The most terrible incidents from the history of the Second World War. Nazi toilets Torture of fascism

Next, we invite you, in the company of one blogger, to go on a creepy tour of the Nazi death camp Stutthof in Poland, where German doctors conducted their terrible experiments on people during the Second World War.

The most eminent doctors in Germany worked in these operating rooms and X-ray rooms: Professor Karl Clauberg, doctors Karl Gebhard, Sigmund Rascher and Kurt Plötner. What brought these luminaries of science to the tiny village of Sztutovo in eastern Poland, near Gdansk? There are heavenly places here: picturesque white Baltic beaches, pine forests, rivers and canals, medieval castles and ancient cities. But the doctors did not come here to save lives. They came to this quiet and peaceful place in order to do evil, cruelly mocking thousands of people and conducting savage anatomical experiments on them. No one came out alive from the hands of professors of gynecology and virology...

The Stutthof concentration camp was created 35 km east of Gdansk in 1939, immediately after the Nazi occupation of Poland. A couple of kilometers from the small village of Shtutovo, active construction of watchtowers, wooden barracks and stone security barracks suddenly began. During the war years, about 110 thousand people ended up in this camp, of whom about 65 thousand died. This is a relatively small camp (when compared with Auschwitz and Treblinka), but it was here that experiments on people were carried out, and in addition, Dr. Rudol Spanner in 1940-1944 produced soap from human bodies, trying to put the matter on an industrial footing.

From most of the barracks, only the foundations remained.

But part of the camp has been preserved and you can fully experience the harshness for what it is.

At first, the camp regime was such that prisoners were even allowed to occasionally meet with relatives. In these rooms. But very quickly this practice was stopped and the Nazis began to seriously engage in the extermination of prisoners, for which, in fact, such places were created.

No comments needed.

It is generally accepted that the most terrible thing in such places is the crematorium. I don't agree. Dead bodies were burned there. Much more terrible is what the sadists did to people who were still alive. Let's take a walk to the "hospital" and see this place where the luminaries of German medicine saved unfortunate prisoners. I said this sarcastically about “rescuing”. Usually it was relatively healthy people who ended up in the hospital. Doctors didn't need real patients. People were washed here.

Here the unfortunate people relieved themselves. Pay attention to the service - there are even toilets. In the barracks, the toilets are just holes in the concrete floor. A healthy body means a healthy mind. Fresh “patients” were prepared for medical experiments.

Here, in these offices, at different times in 1939-1944, the luminaries of German science worked hard. Dr. Clauberg enthusiastically experimented with the sterilization of women, a topic that fascinated him throughout his adult life. Experiments were carried out using x-rays, surgery and various drugs. During the experiments, thousands of women, mostly Polish, Jewish and Belarusian, were sterilized.

Here they studied the effects of mustard gas on the body and looked for cures. For this purpose, prisoners were first placed in gas chambers and gas was released into them. And then they brought them here and tried to treat them.

Karl Wernet also worked here for a short period of time, devoting himself to finding a way to cure homosexuality. Experiments on gays began late, in 1944, and were not brought to any obvious result. Detailed documentation has been preserved about his operations, as a result of which a capsule with a “male hormone” was sewn into the groin area of ​​homosexual prisoners of the camp, which was supposed to make them heterosexuals. They write that hundreds of ordinary male prisoners passed themselves off as homosexuals in the hope of surviving. After all, the doctor promised that prisoners cured of homosexuality would be released. As you understand, no one escaped from the hands of Dr. Vernet alive. The experiments were not completed, and the experimental subjects ended their lives in a gas chamber nearby.

While the experiments were carried out, the test subjects lived in more acceptable conditions than other prisoners.

However, the close proximity to the crematorium and gas chamber seemed to hint that there would be no salvation.

A sad and depressing sight.

Ashes of prisoners.

The gas chamber, where they first experimented with mustard gas, and from 1942 switched to “Cyclone-B” for the consistent destruction of concentration camp prisoners. Thousands died in this small house opposite the crematorium. The bodies of those who died from the gas were immediately dumped into the crematorium ovens.

There is a museum at the camp, but almost everything there is in Polish.

Nazi literature in the concentration camp museum.

Plan of the camp on the eve of its evacuation.

Road to nowhere...

The fate of the fascist doctors-fanatics developed differently:

The main monster, Josef Mengele fled to South America and lived in Sao Paulo until his death in 1979. Next door to him, the sadistic gynecologist Karl Wernet, who died in 1965 in Uruguay, quietly lived out his life. Kurt Pletner lived to a ripe old age, managed to receive a professorship in 1954, and died in 1984 in Germany as an honorary veteran of medicine.

Dr. Rascher himself was sent by the Nazis in 1945 to the Dachau concentration camp on suspicion of treason against the Reich and his further fate is unknown. Only one of the monster doctors suffered the deserved punishment - Karl Gebhard, who was sentenced to death by the Nuremberg court and was hanged on June 2, 1948.

Bone fragments are still found in this land. The crematorium could not cope with the huge number of corpses, although two sets of ovens were built. They burned poorly, leaving fragments of bodies - the ashes were buried in pits around the concentration camp. 72 years have passed, but mushroom pickers in the forest often come across pieces of skulls with eye sockets, bones of arms or legs, crushed fingers - not to mention decayed scraps of striped "robes" of prisoners. The Stutthof concentration camp (fifty kilometers from the city of Gdansk) was founded on September 2, 1939 - the day after the outbreak of World War II, and its prisoners were liberated by the Red Army on May 9, 1945. The main thing that Stutthof became famous for is that These were "experiments" by SS doctors who, using humans as guinea pigs, made soap from human fat. A bar of this soap was later used at the Nuremberg trials as an example of Nazi savagery. Now some historians (not only in Poland, but also in other countries) are saying: this is “military folklore”, fantasy, this could not have happened.

Soap from prisoners

The Stutt-Hof museum complex receives 100 thousand visitors a year. Barracks, towers for SS machine gunners, a crematorium and a gas chamber are available for viewing: small, for about 30 people. The premises were built in the fall of 1944; before that, they “coped” with the usual methods - typhus, exhausting work, hunger. A museum employee, taking me through the barracks, says: on average, the life expectancy of the inhabitants of Stutthof was 3 months. According to archival documents, one of the female prisoners weighed 19 kg before her death. Behind the glass I suddenly see large wooden shoes, as if from a medieval fairy tale. I ask: what is this? It turns out that the guards took away the prisoners’ shoes and in return gave them these “shoes” that abraded their feet to the point of bloody blisters. In winter, prisoners worked in the same “robe”, only a light cape was required - many died from hypothermia. It was believed that 85,000 people died in the camp, but EU historians have recently re-estimated the number of prisoners who died to 65,000.

In 2006, the Institute of National Remembrance of Poland conducted an analysis of the same soap presented at the Nuremberg trials, says the guide Danuta Ochocka. - Contrary to expectations, the results were confirmed - it was indeed made by a Nazi professor Rudolf Spanner from human fat. However, now researchers in Poland claim: there is no exact confirmation that the soap was made specifically from the bodies of Stutthof prisoners. It is possible that the corpses of homeless people who died of natural causes, brought from the streets of Gdansk, were used for production. Professor Spanner indeed visited Stutthof at different times, but the production of “soap of the dead” was not carried out on an industrial scale.

Gas chamber and crematorium in the Stutthof concentration camp. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Hans Weingartz

"People were skinned"

The Institute of National Remembrance of Poland is the same “glorious” organization that advocates for the demolition of all monuments to Soviet soldiers, and in this case the situation turned out to be tragicomic. Officials specifically ordered an analysis of the soap in order to obtain proof of the “lies of Soviet propaganda” in Nuremberg, but it turned out the opposite. As for industrial scale, Spanner produced up to 100 kg of soap from “human material” in the period 1943-1944. and, according to the testimony of his employees, he repeatedly went to Stutthof for “raw materials.” Polish investigator Tuvya Friedman published a book where he described his impressions of Spanner’s laboratory after the liberation of Gdansk: “We had the feeling that we had been in hell. One room was filled with naked corpses. The other is lined with boards on which skins taken from many people have been stretched. Almost immediately they discovered a furnace in which the Germans were experimenting in making soap using human fat as a raw material. Several bars of this “soap” lay nearby.” A museum employee shows me a hospital used for experiments by SS doctors; relatively healthy prisoners were placed here under the formal pretext of “treatment.” Doctor Carl Clauberg went to Stutthof on short business trips from Auschwitz to sterilize women, and SS Sturmbannführer Karl Wernet from Buchenwald cut out people's tonsils and tongues, replacing them with artificial organs. Wernet was not satisfied with the results - the victims of the experiments were killed in a gas chamber. There are no exhibits in the concentration camp museum about the savage activities of Clauberg, Wernet and Spanner - they “have little documentary evidence.” Although during the Nuremberg trials that same “human soap” from Stutt-Hof was demonstrated and the testimony of dozens of witnesses was voiced.

"Cultural" Nazis

“I would like to draw your attention to the fact that we have an entire exhibition dedicated to the liberation of Stutt-Hof by Soviet troops on May 9, 1945,” says Dr. Marcin Owsiński, head of the museum's research department. - It is noted that this was precisely the release of prisoners, and not the replacement of one occupation with another, as it is now fashionable to say. People rejoiced at the arrival of the Red Army. Regarding the SS experiments in the concentration camp, I assure you that there is no politics here. We work with documentary evidence, and most of the papers were destroyed by the Germans during the retreat from Stutthof. If they appear, we will immediately make changes to the exhibition.

In the cinema hall of the museum they are showing a film about the entry of the Red Army into Stutthof - archival footage. It is noted that by this time only 200 exhausted prisoners remained in the concentration camp and “then the N-KVD sent some to Siberia.” No confirmation, no names - but a fly in the ointment spoils the barrel of honey: clearly there is a goal - to show that the liberators were not so good. At the crematorium there is a sign in Polish: “We thank the Red Army for our liberation.” She is old, from the old days. Soviet soldiers, including my great-grandfather (buried in Polish soil), saved Poland from dozens of “death factories” like Stutt Hof, which entangled the country in a deadly network of ovens and gas chambers, but now they are trying to downplay the significance of their victories. They say that the atrocities of the SS doctors have not been confirmed, fewer people died in the camps and, in general, the crimes of the occupiers have been exaggerated. Moreover, this is stated by Poland, where the Nazis destroyed a fifth of the entire population. To be honest, I want to call an ambulance so that Polish politicians can be taken to a psychiatric hospital.

As a publicist from Warsaw said Maciej Wisniewski: “We will still live to see the time when they will say: the Nazis were a cultured people, they built hospitals and schools in Poland, and the war was started by the Soviet Union.” I wouldn't want to live to see these times. But for some reason it seems to me that they are not far off.

New evidence of Hitler’s abuse of Jewish prisoners continues to emerge. Accounts presented in a recent report by the Association of Former Nazi Concentration Camp Prisoners reveal a hitherto unknown fact that during the Second World War, prisoners at camps such as Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Chelmno were prohibited from using toilet paper. In return, the SS forced the prisoners to use sandpaper, which was real torture for the latter.

As a result of the forced use of sandpaper, many prisoners developed serious skin irritation in their private parts, however, when they sought medical help, the SS doctors simply laughed at them. “I could hardly sit, and going to the restroom every day was sheer torture,” recalls Leon Vrundelman, now an Israeli citizen. “The rash on my skin bled from time to time, but every time I asked for help, the doctors began to laugh and let "They made sarcastic jokes about this. They sometimes even waved clean toilet paper in front of us (which they could use) to further humiliate and torment us."
Thousands of prisoners reportedly died as a result of the use of sandpaper.
German researchers have discovered photographs from World War II that show stacks of industrial sandpaper being loaded onto freight cars for transport to concentration camps. Other photographs show empty railroad cars before sandpaper was loaded onto them.

Documentation recently reviewed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center (WSC) clearly shows that the sandpaper manufacturer that supplied orders to Nazi Germany - a Swedish company, a subsidiary of the American company International Industrial Paper Supply (IPSP) - knew for which purposes, this paper is used, but still continued to supply it. A CSV spokesperson said that their Center, in conjunction with the World Jewish Congress and the International Federation of Jewish Representatives, will begin filing lawsuits against both the subsidiary and parent corporations for their complicity in the Holocaust. According to preliminary estimates, the amount of damage caused will be approximately 18 billion US dollars.

A representative of the American concern IPPB voiced a brief comment on the discovered facts: “We are deeply shocked and saddened by this deplorable activity of our company during the Second World War,” said Thomas Pupkins. “The recent meeting of the company’s ruling board ordered the organization of meetings with Jewish representatives and associations of Holocaust survivors to establish the amounts of appropriate compensation. We are simply unable to express in words our regret and guilt for what we have done. We are morally obliged to the Jewish people for the fact that their representatives brought these facts to our attention, and we pray. providence that this kind of thing will never happen again."

The Great Patriotic War left an indelible mark on the history and destinies of people. Many lost loved ones who were killed or tortured. In the article we will look at the Nazi concentration camps and the atrocities that happened on their territories.

What is a concentration camp?

A concentration camp or concentration camp is a special place intended for the detention of persons of the following categories:

• political prisoners (opponents of the dictatorial regime);
• prisoners of war (captured soldiers and civilians).

Nazi concentration camps became notorious for their inhuman cruelty to prisoners and impossible conditions of detention. These places of detention began to appear even before Hitler came to power, and even then they were divided into women's, men's and children's. Mainly Jews and opponents of the Nazi system were kept there.

Life in the camp

Humiliation and abuse for prisoners began from the moment of transportation. People were transported in freight cars, where there was not even running water or a fenced-off latrine. Prisoners had to relieve themselves publicly, in a tank standing in the middle of the carriage.

But this was only the beginning; a lot of abuse and torture were prepared for the concentration camps of fascists who were undesirable to the Nazi regime. Torture of women and children, medical experiments, aimless exhausting work - this is not the whole list.

The conditions of detention can be judged from the prisoners’ letters: “they lived in hellish conditions, ragged, barefoot, hungry... I was constantly and severely beaten, deprived of food and water, tortured...”, “They shot me, flogged me, poisoned me with dogs, drowned me in water, beat me to death.” with sticks and starvation. They were infected with tuberculosis... suffocated by a cyclone. Poisoned with chlorine. They burned..."

The corpses were skinned and hair cut off - all this was then used in the German textile industry. The doctor Mengele became famous for his terrifying experiments on prisoners, at whose hands thousands of people died. He studied mental and physical exhaustion of the body. He conducted experiments on twins, during which they received organ transplants from each other, blood transfusions, and sisters were forced to give birth to children from their own brothers. Performed sex reassignment surgery.

All fascist concentration camps became famous for such abuses; we will consider the names and conditions of detention in the main ones below.

Camp diet

Typically, the daily ration in the camp was as follows:

• bread - 130 gr;
• fat - 20 g;
• meat - 30 g;
• cereal - 120 gr;
• sugar - 27 gr.

Bread was handed out, and the rest of the products were used for cooking, which consisted of soup (issued 1 or 2 times a day) and porridge (150 - 200 grams). It should be noted that such a diet was intended only for working people. Those who, for some reason, remained unemployed received even less. Usually their portion consisted of only half a portion of bread.

List of concentration camps in different countries

Fascist concentration camps were created in the territories of Germany, allied and occupied countries. There are a lot of them, but let’s name the main ones:

• In Germany - Halle, Buchenwald, Cottbus, Dusseldorf, Schlieben, Ravensbrück, Esse, Spremberg;
• Austria - Mauthausen, Amstetten;
• France - Nancy, Reims, Mulhouse;
• Poland - Majdanek, Krasnik, Radom, Auschwitz, Przemysl;
• Lithuania - Dimitravas, Alytus, Kaunas;
• Czechoslovakia - Kunta Gora, Natra, Hlinsko;
• Estonia - Pirkul, Pärnu, Klooga;
• Belarus - Minsk, Baranovichi;
• Latvia - Salaspils.

And this is not a complete list of all concentration camps that were built by Nazi Germany in the pre-war and war years.

Salaspils

Salaspils, one might say, is the most terrible concentration camp of the Nazis, because, in addition to prisoners of war and Jews, children were also kept there. It was located on the territory of occupied Latvia and was the central eastern camp. It was located near Riga and operated from 1941 (September) to 1944 (summer).

Children in this camp were not only kept separately from adults and exterminated en masse, but were used as blood donors for German soldiers. Every day, about half a liter of blood was taken from all children, which led to the rapid death of donors.

Salaspils was not like Auschwitz or Majdanek (extermination camps), where people were herded into gas chambers and then their corpses were burned. It was used for medical research, which killed more than 100,000 people. Salaspils was not like other Nazi concentration camps. Torture of children was a routine activity here, carried out according to a schedule with the results carefully recorded.

Experiments on children

Testimony of witnesses and results of investigations revealed the following methods of extermination of people in the Salaspils camp: beating, starvation, arsenic poisoning, injection of dangerous substances (most often to children), surgical operations without painkillers, pumping out blood (only from children), executions, torture, useless heavy labor (carrying stones from place to place), gas chambers, burying alive. In order to save ammunition, the camp charter prescribed that children should be killed only with rifle butts. The atrocities of the Nazis in the concentration camps surpassed everything that humanity had seen in modern times. Such an attitude towards people cannot be justified, because it violates all conceivable and inconceivable moral commandments.

Children did not stay with their mothers for long and were usually quickly taken away and distributed. Thus, children under six years of age were kept in a special barracks where they were infected with measles. But they did not treat it, but aggravated the disease, for example, by bathing, which is why the children died within 3-4 days. The Germans killed more than 3,000 people in one year in this way. The bodies of the dead were partly burned and partly buried on the camp grounds.

The Act of the Nuremberg Trials “on the extermination of children” provided the following numbers: during the excavation of only a fifth of the concentration camp territory, 633 bodies of children aged 5 to 9 years, arranged in layers, were discovered; an area soaked in an oily substance was also found, where the remains of unburned children’s bones (teeth, ribs, joints, etc.) were found.

Salaspils is truly the most terrible Nazi concentration camp, because the atrocities described above are not all the tortures that the prisoners were subjected to. Thus, in winter, children brought in were driven barefoot and naked to a barracks for half a kilometer, where they had to wash themselves in icy water. After this, the children were driven in the same way to the next building, where they were kept in the cold for 5-6 days. Moreover, the age of the eldest child did not even reach 12 years. Everyone who survived this procedure was also subjected to arsenic poisoning.

Infants were kept separately and given injections, from which the child died in agony within a few days. They gave us coffee and poisoned cereals. About 150 children died from experiments per day. The bodies of the dead were carried out in large baskets and burned, dumped in cesspools, or buried near the camp.

Ravensbrück

If we start listing Nazi women's concentration camps, Ravensbrück will come first. This was the only camp of this type in Germany. It could accommodate thirty thousand prisoners, but by the end of the war it was overcrowded by fifteen thousand. Mostly Russian and Polish women were detained; Jews numbered approximately 15 percent. There were no prescribed instructions regarding torture and torment; the supervisors chose the line of behavior themselves.

Arriving women were undressed, shaved, washed, given a robe and assigned a number. Race was also indicated on clothing. People turned into impersonal cattle. In small barracks (in the post-war years, 2-3 refugee families lived in them) there were approximately three hundred prisoners, who were housed on three-story bunks. When the camp was overcrowded, up to a thousand people were herded into these cells, all of whom had to sleep on the same bunks. The barracks had several toilets and a washbasin, but there were so few of them that after a few days the floors were littered with excrement. Almost all Nazi concentration camps presented this picture (the photos presented here are only a small fraction of all the horrors).

But not all women ended up in the concentration camp; a selection was made beforehand. The strong and resilient, fit for work, were left behind, and the rest were destroyed. Prisoners worked at construction sites and sewing workshops.

Gradually, Ravensbrück was equipped with a crematorium, like all Nazi concentration camps. Gas chambers (nicknamed gas chambers by prisoners) appeared towards the end of the war. Ashes from crematoria were sent to nearby fields as fertilizer.

Experiments were also carried out in Ravensbrück. In a special barracks called the “infirmary,” German scientists tested new drugs, first infecting or crippling experimental subjects. There were few survivors, but even those suffered from what they had endured until the end of their lives. Experiments were also conducted with the irradiation of women with X-rays, which caused hair loss, skin pigmentation, and death. Excisions of the genital organs were carried out, after which few survived, and even those quickly aged, and at the age of 18 they looked like old women. Similar experiments were carried out in all Nazi concentration camps; torture of women and children was the main crime of Nazi Germany against humanity.

At the time of the liberation of the concentration camp by the Allies, five thousand women remained there; the rest were killed or transported to other places of detention. The Soviet troops who arrived in April 1945 adapted the camp barracks to accommodate refugees. Ravensbrück later became a base for Soviet military units.

Nazi concentration camps: Buchenwald

Construction of the camp began in 1933, near the town of Weimar. Soon, Soviet prisoners of war began to arrive, becoming the first prisoners, and they completed the construction of the “hellish” concentration camp.

The structure of all structures was strictly thought out. Immediately behind the gate began the “Appelplat” (parallel ground), specially designed for the formation of prisoners. Its capacity was twenty thousand people. Not far from the gate there was a punishment cell for interrogations, and opposite there was an office where the camp fuehrer and the officer on duty - the camp authorities - lived. Deeper down were the barracks for prisoners. All barracks were numbered, there were 52 of them. At the same time, 43 were intended for housing, and workshops were set up in the rest.

The Nazi concentration camps left behind a terrible memory; their names still evoke fear and shock in many, but the most terrifying of them is Buchenwald. The crematorium was considered the most terrible place. People were invited there under the pretext of a medical examination. When the prisoner undressed, he was shot and the body was sent to the oven.

Only men were kept in Buchenwald. Upon arrival at the camp, they were assigned a number in German, which they had to learn within the first 24 hours. The prisoners worked at the Gustlovsky weapons factory, which was located a few kilometers from the camp.

Continuing to describe the Nazi concentration camps, let us turn to the so-called “small camp” of Buchenwald.

Small camp of Buchenwald

The “small camp” was the name given to the quarantine zone. The living conditions here were, even compared to the main camp, simply hellish. In 1944, when German troops began to retreat, prisoners from Auschwitz and the Compiegne camp were brought to this camp; they were mainly Soviet citizens, Poles and Czechs, and later Jews. There was not enough space for everyone, so some of the prisoners (six thousand people) were housed in tents. The closer 1945 got, the more prisoners were transported. Meanwhile, the “small camp” included 12 barracks measuring 40 x 50 meters. Torture in Nazi concentration camps was not only specially planned or for scientific purposes, life itself in such a place was torture. 750 people lived in the barracks; their daily ration consisted of a small piece of bread; those who were not working were no longer entitled to it.

Relations among prisoners were tough; cases of cannibalism and murder for someone else's portion of bread were documented. A common practice was to store the bodies of the dead in barracks in order to receive their rations. The dead man's clothes were divided among his cellmates, and they often fought over them. Due to such conditions, infectious diseases were common in the camp. Vaccinations only worsened the situation, since injection syringes were not changed.

Photos simply cannot convey all the inhumanity and horror of the Nazi concentration camp. The stories of witnesses are not intended for the faint of heart. In each camp, not excluding Buchenwald, there were medical groups of doctors who conducted experiments on prisoners. It should be noted that the data they obtained allowed German medicine to step far forward - no other country in the world had such a number of experimental people. Another question is whether it was worth the millions of tortured children and women, the inhuman suffering that these innocent people endured.

Prisoners were irradiated, healthy limbs were amputated, organs were removed, and they were sterilized and castrated. They tested how long a person could withstand extreme cold or heat. They were specially infected with diseases and introduced experimental drugs. Thus, an anti-typhoid vaccine was developed in Buchenwald. In addition to typhus, prisoners were infected with smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria, and paratyphoid.

Since 1939, the camp was run by Karl Koch. His wife, Ilse, was nicknamed the “Witch of Buchenwald” for her love of sadism and inhumane abuse of prisoners. They feared her more than her husband (Karl Koch) and Nazi doctors. She was later nicknamed "Frau Lampshaded". The woman owed this nickname to the fact that she made various decorative things from the skin of killed prisoners, in particular, lampshades, which she was very proud of. Most of all, she liked to use the skin of Russian prisoners with tattoos on their backs and chests, as well as the skin of gypsies. Things made of such material seemed to her the most elegant.

The liberation of Buchenwald took place on April 11, 1945, at the hands of the prisoners themselves. Having learned about the approach of the allied troops, they disarmed the guards, captured the camp leadership and controlled the camp for two days until American soldiers approached.

Auschwitz (Auschwitz-Birkenau)

When listing Nazi concentration camps, it is impossible to ignore Auschwitz. It was one of the largest concentration camps, in which, according to various sources, from one and a half to four million people died. The exact details of the dead remain unclear. The victims were mainly Jewish prisoners of war, who were exterminated immediately upon arrival in gas chambers.

The concentration camp complex itself was called Auschwitz-Birkenau and was located on the outskirts of the Polish city of Auschwitz, whose name became a household name. The following words were engraved above the camp gate: “Work sets you free.”

This huge complex, built in 1940, consisted of three camps:

• Auschwitz I or the main camp - the administration was located here;
• Auschwitz II or "Birkenau" - was called a death camp;
• Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz.

Initially, the camp was small and intended for political prisoners. But gradually more and more prisoners arrived at the camp, 70% of whom were destroyed immediately. Many tortures in Nazi concentration camps were borrowed from Auschwitz. Thus, the first gas chamber began to function in 1941. The gas used was Cyclone B. The terrible invention was first tested on Soviet and Polish prisoners totaling about nine hundred people.

Auschwitz II began its operation on March 1, 1942. Its territory included four crematoria and two gas chambers. In the same year, medical experiments on sterilization and castration began on women and men.

Small camps gradually formed around Birkenau, where prisoners working in factories and mines were kept. One of these camps gradually grew and became known as Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz. Approximately ten thousand prisoners were held here.

Like any Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz was well guarded. Contacts with the outside world were prohibited, the territory was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and guard posts were set up around the camp at a distance of a kilometer.

Five crematoria operated continuously on the territory of Auschwitz, which, according to experts, had a monthly capacity of approximately 270 thousand corpses.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. By that time, approximately seven thousand prisoners remained alive. Such a small number of survivors is due to the fact that about a year earlier, mass murders in gas chambers (gas chambers) began in the concentration camp.

Since 1947, a museum and memorial complex dedicated to the memory of all those who died at the hands of Nazi Germany began to function on the territory of the former concentration camp.

Conclusion

During the entire war, according to statistics, approximately four and a half million Soviet citizens were captured. These were mostly civilians from the occupied territories. It’s hard to even imagine what these people went through. But it was not only the bullying of the Nazis in the concentration camps that they were destined to endure. Thanks to Stalin, after their liberation, returning home, they received the stigma of “traitors.” The Gulag awaited them at home, and their families were subjected to serious repression. One captivity gave way to another for them. In fear for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, they changed their last names and tried in every possible way to hide their experiences.

Until recently, information about the fate of prisoners after release was not advertised and kept silent. But people who have experienced this simply should not be forgotten.

The word Auschwitz (or Auschwitz) in the minds of many people is a symbol or even the quintessence of evil, horror, death, a concentration of the most unimaginable inhuman cruelties and torture. Many today dispute what former prisoners and historians say happened here. This is their personal right and opinion. But having been to Auschwitz and seen with your own eyes huge rooms filled with... glasses, tens of thousands of pairs of shoes, tons of cut hair and... children's things... You feel empty inside. And my hair is moving in horror. The horror of realizing that this hair, glasses and shoes belonged to a living person. Maybe a postman, or maybe a student. An ordinary worker or market trader. Or a girl. Or a seven year old child. Which they cut off, removed, and threw into a common pile. To another hundred of the same. Auschwitz. A place of evil and inhumanity.

Young student Tadeusz Uzynski arrived in the first echelon with prisoners. As I already said in yesterday’s report, the Auschwitz concentration camp began to function in 1940, as a camp for Polish political prisoners. The first prisoners of Auschwitz were 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnow. At the time of its founding, the camp had 20 buildings - former Polish military barracks. Some of them were converted for mass housing of people, and 6 more buildings were additionally built. The average number of prisoners fluctuated between 13-16 thousand people, and in 1942 reached 20 thousand. The Auschwitz camp became the base camp for a whole network of new camps - in 1941, the Auschwitz II - Birkenau camp was built 3 km away, and in 1943 - Auschwitz III - Monowitz. In addition, in 1942-1944, about 40 branches of the Auschwitz camp were built, built near metallurgical plants, factories and mines, which were subordinate to the Auschwitz III concentration camp. And the camps Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II - Birkenau completely turned into a plant for the extermination of people.

In 1943, a tattoo of the prisoner's number on the arm was introduced. For infants and young children, the number was most often applied to the thigh. According to the Auschwitz State Museum, this concentration camp was the only Nazi camp in which prisoners had numbers tattooed on them.

Depending on the reasons for their arrest, prisoners received triangles of different colors, which, along with their numbers, were sewn onto their camp clothes. Political prisoners were given a red triangle, criminals were given a green triangle. Gypsies and antisocial elements received black triangles, Jehovah's Witnesses received purple ones, and homosexuals received pink ones. Jews wore a six-pointed star consisting of a yellow triangle and a triangle of the color that corresponded to the reason for the arrest. Soviet prisoners of war had a patch in the form of the letters SU. The camp clothes were quite thin and provided almost no protection from the cold. Linen was changed at intervals of several weeks, and sometimes even once a month, and the prisoners did not have the opportunity to wash it, which led to epidemics of typhus and typhoid fever, as well as scabies

Prisoners in the Auschwitz I camp lived in brick blocks, in Auschwitz II-Birkenau - mainly in wooden barracks. Brick blocks were only in the women's section of the Auschwitz II camp. During the entire existence of the Auschwitz I camp, there were about 400 thousand prisoners of different nationalities, Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners of building No. 11 awaiting conclusion of the Gestapo police tribunal. One of the disasters of camp life was the inspections at which the number of prisoners was checked. They lasted for several, and sometimes over 10 hours (for example, 19 hours on July 6, 1940). Camp authorities very often announced penalty checks, during which prisoners had to squat or kneel. There were tests when they had to hold their hands up for several hours.

Housing conditions varied greatly in different periods, but they were always catastrophic. The prisoners, who were brought in at the very beginning in the first trains, slept on straw scattered on the concrete floor.

Later, hay bedding was introduced. These were thin mattresses filled with a small amount of it. About 200 prisoners slept in a room that barely accommodated 40-50 people.

With the increase in the number of prisoners in the camp, the need arose to densify their accommodation. Three-tier bunks appeared. There were 2 people lying on one tier. The bedding was usually rotted straw. The prisoners covered themselves with rags and whatever they had. In the Auschwitz camp the bunks were wooden, in Auschwitz-Birkenau they were both wooden and brick with wooden flooring.

Compared to the conditions in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the toilet of the Auschwitz I camp looked like a real miracle of civilization.

toilet barracks in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp

Wash room. The water was only cold and the prisoner only had access to it for a few minutes a day. Prisoners were allowed to wash extremely rarely, and for them it was a real holiday

Sign with the number of the residential unit on the wall

Until 1944, when Auschwitz became an extermination factory, most prisoners were sent to grueling labor every day. At first they worked to expand the camp, and then they were used as slaves in the industrial facilities of the Third Reich. Every day, columns of exhausted slaves went out and entered through gates with the cynical inscription “Arbeit macht Frei” (Work makes you free). The prisoner had to do the work running, without a second of rest. The pace of work, meager portions of food and constant beatings increased the mortality rate. During the return of prisoners to the camp, those killed or exhausted, who could not move on their own, were dragged or carried in wheelbarrows. And at this time, a brass band consisting of prisoners played for them near the gates of the camp.

For every inhabitant of Auschwitz, block No. 11 was one of the most terrible places. Unlike other blocks, its doors were always closed. The windows were completely bricked up. Only on the first floor there were two windows - in the room where the SS men were on duty. In the halls on the right and left sides of the corridor, prisoners were placed awaiting the verdict of the emergency police court, which came to the Auschwitz camp from Katowice once or twice a month. During 2-3 hours of his work, he imposed from several dozen to over a hundred death sentences.

The cramped cells, which sometimes housed a huge number of people awaiting sentencing, had only a tiny barred window near the ceiling. And on the street side near these windows there were tin boxes that blocked these windows from the influx of fresh air

Those sentenced to death were forced to undress in this room before execution. If there were few of them that day, then the sentence was carried out right here.

If there were many condemned, they were taken to the “Wall of Death,” which was located behind a high fence with a blank gate between buildings 10 and 11. Large numbers of their camp number were written on the chests of undressed people with an ink pencil (until 1943, when tattoos appeared on the arm), so that later it would be easy to identify the corpse.

Under the stone fence in the courtyard of block 11, a large wall was built of black insulating boards, lined with absorbent material. This wall became the last facet of life for thousands of people sentenced to death by the Gestapo court for unwillingness to betray their homeland, attempted escape and political “crimes.”

Fibers of death. The condemned were shot by the reportfuehrer or members of the political department. For this, they used a small-caliber rifle so as not to attract too much attention with the sounds of shots. After all, very close there was a stone wall, behind which there was a highway.

The Auschwitz camp had a whole system of punishments for prisoners. It can also be called one of the fragments of their deliberate destruction. The prisoner was punished for picking an apple or finding a potato in a field, relieving himself while working, or for working too slowly. One of the most terrible places of punishment, often leading to the death of a prisoner, was one of the basements of building 11. Here in the back room there were four narrow vertical sealed punishment cells measuring 90x90 centimeters in perimeter. Each of them had a door with a metal bolt at the bottom.

The person being punished was forced to squeeze inside through this door and it was bolted. A person could only be standing in this cage. So he stood there without food or water for as long as the SS men wanted. Often this was the last punishment in the life of a prisoner.

Sending punished prisoners to standing cells

In September 1941, the first attempt was made to mass exterminate people using gas. About 600 Soviet prisoners of war and about 250 sick prisoners from the camp hospital were placed in small batches in sealed cells in the basement of the 11th building.

Copper pipelines with valves were already installed along the walls of the chambers. Gas flowed through them into the chambers...

The names of the exterminated people were entered into the "Day Status Book" of the Auschwitz camp

Lists of people sentenced to death by the extraordinary police court

Found notes left by those sentenced to death on scraps of paper

In Auschwitz, in addition to adults, there were also children who were sent to the camp along with their parents. These were the children of Jews, Gypsies, as well as Poles and Russians. Most Jewish children died in gas chambers immediately after arriving at the camp. The rest, after a strict selection, were sent to a camp where they were subject to the same strict rules as adults.

Children were registered and photographed in the same way as adults and designated as political prisoners.

One of the most terrible pages in the history of Auschwitz were medical experiments by SS doctors. Including over children. For example, Professor Karl Clauberg, in order to develop a quick method of biological destruction of the Slavs, conducted sterilization experiments on Jewish women in building No. 10. Dr. Josef Mengele conducted experiments on twin children and children with physical disabilities as part of genetic and anthropological experiments. In addition, various kinds of experiments were carried out at Auschwitz using new drugs and preparations, toxic substances were rubbed into the epithelium of prisoners, skin transplants were carried out, etc.

Conclusion on the results of X-rays carried out during the experiments with the twins by Dr. Mengele.

Letter from Heinrich Himmler in which he orders a series of sterilization experiments to begin

Cards of recording anthropometric data of experimental prisoners as part of Dr. Mengele's experiments.

Pages of the register of the dead, which contain the names of 80 boys who died after injections of phenol as part of medical experiments

List of released prisoners placed in a Soviet hospital for treatment

In the autumn of 1941, a gas chamber using Zyklon B gas began operating in the Auschwitz camp. It was produced by the Degesch company, which received about 300 thousand marks of profit from the sale of this gas during the period 1941-1944. To kill 1,500 people, according to Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, about 5-7 kg of gas was needed.

After the liberation of Auschwitz, a huge number of used Zyklon B cans and cans with unused contents were found in the camp warehouses. During the period 1942-1943, according to documents, about 20 thousand kg of Zyklon B crystals were supplied to Auschwitz alone.

Most Jews doomed to death arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with the conviction that they were being taken “for settlement” to eastern Europe. This was especially true for Jews from Greece and Hungary, to whom the Germans even sold non-existent building plots and lands or offered work in fictitious factories. That is why people sent to the camp for extermination often brought with them the most valuable things, jewelry and money.

Upon arrival at the unloading platform, all things and valuables were taken from people, SS doctors selected the deported people. Those who were declared unable to work were sent to gas chambers. According to the testimony of Rudolf Hoess, there were about 70-75% of those who arrived.

Items found in Auschwitz warehouses after the liberation of the camp

Model of the gas chamber and crematorium II of Auschwitz-Birkenau. People were convinced that they were being sent to a bathhouse, so they looked relatively calm.

Here, prisoners are forced to take off their clothes and are moved to the next room, which simulates a bathhouse. There were shower holes under the ceiling through which no water ever flowed. About 2,000 people were brought into a room of about 210 square meters, after which the doors were closed and gas was supplied to the room. People died within 15-20 minutes. The gold teeth of the dead were pulled out, rings and earrings were removed, and women's hair was cut off.

After this, the corpses were transported to the crematorium ovens, where the fire roared continuously. When the ovens overflowed or when the pipes were damaged from overloading, the bodies were destroyed in the burning areas behind the crematoria. All these actions were carried out by prisoners belonging to the so-called Sonderkommando group. At the peak of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, its number was about 1,000 people.

A photograph taken by one of the Sonderkommando members, which shows the process of burning dead people.

In the Auschwitz camp, the crematorium was located outside the camp fence. Its largest room was the morgue, which was converted into a temporary gas chamber.

Here, in 1941 and 1942, Soviet prisoners of war and Jews from the ghetto located in Upper Silesia were exterminated.

In the second hall there were three double ovens, in which up to 350 bodies were burned during the day.

One retort held 2-3 corpses.