Survivors in the horror of the concentration camp. Terrible torture and executions from the Japanese fascists during the Second World War! They were even worse than the Germans

Fragments of bones are still found in this earth. The crematorium could not cope with the huge number of corpses, although two complexes of furnaces were built. They burned badly, fragments of bodies remained - 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 fragments of the striped “robe” of prisoners. The Stutthof concentration camp (50 kilometers from the city of Gdansk) was founded on September 2, 1939 - the day after the start 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" was these are "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 fanaticism. Now some historians (not only in Poland, but also in other countries) are saying: this is “military folklore”, fantasy, this could not be.

Soap from prisoners

The museum complex Stutthof receives 100,000 visitors a year. Barracks, towers for SS machine gunners, a crematorium and a gas chamber are available for viewing: a small one, for about 30 people. The building was built in the fall of 1944, before that they had been "coping" with the usual methods - typhus, exhausting work, hunger. An employee of the museum, guiding 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 it? It turns out that the guards took away the shoes of the prisoners and in return gave out just such “shoes” that erased the legs to bloody calluses. In winter, the 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 recently EU historians have been reevaluating: the number of dead prisoners has been reduced to 65,000.

In 2006, the Institute of National Remembrance of Poland analyzed the same soap presented at the Nuremberg Trials, says the guide Danuta Okhotska. - Contrary to expectations, the results were confirmed - it really was made by a Nazi professor Rudolf Spanner from human fat. However, now researchers in Poland say: 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 did indeed visit Stutthof at different times, but the production of "soap of the dead" was not carried out on an industrial scale.

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

"People were skinned"

The Institute of National Memory of Poland is the same “glorious” organization that advocates the demolition of all monuments to Soviet soldiers, and in this case the situation turned out to be tragicomic. Officials specifically ordered the analysis of soap in order to obtain evidence of the "lie of Soviet propaganda" in Nuremberg - but it turned out the other way around. As for industrial scale - Spanner made up to 100 kg of soap from "human material" in the period 1943-1944. and, according to the testimonies of its employees, repeatedly went to Stutthof for "raw materials". Polish investigator Tuvia Friedman published a book where he described the 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 was lined with boards on which skins taken from many people were stretched. Almost immediately, a furnace was discovered in which the Germans experimented with making soap using human fat as a raw material. Several bars of this "soap" lay nearby. An employee of the museum shows me the hospital used for the experiments of 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. Vernet's results were not satisfied - 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, the same “human soap” from Stutthof was demonstrated and the testimony of dozens of witnesses was voiced.

"Cultural" Nazis

I draw your attention to the fact that we have a whole exposition devoted to the liberation of Stutthof by Soviet troops on May 9, 1945, - says the doctor Marcin Owsiński, head of the research department of the museum. - It is noted that it 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. As for the SS experiments in the concentration camp - I assure you, there is no politics here. We are working 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.

A film about the entry of the Red Army into Stutthof is shown in the museum's cinema hall - archival footage. It is noted that by this time only 200 emaciated prisoners remained in the concentration camp and “then N-KVD sent some to Siberia”. No confirmation, no names - but a fly in the ointment spoils a barrel of honey: there is clearly a goal - to show that the liberators were not so good. On 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 Stutthof, which entangled the country with a deadly network of furnaces and gas chambers, but now they are trying to downplay the significance of their victories. Say, the atrocities of the SS doctors are not confirmed, fewer people died in the camps, and in general - the crimes of the invaders are exaggerated. Moreover, Poland declares this, where the Nazis destroyed a fifth of the entire population. To be honest, I want to call an ambulance so that Polish politicians are taken to a psychiatric hospital.

As a publicist from Warsaw said Maciej Wisniewski: "We will live to see the time when they say: the Nazis were a cultured people, they built hospitals and schools in Poland, and the Soviet Union unleashed the war." I would not want to live up to these times. But for some reason it seems to me that they are not far off.

The word Auschwitz (or Auschwitz) in the minds of many people is a symbol or even the quintessence of evil, horror, death, the concentration of the most unimaginable inhuman fanaticism 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 seeing with my own eyes huge rooms filled with ... glasses, tens of thousands of pairs of shoes, tons of cut hair and ... children's things ... You have an emptiness inside. And the hair is moving in horror. The horror of realizing that this hair, glasses and shoes belonged to a living person. Maybe a postman, maybe a student. An ordinary worker or a merchant in the market. Or a girl. Or a seven year old. Which they cut off, removed, thrown into a common pile. To another hundred of the same. Auschwitz. A place of evil and inhumanity.

Young student Tadeusz Uzhinsky arrived in the first echelon with prisoners As I said in yesterday's report, the Auschwitz concentration camp began to function in 1940, being a camp for Polish political prisoners. The first prisoners of Auschwitz were 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnow. At the time of its foundation, there were 20 buildings in the camp - former Polish military barracks. Some of them were converted for mass detention of people, and 6 more buildings were additionally built. The average number of prisoners ranged from 13-16 thousand people, and in 1942 it 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 the years 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 Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II - Birkenau camps have completely turned into a plant for the destruction of people.

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

Depending on the reasons for the arrest, the prisoners received triangles of different colors, which, together with the numbers, were sewn onto camp clothes. Political prisoners were supposed to have a red triangle, criminals - green. Gypsies and anti-social elements received black triangles, Jehovah's Witnesses - purple, homosexuals - pink. The 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 little 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, about 400 thousand prisoners of various nationalities, Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners of corps No. 11, who were awaiting the conclusion of the Gestapo police tribunal, were registered here. One of the disasters of camp life was verification, which checked the number of prisoners. They lasted for several, and sometimes more than 10 hours (for example, 19 hours on July 6, 1940). The camp authorities very often announced penal checks, during which the prisoners had to squat or kneel. There were verifications when they had to keep their hands up for several hours.

Living conditions in different periods were very different, but they were always catastrophic. The prisoners, who were brought in at the very beginning by the first echelons, slept on straw scattered on the concrete floor.

Later, hay bedding was introduced. They were thin mattresses stuffed 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, it became necessary to compact their accommodation. There were three-tiered bunks. There were 2 people on one level. In the form of bedding, as a rule, there was rotten straw. The prisoners were covered with rags and what was. In the Auschwitz camp, the bunks were wooden, in Auschwitz-Birkenau both wooden and brick with wooden flooring.

The toilet of the Auschwitz I camp, compared with the conditions in Auschwitz-Birkenau, looked like a real miracle of civilization.

toilet hut in Auschwitz-Birkenau camp

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

The plate with the number of the residential block on the wall

Until 1944, when Auschwitz became an extermination factory, most of the prisoners were sent to grueling labor every day. At first they worked on the expansion of the camp, and then they were used as slaves in the industrial facilities of the Third Reich. Every day columns of emaciated slaves left and entered through the gate with the cynical inscription "Arbeit macht Frei" (Work makes free). The prisoner had to do the work by running, without a second of rest. The pace of work, meager portions of food and constant beatings increased mortality. During the return of prisoners to the camp, dead 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 11 was one of the scariest places. Unlike other blocks, its doors were always closed. The windows were completely walled 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. Within 2-3 hours of his work, he passed from several dozen to over a hundred death sentences.

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

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

If there were many sentenced, they were taken to the "Wall of Death", which was located behind a high fence with blank gates between buildings 10 and 11. Large digits of their camp number were applied with an ink pencil on the chest of undressed people (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 Unit 11, a large wall of black insulating boards was built, sheathed with absorbent material. This wall became the last facet of the lives of thousands of people sentenced to death by the Gestapo court for their unwillingness to betray their homeland, attempted flight and political "crimes".

The fibers of death. The condemned were shot by the reporter or members of the political department. To do this, they used a small-caliber rifle so as not to attract too much attention with the sounds of shots. After all, not far away was a stone wall, beyond which there was a highway.

In the Auschwitz camp there was 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 the field, defecation 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 the 11th building. Here, in the back room, there were four narrow vertical sealed punishment cells measuring 90x90 centimeters in perimeter. In each of them there was a door with a metal bolt at the bottom.

Through this door, the punished was forced to squeeze inside and closed it with a bolt. In this cage, a person could only be standing. So he stood without food and water for as long as the SS wanted. Often this was the last punishment in the prisoner's life.

Directions of punished prisoners to standing punishment cells

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

Copper pipelines with valves have already been laid along the walls of the chambers. Gas entered the chambers through them ...

The names of the destroyed people were entered in the "Book of the Daily Status" of the Auschwitz camp

Lists of people sentenced to death by the Emergency 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 with their parents. These were the children of Jews, Gypsies, as well as Poles and Russians. Most of the Jewish children perished in the gas chambers as soon as they arrived at the camp. The rest, after a strict selection, were sent to the camp, where they were subject to the same strict rules as adults.

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

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

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

Letter from Heinrich Himmler ordering the start of a series of sterilization experiments

Maps of records of anthropometric data of experimental prisoners in the framework of Dr. Mengele's experiments.

Pages of the register of the dead, which indicate the names of 80 boys who died after being injected with phenol as part of medical experiments

List of released prisoners admitted to a Soviet hospital for treatment

Since the autumn of 1941, a gas chamber began to function in the Auschwitz camp, in which Zyklon B gas is used. It was produced by the Degesch company, which in the period 1941-1944 received about 300 thousand marks of profit from the sale of this gas. To kill 1,500 people, according to the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, about 5-7 kg of gas were 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. For the period 1942-1943, according to documents, about 20 thousand kg of Zyklon B crystals were delivered to Auschwitz alone.

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

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

Things found in the warehouses of Auschwitz 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 the bathhouse, so they appear relatively calm.

Here, the prisoners are forced to take off their clothes and are taken to the next room, which imitates a bathhouse. Shower holes were located under the ceiling, through which water never 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 were dying within 15-20 minutes. Gold teeth were pulled out from the dead, rings and earrings were removed, women's hair was cut off.

After that, the corpses were transported to the crematorium ovens, where the fire hummed continuously. In the event of an overflow of the ovens or at a time when the pipes were damaged by overloading, the bodies were destroyed in the places of burning behind the crematoria. All these actions were carried out by prisoners belonging to the so-called Sonderkommando group. At the peak of the activity of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, its number was about 1000 people.

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

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

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

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

In one retort, 2-3 corpses were placed.

This name has become a symbol of the brutal attitude of the Nazis towards captured children.

During the three years of the existence of the camp (1941-1944) in Salaspils, according to various sources, about a hundred thousand people died, seven thousand of them were children.

The place from which they did not return

This camp was built by captured Jews in 1941 on the territory of the former Latvian training ground, 18 kilometers from Riga, near the village of the same name. According to the documents, Salaspils (German: Kurtenhof) was originally called an “educational labor camp”, and not a concentration camp.

An impressive area, fenced with barbed wire, was built up with hastily built wooden barracks. Each was designed for 200-300 people, but often in one room there were from 500 to 1000 people.

Initially, Jews deported from Germany to Latvia were doomed to death in the camp, but since 1942, "undesirable" Jews from various countries were sent here: France, Germany, Austria, the Soviet Union.

The Salaspils camp also gained notoriety because it was here that the Nazis took blood from innocent children for the needs of the army and mocked young prisoners in every possible way.

Full donors for the Reich

New prisoners were brought in regularly. They were forced to strip naked and sent to the so-called bathhouse. It was necessary to walk half a kilometer through the mud, and then wash in icy water. After that, the arrivals were placed in barracks, all things were taken away.

There were no names, surnames, titles - only serial numbers. Many died almost immediately, while those who managed to survive after several days of imprisonment and torture were “sorted out”.

The children were separated from their parents. If the mothers did not give, the guards took the babies by force. There were terrible screams and screams. Many women went crazy; some of them were placed in the hospital, and some were shot on the spot.

Infants and children under the age of six were sent to a special barrack, where they died of starvation and disease. The Nazis experimented on older prisoners: they injected poisons, performed operations without anesthesia, took blood from children, which was transferred to hospitals for wounded soldiers of the German army. Many children became "full donors" - they took blood from them until they died.

Considering that the prisoners were practically not fed: a piece of bread and a gruel from vegetable waste, the number of child deaths was in the hundreds per day. The corpses, like garbage, were taken out in huge baskets and burned in crematorium ovens or dumped into disposal pits.

Covering up traces

In August 1944, before the arrival of the Soviet troops, in an attempt to destroy the traces of atrocities, the Nazis burned down many barracks. The surviving prisoners were taken to the Stutthof concentration camp, and German prisoners of war were kept on the territory of Salaspils until October 1946.

After the liberation of Riga from the Nazis, a commission to investigate Nazi atrocities found 652 children's corpses in the camp. Mass graves and human remains were also found: ribs, hip bones, teeth.

One of the most eerie photographs that clearly illustrates the events of that time is the “Salaspils Madonna”, the corpse of a woman who hugs a dead baby. It was found that they were buried alive.

The truth pricks the eyes

Only in 1967, the Salaspils memorial complex was erected on the site of the camp, which still exists today. Many famous Russian and Latvian sculptors and architects worked on the ensemble, including Ernst Unknown. The road to Salaspils begins with a massive concrete slab, the inscription on which reads: "The earth groans behind these walls."

Further, on a small field, figures-symbols with "speaking" names rise: "Unbroken", "Humiliated", "Oath", "Mother". On either side of the road are barracks with iron bars, where people bring flowers, children's toys and sweets, and on the black marble wall, serifs measure the days spent by the innocent in the "death camp".

To date, some Latvian historians blasphemously call the Salaspils camp "educational and labor" and "socially useful", refusing to recognize the atrocities that were committed near Riga during the Second World War.

In 2015, an exhibition dedicated to the victims of Salaspils was banned in Latvia. Officials considered that such an event would harm the image of the country. As a result, the exposition “Stolen childhood. Victims of the Holocaust through the Eyes of Young Prisoners of the Salaspils Nazi Concentration Camp was held at the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Paris.

In 2017, there was also a scandal at the press conference “Salaspils camp, history and memory”. One of the speakers tried to express his original point of view on historical events, but received a harsh rebuff from the participants. “It hurts to hear how you are trying to forget about the past today. We cannot allow such terrible events to happen again. God forbid you experience something like this,” one of the women who managed to survive in Salaspils addressed the speaker.

On January 27, 1945, the Auschwitz death camp was liberated. He was released by the Ukrainians, as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland told Grzegorz Schetyna, since the operation was carried out by the forces of the 1st Ukrainian Front. Both in Poland itself and in Europe, the historical "discoveries" of the head of the Polish Foreign Ministry caused a storm of indignation, and he himself was forced to justify himself. However, this is not the first attempt to rewrite the history of World War II.

Hell factories stats

Concentration camps were invented long before Nazi Germany started building them in Europe. However, Hitler became a "revolutionary" in this matter, setting one of the main tasks for the administration of the camps the mass extermination of representatives of "inferior nations" - Jews and Gypsies, as well as prisoners of war. Soon, when Germany began to suffer defeats on the Eastern Front, the Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians were counted among the nations to be destroyed as "representatives of the flawed Slavs."

In total, fascist Germany created more than 1,500 camps on its territory, and mainly in Eastern Europe, in which 16 million people were kept. 11 million were killed or they died from disease, hunger and overwork. There were more than 60 concentration camps in which more than 10 thousand people were kept.

The most terrible among them were the "death camps", designed exclusively for the mass destruction of people. There are a dozen of them on the list.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz (in German - Auschwitz), which had three departments, occupied an area of ​​​​40 square kilometers. It was the largest camp, it claimed the lives of, according to various estimates, from 1.5 million to 3 million people. At the Nuremberg Tribunal, a figure of 2.8 million was named. 90% of the victims were Jews. A significant percentage were Poles, Gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war.

It was a factory, soulless, mechanistic, and that made it all the more terrible. At the first stage of the existence of the camp, prisoners were shot. And in order to increase the "performance" of this infernal machine, they constantly "improved the technology." Since the executioners could no longer cope with the burial of an ever-increasing number of the executed, a crematorium was built. And it was built by the prisoners themselves. Then they tested the poison gas and recognized its "effectiveness". This is how the gas chambers appeared in Auschwitz.

Security and supervisory functions were performed by the SS troops. All the “routine work” was shifted to the prisoners themselves, the Sonderkommando: sorting clothes, carrying bodies, maintaining the crematorium. In the most "tense" periods, up to 8 thousand bodies were burned daily in the ovens of Auschwitz.

In this camp, as in all others, torture was practiced. Here the sadists were already at work. The doctor was in charge Josef Mengele, which, unfortunately, the Mossad did not get, and he died of his death in Latin America. He performed medical experiments on prisoners, performing monstrous abdominal operations without anesthesia.

Despite heavy camp security, which included a high voltage fence and 250 guard dogs, escape attempts were made at Auschwitz. But almost all of them ended in the death of prisoners.

And on October 4, 1944, an uprising took place. The members of the 12th Sonderkommando, having learned that they were going to be replaced by a new composition, which meant certain death, decided on desperate actions. Having blown up the crematorium, they killed three SS men, set fire to two knowledge and made a breach in the fence that was under tension, having previously arranged a short circuit. Up to 500 people were released. But soon all the fugitives were caught and taken to the camp for a demonstration execution.

When in mid-January 1945 it became clear that Soviet troops would inevitably come to Auschwitz, the able-bodied prisoners, who then numbered 58 thousand people, were driven deep into German territory. Two-thirds of them died on the road from exhaustion and disease.

On January 27, at 3 p.m., troops entered Auschwitz under the command of Marshal I.S. Koneva. In the camp at that moment there were about 7 thousand prisoners, among whom were 500 children from 6 to 14 years old. The soldiers, who had seen enough of many atrocities in the war, found traces of monstrous, transcendent atrocities in the camp. The scale of the "work done" was astounding. Mountains of men's suits and women's and children's outerwear, several tons of human hair and ground bones were found in the warehouses, prepared for shipment to Germany.

In 1947, a memorial complex was opened on the territory of the former camp.

Treblinka

An extermination camp established in the Warsaw Voivodeship of Poland in July 1942. During the year of the existence of the camp, about 800 thousand people, mostly Jews, were killed in it. Geographically, these were citizens of Poland, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Germany, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, France and Yugoslavia. Jews were brought in boarded up boxcars. The rest were mostly invited "to a new place of residence", and they bought railway tickets with their own money.

The "technology" of mass murder here was different from that of Auschwitz. Arriving and unsuspecting people were invited to the gas chambers, on which was written "Showers". Not poison gas was used, but exhaust gases from working tank engines. At first, the bodies were buried in the ground. In the spring of 1943, a crematorium was built.

An underground organization operated among the members of the Sonderkommando. On August 2, 1943, she organized an armed uprising, seizing weapons. Part of the guard was killed, several hundred prisoners managed to escape. However, almost all of them were soon found and killed.

One of the few survivors of the uprising was Samuel Willenberg, who wrote the book "The Uprising in Treblinka" after the war. Here is what he said in a 2013 interview about his first impression of the death factory:

“I had no idea what was going on in the infirmary. I just entered this wooden building and at the end of the corridor I suddenly saw all this horror. Bored Ukrainian guards with guns sat on a wooden chair. In front of them is a deep hole. It contains the remains of bodies that have not yet been consumed by the fire lit under them. The remains of men, women and small children. This picture just paralyzed me. I heard burning hair crackle and bones burst. There was acrid smoke in my nose, tears welled up in my eyes ... How can I describe and express it? There are things that I remember, but they cannot be expressed in words.

After the brutal suppression of the uprising, the camp was liquidated.

Majdanek

The Majdanek camp located in Poland, according to the original plan, was to become a "universal" camp. But after the capture of a large number of Red Army soldiers who were surrounded near Kyiv, it was decided to retrain him into a "Russian" camp. With the number of prisoners up to 250 thousand, prisoners of war were engaged in construction. By December 1941, due to hunger, hard work, and also due to an outbreak of typhus, all the prisoners, who at that time numbered about 10 thousand, died.

Subsequently, the camp lost its “national” orientation, and not only prisoners of war, but also Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and representatives of other peoples were brought into it for the destruction.

The camp, which had an area of ​​270 hectares, was divided into five sections. One was reserved for women and children. The prisoners were housed in 22 huge barracks. On the territory of the camp there were also industrial premises where the prisoners worked. In Majdanek, according to various sources, from 80 thousand to 500 thousand people died.

At Majdanek, as at Auschwitz, poison gas was used in the gas chambers.

Against the background of daily crimes, the operation with the code name "Enterfest" (German - harvest festival) stands out. On November 3 and 4, 1943, 43,000 Jews were shot. At the bottom of a ditch 100 meters long, 6 meters wide and 3 meters deep, the prisoners were tightly packed in one layer. After that, they were sequentially killed with a shot in the back of the head. Then the second layer was laid ... And so on until the moat was completely filled.

When the Red Army occupied Majdanek on July 22, 1944, there were several hundred surviving prisoners of various nationalities in the camp.

Sobibor

This camp operated in Poland from May 15, 1942 to October 15, 1943. Killed a quarter of a million people. The destruction of people took place according to the proven "technology" - gas chambers based on exhaust gases, a crematorium.

The vast majority of prisoners were killed on the first day. And only a few were left to perform various work in the workshops in the production area.

Sobibor became the first German camp in which an uprising took place. An underground group operated in the camp, headed by a Soviet officer, Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky. Pechersky and his deputy rabbi Leon Feldhendler planned and led the uprising that began on October 14, 1943.

According to the plan, the prisoners were supposed to secretly, one by one, liquidate the SS personnel of the camp, and then, having taken possession of the weapons that were in the camp warehouse, kill the guards. It was only partially successful. 12 SS men were killed and 38, according to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Ukrainian guards. But they failed to get hold of the weapon. Of the 550 prisoners in the working zone, 320 began to break out of the camp, 80 of them died during the escape. The rest managed to escape.

130 prisoners refused to escape, all of them were shot the next day.

A massive hunt was arranged for the fugitives, which lasted two weeks. It was possible to find 170 people who were immediately shot. Subsequently, another 90 people were extradited to the Nazis by the local population. Until the end of the war, 53 participants in the uprising survived.

The leader of the uprising, Alexander Aronovich Pechersky, was able to get into Belarus, where, before rejoining the regular army, he fought as a demolition officer in a partisan detachment. Then, as part of the assault battalion of the 1st Baltic Front, he fought his way to the west, rising to the rank of captain. The war ended for him in August 1944, when, as a result of being wounded, Pechersky became disabled. He died in 1990 in Rostov-on-Don.

Shortly after the uprising, the Sobibor camp was liquidated. After the demolition of all the buildings, its territory was plowed up and sown with potatoes and cabbage.

Picture in the opening of the article: surviving children after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz by Soviet troops, Poland, January 27, 1945 / Photo: TASS

The concentration camps of Nazi Germany were located throughout the country and served different purposes. They occupied hundreds of hectares of land and brought tangible income to the country's economy. Description of the history of the creation and organization of some of the most famous concentration camps of the Third Reich.

By the beginning of World War II, the system of concentration camps in Nazi Germany was already well established. The Nazis were not the inventors of this method of fighting large masses of people. The first concentration camp in the world was created during the Civil War in the United States of America in the town of Andersonville. However, it was after the defeat of Germany and the official courts for Nazi crimes against humanity, when the whole truth of the Reich was revealed, that the world community was stirred up by the revealed information about what was happening behind thick walls and rows of barbed wire.

In order to hold on to the power gained with such difficulty, Hitler had to quickly and effectively suppress any speeches against his regime. Therefore, the prisons in Germany began to fill up quickly, and soon overflowed with political prisoners. These were German citizens who were sent to prison not for extermination, but for indoctrination. As a rule, a few months of staying in unpleasant dungeons was enough to quench the ardor of the thirsty changes in the existing order of citizens. Once they ceased to pose a threat to the Nazi regime, they were released.

Over time, it turned out that the state had much more enemies than the prisons available. Then a proposal was made to solve the problem. The construction of places of mass concentrated detention of people objectionable to the regime, by the hands of these same people, was economically and politically beneficial to the Third Reich. The first concentration camps appeared on the basis of old abandoned barracks and factory workshops. But by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, they were already erected in any open place convenient for transporting prisoners there.

Buchenwald

Buchenwald concentration camp was built in the summer of 1937 in the heart of Germany near the city of Weimar. The project, like others like it, was strictly secret. Standartenführer Karl Koch, who was appointed commandant here, already had experience in managing camps. Prior to that, he managed to serve in Lichtenburg and Sachsenhausen. Now Koch was given the task of building the largest concentration camp in Germany. It was a great opportunity to forever write your name in the chronicles of Germany. The first concentration camps appeared in 1933. But this Koch had the opportunity to build from scratch. He felt like a king and a god there.

The main part of the inhabitants of Buchenwald were political prisoners. These were Germans who did not want to support Hitler's rule. Believers were also sent there, whose conscience did not allow them to kill and take up arms. Men who refused to serve in the army were considered dangerous opponents of the state. And since they did it out of religious conviction, they outlawed all religion. Therefore, all members of such a group, regardless of age and gender, were persecuted. The believers, who in Germany were called biebelforscher (Bible students), even had their own identification mark on their clothes - a purple triangle.

Like other concentration camps, Buchenwald was supposed to benefit the new Germany. In addition to the usual use of slave labor for such places, experiments were carried out on living people within the walls of this camp. In order to study the development and course of contagious diseases, as well as to find out which vaccines are more effective, groups of prisoners were infected with tuberculosis and typhoid. After research, the victims of such medical experiments were sent to the gas chamber as waste material.

On April 11, 1945, an organized uprising of prisoners was raised in Buchenwald. It turned out to be successful. Encouraged by the proximity of the Allied army, the prisoners seized the commandant's office and waited for the arrival of American troops, who approached on the same day. Five days later, the Americans brought ordinary residents from the city of Weimar so that they could see with their own eyes what horror was going on outside the walls of the camp. This would allow, if necessary, to use their testimony as eyewitnesses during trials.

Auschwitz

The Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland became the largest death camp in the history of the Third Reich. Initially, it was created, like many others, to resolve local problems - intimidate opponents, exterminate the local Jewish population. But soon the Auschwitz camp (that's how it was called in the German manner in all official German documents) was chosen for the final solution of the "Jewish question". Due to its convenient geographical location and good transport interchange, it was chosen to exterminate all the Jews from the European countries captured by Hitler.

Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland

The camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, was tasked with developing an effective technique for exterminating large batches of people. On September 3, 1941, Soviet prisoners of war (600 people) and 250 Polish prisoners were separated from the prisoners at the disposal of Höss. They were brought into one block and sprayed there with the poisonous gas "Cyclone B". A few minutes later, all 850 people were dead. This was the first test of a gas chamber. In the second section of Auschwitz, random buildings were no longer used for gas chambers. They built specially designed hermetic buildings disguised as shared showers. Thus, the prisoner of the concentration camp sentenced to death did not suspect until the last that he was going to certain death. This prevented panic and resistance attempts.

So the murder of people in Auschwitz was brought to a production scale. From all over Europe, trains full of Jews were sent to Poland. After being gassed, the murdered Jews were sent to the crematorium. However, the pragmatic Germans burned only what they could not use. All personal belongings, including clothing, were confiscated, sorted and sent to special warehouses. Gold teeth were pulled out from the corpses. Human hair was used to fill mattresses. Soap was made from human fat. And even the ashes of the victims were used as fertilizer.

In addition, people in the concentration camp were also considered as material for medical experiments. Physicians worked in Auschwitz, who, as a practice, performed a variety of surgical operations on healthy people. The notorious doctor Josef Mengele, nicknamed the Angel of Death, conducted his experiments on twins there. Many of them were children.

Dachau

Dachau is the first concentration camp in Germany. In many ways it was experimental. The first prisoners of this camp had the opportunity to leave it in just a few months. Under the condition of a complete "re-education". In other words, when they were rearranged to pose a political threat to the Nazi regime. In addition, Dachau was the first attempt to genetically cleanse the Aryan race by removing dubious "genetic material" from the public. Moreover, the selection went not only on the physical, but also on the moral character. So, prostitutes, homosexuals, vagrants, drug addicts and alcoholics were sent to the concentration camp.

There is a legend in Munich that Dachau was built near the city as a punishment for the fact that in the elections to the Reichstag all its inhabitants voted against Hitler. The fact is that the fetid smoke from the chimneys of the crematorium regularly covered the city blocks, spreading with the prevailing wind in this direction. But this is just a local legend, not confirmed by any documents.

It was in Dachau that work began on improving the methods of influencing the human psyche. Here they invented, tested and improved the methods of torture used during the interrogation. Here, methods of mass suppression of the human will were honed. The will to live and resist. Subsequently, concentration camp inmates throughout Germany and beyond experienced the technique, originally developed in Dachau. Over time, the conditions of stay in the camp became tougher. Long gone are releases from prison. People were coming up with new ways to become useful in the development of the Third Reich.

Many prisoners had the opportunity to serve as guinea pigs for medical students. Healthy people underwent surgery without the use of anesthesia. Soviet prisoners of war were used as live targets for training young soldiers. After classes, the unfinished were simply left at the training ground, and sometimes still alive they were sent to the crematorium. It is significant that healthy young men were selected for Dachau. Experiments were carried out on them to determine the limits of endurance of the human body. For example, prisoners were infected with malaria. Some died as a result of the course of the disease itself. However, most died from the treatments themselves.

In Dachau, Dr. Roscher, using a pressure chamber, found out how much pressure the human body can withstand. He put people in the chamber and simulated the situation in which a pilot could find himself at an extremely high altitude. They also tested what would happen with a fast forced parachute jump from such a height. The people were in terrible pain. They beat their heads against the wall of the cell and tore their heads bloody with their nails, trying to somehow reduce the terrible pressure. And the doctor at this time meticulously recorded the frequency of respiration and pulse. Units of test subjects who survived were immediately sent to the gas chamber. The experiments were classified under secrecy. The information could not be leaked.

Although most medical research took place in Dachau and Auschwitz, the concentration camp that supplied living material for the university in Germany was Sachsenhausen, located near the city of Friedenthal. Due to the use of such material, this institution has earned a reputation as a killer university.

Majdanek

In official documents, the new camp on the territory of occupied Poland was listed as "Dachau 2". But soon it acquired its own name - Majdanek - and even surpassed Dachau, in the image and likeness of which it was created. The concentration camps in Germany were secret facilities. But with regard to Majdanek, the Germans did not stand on ceremony. They wanted the Poles to know what was going on in the camp. It was located right next to the highway in the immediate vicinity of the city of Lublin. The putrid smell brought by the wind often completely enveloped the city. The inhabitants of Lublin knew about the executions of Soviet prisoners of war taking place in the nearby woods. They saw transports full of people and knew that gas chambers were destined for these unfortunate people.

The prisoners of Majdanek settled in the barracks intended for them. It was a whole city with its own districts. Five hundred and sixteen hectares of land fenced with barbed wire. There was even a section for women. And the chosen women went to the camp brothel, where the SS soldiers could satisfy their needs.

Majdanek concentration camp began to function in the fall of 1941. Initially, it was planned that only dissatisfied people from the surrounding area would be gathered here, as was the case with other local camps, which were needed to consolidate the new government and quickly deal with the dissatisfied. But a powerful flow of Soviet prisoners of war from the Eastern Front made adjustments to the planning of the camp. Now he had to accept thousands of captive men. In addition, this camp was included in the program for the final solution of the Jewish question. So, it had to be prepared for the rapid destruction of large parties of people.

When the operation "Erntefest" was carried out, during which they were supposed to destroy all the Jews remaining in the vicinity in one fell swoop, the camp leadership decided to shoot them. In advance, not far from the camp, the prisoners were ordered to dig a hundred-meter-long ditches, six meters wide and three meters deep. On November 3, 1943, 18,000 Jews were brought to these ditches. They were ordered to undress and lie face down on the ground. Moreover, the next row had to lie face down in the back of the previous one. Thus, we got a living carpet, folded according to the principle of tiles. Eighteen thousand heads were turned to the executioners.

Lively cheerful music began to play from loudspeakers around the perimeter of the camp. And then the massacre began. The SS men came close and shot at the back of the head of the lying man. Having finished with the first row, they pushed him into the ditch, and they began to methodically shoot the next one. When the ditches were full, they were only lightly covered with earth. In total, more than 40,000 people were killed in the Lublin region that day. This action was carried out in response to the uprising of the Jews in Sobibor and Treblinka. So the Germans wanted to protect themselves.

Operation Erntefest

During the three years of the existence of the death camp, five commandants were replaced in it. The first was Karl Koch, who was transferred to a new location from Buchenwald. The next is Max Koegel, who had previously been commandant of Ravensbrück. After them, Hermann Florshted, Martin Weiss served as commandants, and the last was Arthur Liebehenschel, the successor of Rudolf Höss in Auschwitz.

Treblinka

In Treblinka, there were two camps at once, which differed in numbers. Treblinka-1 was positioned as a labor camp, and Treblinka-2 as a death camp. At the end of May 1942, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, the camp was built near the village of Treblinka, and by June it began to operate. This is the largest death camp built during the war years, with its own railway. The first victims, exiled there, bought train tickets themselves, not realizing that they were going to their death.

The secrecy stamp extended not only to the murders of prisoners - the very existence of the concentration camp was a secret for a long time. German planes were forbidden to fly over Treblinka, and at a distance of 1 km from it, soldiers were placed throughout the forest, who, when anyone approached, fired without any warning. Those who brought prisoners here were replaced by camp guards and never went inside, and the 3-meter wall did not allow one to become accidental witnesses of what was happening outside the fence.

Due to the complete secrecy in Treblinka, the presence of a large number of guards was not required: about 100 watchmen were enough - specially trained collaborators (Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Poles) and 30 SS men. Gas chambers disguised as showers were attached to the exhaust pipes of heavy tank engines. People who were in the shower died more from suffocation than from the lethal composition of the gas. However, they also used other methods: the air from the room was completely sucked out and the prisoners died from lack of oxygen.

After the massive attack of the Red Army on the Volga, Himmler personally came to Treblinka. Prior to his visit, the victims were buried, but that meant leaving footprints behind them. By his order, crematoria were built. Himmler gave the order to dig up the dead and cremate them. "Operation 1005" was the code name for the elimination of the traces of the murders. The prisoners themselves were engaged in the execution of the order, and soon despair helped them to decide: it was necessary to raise an uprising.

Hard work and gas chambers took the lives of new arrivals, so that approximately 1,000 prisoners remained in the camp at all times to keep it functioning. On August 2, 1943, 300 people decided to flee. Many camp buildings were set on fire and holes were made in the fence, but after the first successful minutes of the uprising, many had to unsuccessfully storm the gates, and not use the original plan. Two-thirds of the rebels were destroyed, and many were found in the forests and shot.

The autumn of 1943 is marked as the complete end of the operation of the concentration camp in Treblinka. For a long time, looting was widespread on the territory of the former concentration camp: many were looking for valuable things that once belonged to the victims. Treblinka was the second largest camp after Auschwitz in terms of the largest number of victims. In total, from 750 to 925 thousand people were killed here. To preserve the memory of the horrors that the victims of the concentration camp had to endure, a symbolic cemetery and a mausoleum monument were later built in its place.

Ravensbrück

In German society, the role of women was to be limited to raising children and maintaining the home. They were not supposed to exert any political or social influence. Therefore, when the construction of concentration camps began, a separate complex for women was not envisaged. The only exception was the Ravensbrück concentration camp. It was built in 1939 in northern Germany near the village of Ravensbrück. The concentration camp takes its name from the name of this village. Today it has already become part of the city of Furstenberg that has spread to its territory.

The Ravensbrück women's concentration camp, the photos of which were taken after its liberation, has been little studied in comparison with other large concentration camps of the Third Reich. Since he was in the heart of the country - only 90 kilometers from Berlin, he was one of the last to be released. Therefore, the Nazis managed to reliably destroy all the documentation. In addition to the photographs taken after the liberation, only the stories of eyewitnesses could tell about what was happening in the camp, of whom not so many survived.

The Ravensbrück concentration camp was built to contain German women. Its first inhabitants were German prostitutes, lesbians, criminals and Jehovah's Witnesses who refused to renounce their faith. Subsequently, prisoners from the countries occupied by the Germans were also sent here. However, there were very few Jews in Ravensbrück. And in March 1942 they were all transferred to Auschwitz.

For all women arriving in Ravensbrück, camp life began the same way. They were stripped naked (while the season did not play any role) and inspected. Every woman and girl was subjected to a humiliating gynecological examination. The guards were vigilant to ensure that the newcomers did not carry anything with them. Therefore, the procedures were not only morally overwhelming, but also painful. After that, each woman had to go through a bath. Waiting in line could last several hours. And only after the bath did the captives finally receive a camp uniform and a pair of heavy slippers.

The ascent through the camp was signaled at 4 am. The prisoners received half a cup of a watery drink that replaced coffee, and after the roll call they went to their workplaces. The working day, depending on the season, lasted from 12 to 14 hours. In the middle there was a half-hour break during which the women received bowls of swede broth. Every evening there was another roll call, which could last several hours. Moreover, in cold and rainy times, the guards often deliberately delayed this procedure.

Ravensbrück was also involved in medical experiments. Here they studied the course of gangrene and ways to deal with it. The fact is that the field of receiving gunshot wounds, many soldiers on the battlefield developed this complication, which was fraught with many deaths. The doctors were faced with the task of finding a quick and effective treatment. On experimental women, sulfonamide preparations were tested (these include streptocide). This happened as follows - on the upper thigh - where the emaciated women still had muscles - they made a deep incision (of course, without the use of any anesthesia). Bacteria were injected into an open wound, and in order to more conveniently monitor the development of a lesion in the tissues, a piece of nearby flesh was cut off. To more accurately simulate field conditions, metal shavings, glass fragments, and wood particles were also injected into the wounds.

Women's concentration camps

Although among the German concentration camps, only Ravensbrück was a women's camp (however, several thousand men were kept there in a separate part), in this system there were places reserved exclusively for women. Responsible for the functioning of the camps, Heinrich Himmler was very kind to his offspring. He frequently inspected the various camps, making any changes he felt were necessary, and constantly tried to improve the functioning and output of these major suppliers of labor and material so necessary to the German economy. After learning about the system of incentive incentives that were introduced in the Soviet labor camps, Himmler decided to use it to improve work efficiency. Along with monetary incentives, supplements to the diet and the issuance of camp vouchers, Himmler considered that the satisfaction of sexual desires could become a special privilege. Thus, brothels for prisoners appeared in ten concentration camps.

Women selected from the prisoners worked in them. They agreed to this, trying to save their lives. It was easier to survive in a brothel. Prostitutes were entitled to better food, they received the necessary medical care and they were not sent to physically backbreaking work. Visiting a prostitute, although a privilege, remained paid. The man had to pay two Reichsmarks (the cost of a pack of cigarettes). The "session" lasted strictly 15 minutes, strictly in the missionary position. Reports preserved in Buchenwald documents show that in just the first six months of operation, brothels from concentration camps brought Germany 19,000 Reichsmarks.