by Diane Rufino, January 22, 2024
I’m a Christian, unapologetically. That means I am motivated by the love of God, the teachings of His Son, Jesus Christ, and of course, the history of the Israelites. So, when I hear about the discrimination, the persecution, and the attempted wholesale genocide of the Jewish race, first and foremost, it repulses me, and secondly, it hurts me to the core. To dehumanize and debase a group of people, to reduce them to the status of rats and vermin, to blame them for all society’s ills, is unconscionable.
Since this post is about Auschwitz and the Nazi World War II agenda, it’s only fitting that we look at Hitler’s antisemitic roots. One only needs to look at his seminal work, Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), which he wrote in 1923 while in prison following the failed Beer Hall Putsch. In that manifesto, Hitler outlines his political ideology and future plans for Germany. For the purposes of this article, we will look at his views of the Jewish race:
Fighting Jews as Defending God [p.60 of Mein Kampf] —
The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture. As a foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man. And as, in this greatest of all recognizable organisms, the result of an application of such a law could only be chaos, on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this planet.
If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew. I am fighting for the work of the Lord
On the “Big Lie” [p.134 of Mein Kampf] —
All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes. From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, where as in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. Schopenhauer called the Jew “The Great Master of Lies”. Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.
On the Protocols of the Elders of Zion [p.279 of Mein Kampf] —
To what an extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic … For once this book has become the common property of a people, the Jewish menace may be considered as broken.
On the Weapons of the Jews [pp. 293-296 of Mein Kampf] —
His unfailing instinct in such things scents the original soul in everyone, and his hostility is assured to anyone who is not spirit of his spirit. Since the Jew is not the attacked but the attacker, not only anyone who attacks passes as his enemy, but also anyone who resists him. But the means with which he seeks to break such reckless but upright souls is not honest warfare but lies and slander.
Here he stops at nothing, and in his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.
The ignorance of the broad masses about the inner nature of the Jew, the lack of instinct and narrow-mindedness of our upper classes, make the people an easy victim for this Jewish campaign of lies.
The Jew’s domination in the state seems so assured that now not only can he call himself a Jew again, but he ruthlessly admits his ultimate national and political designs. A section of his race openly owns itself to be a foreign people, yet even here they lie. For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.
With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.
For a racially pure people which is conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew. In this world he will forever be master over bastards and bastards alone. And so he tries systematically to lower the racial level by a continuous poisoning of individuals.
He works systematically for revolutionization in a twofold sense: economic and political.
In the political field he refuses the state the means for its self-preservation, destroys the foundations of all national self-maintenance and defense, destroys faith in the leadership, scoffs at its history and past, and drags everything that is truly great into the gutter.
The end is not only the end of the freedom of the peoples oppressed by the Jew, but also the end of this parasite upon the nations. After the death of his victim, the vampire sooner or later dies too.
On July 31, 1941, Hermann Göring, writing under instructions from Hitler, ordered ordered Reinhard Heydrich, who was the SS general and Heinrich Himmler’s number-two man, to submit “as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative, material, and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question.” Goering recounted briefly the outline for that “final solution” that had been drawn up on January 24, 1939: “emigration and evacuation in the best possible way.” The Jews would be rounded up and sent to extermination camps, designed purposefully for their killing and annihilation. No Jew was to be treated humanely and no Jew was intended to survive.
It is not known when Hitler formed the intention of the “final solution of the Jewish question” on the scale of the European continent. The Wannsee Conference considered only the details of the undertaking: the methods for organizing the deportation and ensuring the cooperation of the civilian administration. Overall, the plans called for the murder of 11 million Jews living in Germany, the occupied territory, the states opposed to the Third Reich, and the allied and neutral countries. Apparently, there is no documented link connecting Hitler to the concentration camps and the Final Solution. However, note his commentary on the Jewish race in his book Mein Kampf and the many times he spoke disparagingly against the Jews, including how they betrayed Germany and how they are responsible for the crucifixion of Christ.
Heydrich already had some experience with organizing such a plan, having reintroduced the cruel medieval concept of the ghetto in Warsaw after the German occupation of Poland. Jews were crammed into filthy overcrowded walled areas of major cities and held as prisoners, as their property was confiscated and given to either local Germans or non-Jewish Polish peasants. Behind this horrendous scheme, carried out month by month, country by country, was Hitler, who set the agenda for his Nazi party. His hatred of the Jews became Germany’s hatred of the Jews.
On January 20, 1942, a conference was held outside of Wannsee, Germany for the purpose of talking about what the Nazis planned to do about the “Jewish question.” At the conference, Heydrich outlined the expansion of Nazi mass murder (genocide) to encompass 11 million Jews in Europe. The carefully revised minutes of the conference, revised by Adolf Eichmann, became known as the Wannsee Protocol. This program of what would become mass, systematic extermination was to encompass “all the territories of Europe under German occupation.” Holocaust scholars have long recognized the significance of the Wannsee Protocol as a crucial piece of evidence for understanding the evolution of Nazi decision making regarding the Holocaust.
As explained above, Heydrich met with Adolf Eichmann, chief of the Central Office of Jewish Emigration, and 15 other officials from various Nazi ministries and organizations at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin. The agenda was simple and focused: to devise a plan that would render a “final solution to the Jewish question” (= mass murder or genocide) in Europe. Various gruesome proposals were discussed, including mass sterilization and deportation to the island of Madagascar. Heydrich proposed simply transporting Jews from every corner Europe to concentration camps in Poland and working them to death. Objections to this plan included the belief that this was simply too time-consuming. What about the strong ones who took longer to die? What about the millions of Jews who were already in Poland? Although the word “extermination” was never uttered during the meeting, the implication was clear: anyone who survived the egregious conditions of a work camp would be “treated accordingly.”
The first killing center set up in occupied Polish lands was the camp at Chełmno (or “Chelmno on the Ner”). The village of Chelmno (German: Kulmhof) is located about 30 miles northwest of Łódź along the Ner River, a tributary of the Warta River in today’s west central Poland. Jews brought in from the ghettos in the Wartheland were being killed there beginning from December 1941. Three more camps, somewhat larger, were opened at Bełżec, Sobibor, and Treblinka (in what was known as “Aktion Reinhard”) somewhat later, between March and July 1942. Months later, the “gas vans” in Chelmno, which were killing 1,000 people a day, proved to be the “solution” they were looking for—the most efficient means of killing large groups of people at one time. [The minutes of this conference were kept with meticulous care, which later provided key evidence during the Nuremberg war crimes trials].
The murdering of prisoners in gas chambers began even earlier, when 575 sick and disabled prisoners were sent to their deaths at the euthanasia center in Germany at the end of June 1941. 388 were sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald in Germany. Dozens died within weeks in the quarries of Buchenwald and then on May 22, the remaining 340 were sent south to Mauthausen concentration camp, which was 21 miles from the castle at Hartheim, located in Alkoven (near Linz), Austria. In 1940 the castle had been turned into a killing centre, where 30,000 people with physical disabilities and mental illnesses were murdered until a public outcry brought the campaign to a halt in August 1941. Jews, Communists, sick persons, homosexuals, political opponents, the disabled, and other ‘undesirables’ were sent there to die, at the hands of Aktion T4, a poison gas. According to the Hartheim statistics, a total of 18,269 people were murdered in the gas chamber at Hartheim in the period of 16 months between May 1940 and 1 September 1941.
At the beginning of September, the SS used Zyklon B gas in the cellars of block 11 to kill about 600 Soviet POWs and another group of patients from the camp hospital. Soviet POWs and Jews brought from Upper Silesia were killed in the gas chamber in crematorium I over the following months. It was probably at the end of March or in April 1942 that the Germans began killing sick prisoners and Jews in a provisional gas chamber in Birkenau (the so-called “little red house”). The tempo of atrocities increased in June and July 1942, with transports of Jews sent to Auschwitz being subjected to systematic “selections” during which SS doctors sentenced people classified as unfit for labor to death.
At the same time, the Germans set about liquidating the ghettos in occupied Poland. July 22, 1942, when the deportation of Jews from Warsaw to the death camp in Treblinka began, is regarded as a symbolic date. A decided majority of the Polish Jews were killed in a little over half a year, after which the SS began liquidating the Aktion Reinhard camps. However, the last great death camp, Auschwitz, remained in existence until the beginning of 1945. It was mainly Jews from Western and Southern Europe, from the liquidated labor camps, and the ghettos in Sosnowiec and Łódź, who died in the gas chambers there.
In 1941, with the invasion of the Soviet Union, Germany embarked on the path of genocide, the physical annihilation of an entire people—which the Nazis euphemistically termed the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” When World War II ended in 1945, the Nazis and their collaborators had killed some six million Jews in Europe, representing two-thirds of the Jewish population in prewar Europe. Surviving Auschwitz and other concentration camps was virtually impossible. It was really all a matter of luck, chance, and being in the right place at the right time. There is an audio theater on the second floor of the US Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. (termed “Voices of Auschwitz”) which presents the compelling testimony of Holocaust survivors.
A Typical Day at Auschwitz –
Auschwitz was the largest extermination center established by the Nazis for the systemic killing of the “reviled” Jewish population. It is probably the most famous of the Nazi concentration/extermination camps and has become the symbol of the Holocaust and willful extreme and discriminatory evil. Nazis murdered between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people there, including more than one million Jews. It comprised 44 camps in the “Auschwitz” system (collectively known as “Auschwitz-Birkenau”) and was/is located in Poland along its southern border; most concentration camps were located in Poland.
Once Jews from Germany, Poland, Hungary, Russia, and other parts of Europe were segregated from society, they were rounded up and relocated to “ghettos,” such as the Warsaw ghetto and the Lodz ghetto (the largest ones in Poland). One camp survivor, Billy Harvey, remembers: “We were in the ghetto for six weeks under terrible sanitation conditions. We were freezing, we had very little food to eat. One day the train arrived…they pushed into one cattle car as many people they possibly can, so that we were crushed like sardines. There were no windows on the cattle car. When the sliding doors slammed closed on us, the only light came through the wooden cracks. Seventy (70) women and children packed shoulder to shoulder in a cattle car, with little food and only a single sanitation bucket to share. When the train arrived at Auschwitz, we saw piles of rotting bodies and thick gray ash clouding the air and heard the endless barking of dogs. We heard messages and classical music being broadcast over a loudspeaker, we saw Nazi guards with guns stationed high up in watch towers, and we witnessed Nazis SS officials stationed at regular intervals shouting in German at us to help us get adjusted.”
Selections of mass Jewish transports took place on three railroad unloading platforms, or ramps. SS doctors made most of the decisions about who was qualified for labor, and who was killed immediately.
The first unloading ramp, located adjacent to the main camp, was in use throughout the period when the camp was in operation and mainly served the main camp. The second ramp (the so-called “Alte Judenrampe”) went into operation in 1942. It was located between the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps. This is where the majority of the mass transports of Jews arrived between 1942 and May 1944. The third ramp was built from 1943 inside the Birkenau camp and went into operation in May 1944 in connection with the anticipated arrival of transports of Hungarian Jews. (All three ramps also served as embarkation points for prisoners transferred later on from Auschwitz to sub-camps and other concentration camps).
At first, selections of mass Jewish transports took place sporadically. It was only after July 4, 1942 that selections took place regularly. Almost all the mass transports of Jews to Auschwitz after that date were subject to selection.
The selection procedure carried out on the ramps was as follows: Families were divided after leaving the train cars and all the people were lined up in two columns. The men and older boys were in one column, and the women and children of both sexes in the other. Next, the people were led to the camp doctors and other camp functionaries conducting selection. They judged the people standing before them on sight and, sometimes eliciting a brief declaration as to their age and occupation, decided whether they would live or die. Many were exterminated immediately. Age was one of the principal criteria for selection. As a rule, all children below 16 years of age (from 1944, below 14) and the elderly were sent to die. Generally speaking, it wasn’t possible to survive in Poland as a Jew without knowing someone who could provide some sort of assistance. As a statistical average, about 20% of the people in the transports were chosen for labor. They were led into the camp, registered as prisoners, and assigned the next numbers in the various series. There was a women’s camp and a men’s camp. Of the approximately 1.1 million Jews deported to Auschwitz, about 200 thousand were chosen in this way. The remainder, about 900 thousand people, were killed immediately in the gas chambers (ie, the “showers”).
As prisoners arrived, young children, the elderly and infirm were separated and immediately sent to take “showers,” which pumped deadly Zyklon-B poison gas into the chambers. Daily mass executions, starvation, disease, and torture transformed Auschwitz into one of the most lethal and terrifying concentration camps and extermination centers of World War II. Escape from Auschwitz was almost impossible. Electrically-charged barbed-wire fences surrounded both the concentration camp and the killing center. Guards, equipped with machine guns and automatic rifles, stood in the many watchtowers. The lives of the prisoners were completely controlled by their guards, who on a whim could inflict cruel punishment, including immediate death, on them. Prisoners were also mistreated by fellow inmates who were chosen to supervise the other in return for special favors by the guards.
Most prisoners at Auschwitz survived only a few weeks or months. Those who were too ill or too weak to work were condemned to death in the gas chambers. Some committed suicide by throwing themselves against the electric fences. Others resembled walking corpses, broken in body and spirit. Yet other inmates were determined to stay alive.
Children, especially twins, could be selected at any time for barbaric medical experiments conducted without anesthesia by the infamous Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele. These included injecting serum directly into children’s eyeballs to study eye color and injecting chloroform into the hearts of twins to determine if the siblings would die at the same time and in the same way, transfusions of blood from one twin to the other, injections of pathogenic agents into their bodies, organ removal, castration, and amputation.
As the Final Solution was under way (1943-January 1945), a typical day at Auschwitz would be as follows: Jewish persons rounded up from the ghettos would be loaded onto (cargo or cattle) trains and shipped to the camp. They had no idea what to expect, let alone the possibility that their families would be torn apart and most immediately killed. The train rides would last for 2 days or so (up to 7 days), with the passengers having to stand the entire time. Auschwitz wanted to welcome the new Jewish “cargo” with a happy comforting environment. There was peaceful melodious music blasting over loudspeakers and officers to “help them” adjust to their new home. Of course, it was all a ruse; totally misleading. They were there essentially to be killed or to die from disease, starvation, or dehydration. The “final solution” meant just that – to finally rid them from the German and the occupied Eastern European populations.
Upon arrival in the Auschwitz camp, transferees were forced to hand over all their belongings. Their belongings were routinely packed and shipped to Germany for the Reich, for distribution to civilians, or for use by German industry.
The first round of selection was those for immediate extermination and confiscation of their property. The second round was for “slave labor” and confiscation of their property. And the third was for the final removal of the Jewish population (= The Final Solution). In 1944, there were five (5) gas chambers working at full capacity, every single day. They looked like large showers. Jews walking off the overcrowded (cargo) trains were initially separated according to gender and age and herded into them. They were specifically instructed to “remember where you put your clothes because you are going to get them back.” They were led to believe, by repeated announcements over loudspeakers, that the camp had a disease outbreak and they needed to disinfect all new inmates. Over the loudspeaker, new transports were told that they would need to take a shower to be disinfected before being processed. Of course, “shower” in most cases meant “gassed.”
This system of primary selection was designed to keep everyone calm; they would never actually have the chance to retrieve their clothes. Once inside, the chambers were sealed and then an SS officer would deliver a cannister of nerve agent (Xyklon B) to be used on the Jewish “rats.” It would take 15-20 minutes for the gassing and then afterwards, the dead bodies would be taken to the crematoriums and burned. They had no idea that the train ride was to a death factory.
A minority of Jews were selected for forced labor. Their hair was shaved, and their identification number (camp tattoo) on their left arm. The work of sorting the possessions brought to the camp by the Jews was done, forcibly, by these Jews which had been selected for such a task. They would assess each item, each package, and then selected items for the Reich. By the time the sorting was done, those who brought the items to the camp were already dead.
One female survivor recalled: “In Auschwitz, everything you could imagine resulting from insane evil and inhuman behavior took place. At 4:00 am, prisoners were told to wake up and to strip naked. They would be led outside, still naked and sometimes with snow all around, through a gate and into a field where they would have to stand until the afternoon. During that time, women’s SS guards, with sticks and whips, would inspect their bodies and assess their abilities to provide work. They looked for Jewish women who were sick or too weak. Those deemed useless were sent off to be gassed or shot and thrown into ditches.”
Those that survived the “selection” process had a “Jew slave” tattoo engraved on their lower arm, had their heads shaven, and then hoarded into wooden barracks that were filthy, filled with skeletonized prisoners, often rampant with disease, vermin, and lice, and without much heat. The barracks were filled with wooden beds stacked in rows of three (36 rows of 3 bunk-beds each) that were expendable because those inhabiting the barracks were expendable themselves. Some that survived the initial selection process were led off specifically to shovel human ashes, which were in huge piles.
The “prisoners” were given a metal bowl which was their “meal ticket”; those in the front of the line for food got the bowl filled with mostly liquid and those at the end of the line risked not getting any food at all. Those in the middle would usually be the ones that got a decent bowlful of food (for an extermination camp, that is). There were areas which served as toilets. However, there was no toilet paper.
There was an orchestra at the camp and the Nazis were always looking for inmates to play in it. The camp was constantly full of dogs barking, and also was engulfed in a continual stench of burning bodies.
Before killing women, “worker” Jews cut off their hair. Masses of hair were packed in bags. Twenty kilos, twenty-two kilos, raw material for German factories. Seven thousand kilograms of hair, 140,000 murdered women. The Nazis traded in death. They made fertilizers of human bones and delivered them to the Strenn firm. They sold hair to factories in the nationalized upholstery industry. Another branch collected spectacles (glasses), another tore out dentures from corpses’ mouths to get hold of gold teeth, and yet another collected and sorted clothing. All such trophies took up the space of 35 storehouses. To be clear, this work was done primarily by Jewish transportees selected to be “worker Jews.” It was the ultimate insult – to reduce their fellow race to nothing more than items, possessions, and body parts.
Men were forced to wear ragged, striped pants and jackets and women were forced to wear work dresses. Both were issued ill-fitting work shoes, usually clogs. They had no change of clothing and slept in the same clothes they worked in. Each day was a struggle for survival under unbearable conditions. Prisoners were housed in primitive wooden barracks that had no windows and were not insulated from the heat or cold. There was no bathroom – only a bucket. Each barrack held about 36 wooden bunkbeds and inmates were squeezed in five or six across on the wooden plank. As many as 500 Jews were lodged in a single barrack.
Inmates were always hungry. Food consisted of watery soup made with rotten vegetables and meat, a few ounces of bread, a bit of margarine, tea, or a bitter drink resembling coffee. Diarrhea was common. People weakened by dehydration and hunger fell easy victim to the contagious diseases that spread through the camp.
Some inmates worked as forced laborers inside the camp – for example, in the kitchen or as barbers. Women often sorted the piles of shoes, clothes, and other prisoner belongings, which would be shipped to Germany for use there. The storage warehouses at Auschwitz, located near two of the crematoria, were called “Kanada” because the Poles regarded that country as a place of great riches. At Auschwitz, as at hundreds of other camps in the Reich and occupied Europe where the Germans used forced laborers, prisoners were also employed outside the camps – for example, in coal mines and rock quarries, and on construction projects, digging tunnels and canals. Under armed guard, they shoveled snow off roads and cleared rubble from roads and towns hit during air raids. A large number of forced laborers eventually were used in factories that produced weapons and other goods that supported the German war effort. Many private companies, including I.G. Farben and Bavarian Motor Works (BMW), which produced automobile airplane engines, and Emalia (Oskar Schindler’s enamel company). All these private companies eagerly sought the use of Jewish prisoners as a source of cheap labor.
Auschwitz survivor, Mindu Hornick, remembers: “We were pushed through to the main gate, and once we entered there we thought we’d entered hell. There were bodies everywhere, and there were these watch towers with machine guns pointing at us…this terrible grey ash falling around us. There were the barking dogs, viciously walking around, there were loudspeakers always and these SS men walking around, with shiny boots and guns on their back. I mean, we were just frightened out of our wits.”
Edith Eger, yet another survivor, painfully recalls: “In Auschwitz you couldn’t fight, because if you touched the guard you were shot. I actually saw that. It happened right in front of me. You couldn’t flee because if you touched the barbed wires, you were electrocuted. When we took a shower, we didn’t know whether gas is coming out of the water.”
And yet another survivor told of this horror: “I saw some soldiers toss a baby up and shoot it in mid-air for fun and from then on I had no doubt about what awaited us here.”
Romanian-born Elie Wiesel talked about his arrival at Auschwitz, as a 15-year-old teen, in the summer of 1944: “Every yard or so, an SS guard held his gun trained on us. Hand-in-hand, we followed the crowd. We were told ‘Men to the left; women to the right.’ Those 8 words were spoken indifferently – without emotion. For part of a second, I glimpsed my mother and sister moving to the right and saw them disappear into the distance while I walked on with my father and the other men. I did not know at that moment that I was parting from my mother and sister forever. The selection process carried out by SS doctors and wardens took place 24 hours a day, 7 days a week as train after train unloaded its human cargo. Most Jews, as it turned out, were sent immediately to the left – to their deaths.”
During the summer of 1944 and until the liberation of the camp in 1945, overcrowded trains of Hungarian Jewish transports arrived at Auschwitz for extermination. There were so many that were to be “gassed” in the showers that the spill-over was sent to the grove closest to the crematorium and told to sit and relax among the trees until they were given further instructions. These were their last moments alive. The SS kept the victims in complete ignorance as to what lay in store for them.
Behind the lines of high-tension barbed wire at Auschwitz, more than 4 million men, women, and children were scientifically murdered by gassing. Extermination was the fate of all who were “not fit to be the active beasts of burden” for the Reich. The sick, old persons, and pregnant women were sent directly to the gas chamber. In the camp, prisoners were forcibly separated from their loved ones, some were torn to pieces by savage dogs, others shot point-blank for no reason at all, many beaten at random, and still others forced to turn on fellow Jews. Inmates feared “selection” most because one could be selected at random (or for one reason or another) for immediate extermination, whether for the gas chamber or to face a firing squad. The wire that encased the camp was of high-tension which means that anyone who even touched it was killed immediately. In fact, it was the easiest way for inmates to kill themselves.
Everything at Auschwitz was done with horrific precision, including the “slave” or camp numbers on their arms. As one survivor recalls: “Upon arrival, we noticed ghost-like figures with shaved heads and wearing tattered clothes, with great big eyes, staggering and screaming out in all languages.”
LIBERATION OF THE CAMP –
As the Red Army marched closer and closer and broke through the German defenses, the SS decided it was time to evacuate the camp. They planned what prisoners thought of as death marches – lengthy, forced journeys from Auschwitz toward other concentration and death camps. Starting on January 17, 1945, prisoners were forced into long columns and told to walk westward toward territory still held by Germany. Only those in good health (a relative term in camps racked with malnutrition and disease) could participate, and those who fell were shot and left behind. The death marches, which occurred in extremely cold conditions, killed up to 15,000 prisoners. Those who remained were forced into open freight cars and shipped further into the Reich, where they were relocated to various camps still under German control. The guards who remained at the camp, continued to cover up evidence, including burning warehouses full of plundered possessions. By January 21, most SS officers had left Auschwitz for good.
Most of the 9,000 prisoners who remained at Auschwitz were in dire health. Others had hidden in the hopes they could escape. Conditions were appalling—there was no food, no fuel, no water. Some prisoners scavenged among the possessions the SS had not managed to destroy. A small group of healthier prisoners attended to the sick.
On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet soldiers. When Soviet soldiers poured into the camp, they found warehouses filled with massive quantities of other people’s belongings. Most of the people who owned them were already dead. Such belongings included: 7 tons of hair, more than 88 pounds of eyeglasses, 3,800 suitcases, 40,000 pairs of shoes, hundreds of prosthetic limbs, 379 striped uniforms, 246 prayer shawls, 514,843 pieces of men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing, and more than 12,000 pots and pans brought to the camp by victims believing they would eventually be resettled.
But though the camps that made up Auschwitz seemed silent and abandoned at first, soldiers soon realized they were filled with people—thousands of them, left to die by SS guards who evacuated the camps after trying to cover up their crimes. As they saw the soldiers, the emaciated prisoners hugged, kissed and cried.
The scouts were followed by troops who entered the camp. They were shocked by what they saw there: piles of ash that had once been human bodies. People living in barracks that were encrusted with excrement. Emaciated patients who became ill when they ate the food they offered.
Eva Mozes Kor was 10 years old when she spotted the soldiers. She was one of a group of hundreds of children who had been left behind, and she had endured medical experiments during her imprisonment. She remembered how the soldiers gave her “hugs, cookies and chocolates. We were not only starved for food but we were starved for human kindness.”
That kind of human kindness characterized the liberation. The shocked soldiers helped set up hospitals on site, and townspeople volunteered to help. For months, Polish Red Cross workers labored to save the dying and treat the living, working without adequate food or supplies and helping prisoners get in touch with their loved ones. About 7,500 survived.
In February, civilians were brought into the camp grounds to witness the horror of their regime. Civilians and soldiers recovered corpses from the common graves of the Auschwitz-Birkenau compound. Some 1.3 million Jews (and homosexuals and political opponents) were sent to the camp and according to the Holocaust Museum in D.C., more than 1.1 were exterminated (or obliterated).
Survivor Edith Eger remembers: “All I could tell you was that it was quite dark, I saw just kind of darkness, and we didn’t know who’s alive and who’s not alive. I was in a very bad state, I was already among the dead, and then I looked up. It was a man. I saw tears in the eyes, and M&Ms in his hand.”
Survivor Billy Harvey remembers: “As the Allies approached, the Nazis evacuated Harvey and other prisoners to Buchenwald by cattle car. People were]dying left and right from hunger. When they died, we took their clothes off to try to keep warmer. When we arrived back to Buchenwald, they came to collect all the dead people from the cattle car to transport them to the crematorium. I was frozen. I was put among the dead people. When I arrived to the crematorium, the prisoner who worked there discovered that I was still alive. He saved my life. I woke up in the barrack. When I opened my eyes, I thought I was in a five-star hotel. Nobody was hollering at me. Nobody was beating me. I was age of 21. I weighed 72 pounds. I could not stand up well on my feet. But I was so happy to be alive. Next day, I ask the people to carry me outside. I wanted to get some fresh air. They carried me outside. I hear a gentleman speak with the French accent.”
Survivor Henry Korman expressed his anger: “I resent the Americans for knowing what was going on but doing nothing about it until 1944. As soon as Hitler wrote Mein Kampf they should have known what was going on.”
Georgii Elisavetskii, one of the first Red Army soldiers to step into Auschwitz, recalls vividly: “They rushed toward us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs… I remember their faces, especially their eyes which betrayed their ordeal.”
After five years of hell, Auschwitz was liberated at last.
The lesson from Nazi Germany in the late 1930’s until 1945, the conclusion of World War II in Europe was that not only did an evil race dared to fight for world domination, but it’s secret project was to exterminate and annihilate Jews. Genocide. Jews in Germany and in Europe were stripped of their very human dignity. They were forced to strip completely naked, had their hair shaved off, and had their names erased, having an identification number tattooed on them instead. No human dignity and no self-respect.
Never before has there been an “industrialized” extermination of human beings based on propagandized demonization and pure hatred such as what happened at the hands of the Nazis. The gross inhumanity of human beings towards other human beings is unmatched in history.
References:
Adolf Hitler: Excerpts from Mein Kampf (Regarding the Jewish Race)” – https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/excerpts-from-mein-kampf
“The Wannsee Protocol (of January 30, 1942) – https://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/news/uploads/WanseeProtocols.pdf
“Development of the Final Solution,” YouTube – https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=YouTube,%20Auschwitz%20and%20the%20Final%20Solution&mid=D9B0E88D0ED4E8D111F8D9B0E88D0ED4E8D111F8&ajaxhist=0
“Nazi Officials Discuss ’The Final Solution’ at the Wannsee Conference,” History. Referenced at: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-wannsee-conference
“Auschwitz Camp Complex,” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Referenced at: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/auschwitz-1
“Preparations for the Final Solution,” History. Referenced at: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/goering-orders-heydrich-to-prepare-for-the-final-solution [The site includes a relatively short video about concentration camps, from a Jewish prisoner’s point of view]
“Auschwitz Survivors Recall Harrowing and Heroic Moments From the Death Camps,” History. Referenced at: https://www.history.com/news/auschwitz-holocaust-survivors-stories
“Jewish Life on the Brink of Death,“ YouTube – https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=YouTube%2c+Auschwitz+and+the+Final+Solution&mid=F13D98FDA3BF631C9DA6F13D98FDA3BF631C9DA6&FORM=VIRE
“Development of Auschwitz and Its Place in the ‘Final Solution’,” YouTube – https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=YouTube,%20Auschwitz%20and%20the%20Final%20Solution&mid=4513E9AC7F904844402E4513E9AC7F904844402E&ajaxhist=0
“Documentation of Atrocities: The Jewish Photographer Henryk Ross,” YouTube – https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=YouTube,%20Auschwitz%20and%20the%20Final%20Solution&mid=E3B1316B4AE597BAED81E3B1316B4AE597BAED81&ajaxhist=0
“The Auschwitz Album- Visual Evidence of the Process Leading to the Mass Murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau,” YouTube – https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=YouTube,%20Auschwitz%20and%20the%20Final%20Solution&mid=95064CF7C138C2D9285B95064CF7C138C2D9285B&ajaxhist=0
“The Final Solution,” Auschwitz-Birkenau website – https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/before-the-extermination/the-final-solution/
Video: “Auschwitz One Day” (a survivor’s tale), YouTube – https://youtu.be/5vIZ0kOpWvw?si=C8J9jPj6Cc9zta5u
Video: “One Day at Auschwitz,” YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZYgzW2fS0o [Commentary by Kitty Hartmarson, a Holocaust survivor. She and her mother survived Auschwitz but 30 members of her family were killed]
Video: “The Unbelievable of Auschwitz,” YouTube – https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=YouTube%20video,%20Auschwitz&mid=329458AC49605FD6F07A329458AC49605FD6F07A&ajaxhist=0
Video – “The Auschwitz Album- Visual Evidence of the Process Leading to the Mass Murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau,” YouTube – https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=YouTube%20video,%20Auschwitz&mid=95064CF7C138C2D9285B95064CF7C138C2D9285B&ajaxhist=0
Video: “Inside Auschwitz,” YouTube – https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=YouTube+video%2c+Auschwitz&&mid=6944BAE38EE8F3395F596944BAE38EE8F3395F59&&FORM=VRDGAR [Remembrances of three Holocaust/Auschwitz survivors]
APPENDIX – Meaning of “Holocaust”
Holocaust – the mass murder of Jewish people under the German Nazi regime during the period 1941–5. More than 6 million European Jews, as well as members of other persecuted groups such as Romani, gay people, and disabled people, were murdered at concentration camps such as Auschwitz.
Tenth Amendment Keepers 