Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State . Auschwitz 1940-1945 . Liberation & Revenge | PBS

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and Birkenau Concentration Camps in Poland. From the article:

"Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State . Auschwitz 1940-1945 . Liberation & Revenge
Liberation
Auschwitz prisoners are liberated by Russian forces

"I realized that they were prisoners and not workers so I called out, "You are free, come out!"
– Vasily Gromadsky, Russian officer, 60th Army, liberating Auschwitz

As the Soviet army approached and the end of the war came closer the vast majority of Auschwitz prisoners were marched west by the Nazis, into Germany. Those few thousand remaining were thought too ill to travel, and were left behind to be shot by the SS. In the confusion that followed the abandonment of the camp, the SS left them alive. The prisoners were found by Soviet forces when they liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.

Vasily Gromadsky, a Russian officer with the 60th Army liberating Auschwitz recalls what happened.

"They [the prisoners] began rushing towards us, in a big crowd. They were weeping, embracing us and kissing us. I felt a grievance on behalf of mankind that these fascists had made such a mockery of us. It roused me and all the soldiers to go and quickly destroy them and send them to hell."

“We ran up to them and they gave us hugs, cookies, and chocolate. Being so alone a hug meant more than anybody could imagine because that replaced the human worth that we were starving for. We were not only starved for food but we were starved for human kindness. And the Soviet Army did provide some of that.”

– Eva Mozes Kor, age 10, child survivor of Auschwitz

Children

Eva Mozes Kor, age 10, was one of several hundred children, many of them twins, who were left behind. She and her twin sister Miriam had been subjects in Dr. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments. She describes what it was like to see the liberating Russians.

In the days before the Russians arrived at Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, and his men tried to conceal the mass murders that had taken place at the camp. Files were removed or destroyed and gas chambers blown up, but their rushed efforts could not hide from the Russians and the world the fact that terrible crimes had been committed here.

Within 84 days of liberating Auschwitz, Soviet forces were in Berlin. With Russian soldiers only blocks away, Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, in his fuehrer-bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery.

Shortly before the end of the war, Commandant Höss was told by his boss Heinrich Himmler to disappear into the navy to avoid capture. Höss disguised himself as a petty officer and hid among the sailors at the German navy base on the holiday island of Sylt. His disguise worked perfectly. Höss was briefly detained by the British and then released to work on a farm as a field hand. Himmler, however, was captured. But he committed suicide before he could be put on trial.

As the Allies learned more about the severity of the Nazis’ crimes at Auschwitz, they realized that Rudolf Höss was still alive and hiding in Germany. British Intelligence discovered Höss’s wife and family living north of Hanover. She was arrested and interrogated. At first she said her husband was dead, but at the threat of having her son turned over to the Russians, she revealed her husband’s whereabouts, and British soldiers captured him on the farm where he was hiding. Höss was incarcerated locally and then moved to Nuremberg as part of the war crimes trial.

Whitney Harris, a member of the prosecuting team at the Nuremberg trials, recalls what Rudolf Höss was like.

“He struck me as a normal person, that was the horrible thing about it. He was cool, objective, matter of fact. ‘This is my war duty. I did my war duty.’ It was like I had to go out and cut down so many trees. So I went out and took my saw and cut the trees down. He was just acting like a normal, unimportant individual.

“He simply answered the questions, and as far as I could tell, told what happened without emotion. Without emotion. Without a sense of guilt. Not in the slightest apologetic, not in the remotest degree was he apologetic. In a sense, I think he showed a certain pride in accomplishment.”

– Whitney Harris, Member of the prosecuting team at the Nuremberg trials

January 1945 to 1963

Pavel Stenkin
"They invented that at Auschwitz,
this camp of death, they were training spies. So somebody got this idea in
his head, ‘What if they had turned me into a spy?’" (Pavel Stenkin, Former Soviet POW, Auschwitz)

While Höss waited in prison for trial, much of the Nazi empire was now in the hands of the Russian Army. The Soviets treated not only their German prisoners more harshly than did the British, they were also brutal with many Soviet prisoners who returned from Nazi camps. Often Soviet POWs were accused of having been turned into German spies and, after their release from German captivity, the Soviets severely punished them. Refugees who tried to return home to Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe often faced brutal treatment from Soviet soldiers, who sometimes raped and killed them.

In 1947 Rudolf Höss was returned to Poland, tried for his crimes, and sentenced to death. During his time in prison he wrote his memoirs, which revealed much about the running of the camp and the mind of its commandant.

“One woman approached me as she walked past and pointed to her four children who were manfully helping the smallest ones over the rough ground and whispered, ‘How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful darling children? Have you no heart at all?”

– Memoirs of Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz

Höss wrote that the reasons behind the Nazi extermination program seemed right to him, and he described watching women and children being taken to the gas chambers.

The only regret he expressed was that he did not spend more time with his family. On April 16, 1947, he was hanged on a specially constructed gallows in Auschwitz, the site of his crimes.

Stanislaw Hantz, a guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau, recalls Höss’s execution.

“When they were leading him to the gallows, Höss looked calm. I thought as he climbed to the gallows, up the steps—knowing him to be a Nazi, a hardened party member—that he would say something. Like make a statement to the glory of the Nazi ideology that he was dying for. But no. He didn’t say a word. And during the execution you thought: One life for so many millions of people, is that not too little?”

After the war, many Nazis successfully returned to a normal life, although they often tried to hide their past from their neighbors as well as their families. Years after his escape Adolf Eichmann was discovered in Argentina, captured, sent to Israel for trial, convicted, and executed. Of the roughly seven thousand SS troops who served at Auschwitz and who survived the war, most were not arrested or tried for their crimes. Many lived productive lives. The inmate survivors of the camps were less able to resume their prewar lives. They had lost their families as well as their property. There was no compensation for their losses.

In four years, some 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz, and at least 1.1 million died there, all so-called enemies of the Nazi state and the vast majority of them Jews. The grounds of the death camp continue to serve as a reminder of the past and a warning to the future. "