore since his sister and mother were marched with the others into the gas chamber.  He said that years later, whenever he saw a little girl wearing a bright red coat, tears flowed from his eyes.    

During the trials of the major war criminals at the Nuremberg Tribunal hearings, the judges heard the testimony of a German engineer. He said that  while he was walking in a forest, he heard gunfire and soon after, he witnessed the slaughter of Jews. He said that when a man and his little daughter stood at the edge of a large pit in the ground, the man was talking to his daughter who knew that she too would also be shot to death just like the dead persons whose bodies were lying in the pit below her.

The Nazis murdered one and a half million children while they were still in power.

Nazi Germany built extermination camps (also called death camps or killing centers) during the Holocaust in World War II to systematically murdered millions of Jews. Others were murdered at the death camps as well, including Poles, homosexuals, Soviet POWs, and Roma. (Gypsies) The victims of death camps were primarily killed by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose or by means of gas vans. Some Nazi camps, such as Auschwitz and Majdanek, served a dual purpose before the end of the war in 1945: extermination by poison gas and also through extreme work under starvation conditions.

It is ironic when you think about it. When their Russian rescuers arrived at the camps, they fed the starving prisoners. Since the inmates ‘stomachs had shrunk, their stomachs burst and many inmates died after being fed. A holocaust survivor watched starving concentration camp prisoners roast and eat the flesh of a dead child just to stay alive.

The concept of mass extermination with the use of stationary facilities, to which the victims were taken by train, was the result of earlier Nazi experimentation with chemically manufactured poison gas during the secretive Aktion T4 euthanasia programme against hospital patients with mental and physical disabilities. The technology was adapted, expanded, and applied in wartime to unsuspecting victims of many ethnic and national groups The Jews were the primary target, accounting for over 90 percent of the extermination camp death toll. The genocide of the Jews of Europe was the Third Reich's "Final Solution to the Jewish question". It is now collectively known as the Holocaust, during which 11 million victims  were also murdered including six million Jews.

Extermination camps were also set up by the fascist regime of the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state of Germany, which carried out genocide between 1941 and 1945 against Serbs, Jews, Roma  and its  Croat and  Bosniak Muslim  political opponents .

After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the secret Action (Action) T4 euthanasia program that was the systematic murder of German, Austrian and Polish hospital patients with mental or physical disabilities that  was initiated by the SS in order to eliminate "life unworthy of life" (German: Lebensunwertes Leben), a Nazi designation for people who had no right to life. In 1941, the experience gained in the secretive killing of these hospital patients led to the creation of extermination camps for the implementation of the Final Solution.

By then, the Jews were already confined to new ghettos and interned in Nazi concentration camps along with other targeted groups, including Roma, and the Soviet POWs. The Nazi Endlösung der Judenfrage (The Final Solution of the Jewish Question), based on the systematic killing of Europe's Jews by gassing, began during Operation Reinhard,  after the onset of the Nazi-Soviet war of June 1941. The adoption of the gassing technology by Nazi Germany was preceded by a wave of hands-on killings carried out by the SS Einsatzgruppen, who followed the Wehrmacht army during Operation Barbarossa  on the Eastern Front.

The camps designed specifically for the mass gassings of Jews were established in the months following the Wannsee Conference chaired by Reinhard Heydrich in January 1942 in which the principle was made clear that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated. Responsibility for the logistics were to be executed by the programme administrator, Adolf Eichmann.  He was later hanged in Israel years later

On the 13^th of  October 1941, the SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik who was  stationing in Lublin received an oral order from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler (who was  also the head of the Gestapo) anticipating the fall of Moscow to start immediate construction work on the killing centre at Bełżec in the General Government territory of occupied Poland. Notably, the order preceded the Wannsee Conference by three months but the gassings at Kulmhof north of Łódź using gas vans began already in December of that same year.

Incidentally, I wrote a play that was published about a group of Jews who were put in one of those gas vans.

Under Sturmbannführer (leader) Herbert Lange. a camp camp at Bełżec was operational by March 1942, with leadership brought in from Germany under the guise of Organization Todt (OT). By mid-1942, two more death camps had been built on Polish lands for Operation Reinhard called Sobibór (ready in May 1942) under the command of Hauptsturmführer 9(equivalent to a major)   Franz Stangl, and Treblinka (operational by July 1942 under Obersturmführer (senior assault or storm leader)  Irmfried Eberl from T4, who was only doctor to have served in such a capacity. Auschwitz concentration camp was fitted with new gassing bunkers in March 1942  Majdanek had them built in September of that same year.

Here is a breakdown of the victims of the holocaust.

Jews:  six million.  Soviet civilians: seven million including the Jews   living in Russia. Soviet prisoners:  including Jewish soldiers.

Non-Jewish Polish civilians: three million including 50,00 Jewish soldiers. Serb civilians (on the territory of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina: 312,000. People with disabilities living in institutions: 250,00. Roma (Gypsies): 25000. Jehovah's Witnesses:1,90.  Repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials: 70.000. German political opponents and resistance activists in Axis-occupied territory: undetermined.

The murders of the victims took place in the following extermination camps:  Auschwitz com Treblinka 2 plex (including Birkenau, Monowitz, and sub-camps) 1 million. Treblinka: 925,oo0. Belzec: 434500. Sobibor:  167,000. Sobibor : 720,000.  

Deaths in other facilities that the Germans designated as concentration camps:  150,000. Shooting operations and gas wagons at hundreds of locations in the German-occupied Soviet Union: 1.3 million. Shooting operations in the Soviet Union (German, Austrian, Czech Jews deported to the Soviet Union: 55,000. Shooting operations and gas wagons in Serbia:  15,88. shot or tortured to death in Croatia under the Ustaša regime: 25,000.  Deaths in ghettos: 800.000.

The leaders who brought about the deaths of so many human beings were for the most part, hunted down and executed.

S-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss (1940–1943/1944 was the head of Auschwitz. On the 25^th of May 1946, Höss was handed over to Polish authorities, and the Supreme National Tribunal in Poland tried him for murder. His trial lasted from the 11^th to the 29^th of March 1947. During his trial, when accused of murdering three and a half million people, Höss replied, "No. Only two and one half million—the rest died from disease and starvation."  Höss was sentenced to death by hanging on the 2^nd  of April 1947. He was executed on the 16^th of April next to the crematorium of the former Auschwitz concentration camp. He was hanged on a gallows built specifically for his execution, at the location of the camp's office of the Gestapo and a short distance from the house he and his family loved in. Today, a board marks the site. Incidentally, he was dropped a few inches so that he could die slowly.  As he was hanging by his neck, he could hear the voices of the surviving inmates cheering his death. 

My next article will be about this particular war criminal.  I am convinced that you will find it really interesting.