Auschwitz

74 years ago today (January 27^th) the Soviet Red Army liberated Auschwitz.

Between March 1933 and May 1945 the Germans ran around 42,500 concentration, labor, POW and death camps and ghettos throughout occupied Europe. Between 15-20 million men, women and children were imprisoned and/or died at these sites.

That number includes:

-          8 Death Camps (in occupied Poland: Auschwitz, Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets  -- in occupied-Belarus) and Sajmiste --in occupied Serbia)
-          980 concentration camps
-          30,000 slave labor camps
-          1,150 Jewish Ghettos
-          500 brothels filled with sex slaves
-          Thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly, the infirm and the disabled; for Germanizing prisoners or for transporting victims to the killing centers.
-          1,000 POW camps

The Targeted Holocaust Victims:
-      Jews
-      Western Allied Jewish POWs or who were suspected of being Jews by the Germans
-      Soviet POWs
-      Gypsies
-      Ethnic Poles
-      Ethnic Serbs
-      People with disabilities
-      Homosexuals
-      Jehovah’s Witnesses
-      Catholic Clergy
-      Eastern European intellectuals
-      Political Prisoners (including Resistance fighters

January 27^th: Liberation of Auscwitz

 The Auschwitz Concentration Camp (40 miles from Krakow, Poland) was run by the Germans from 1940-1945. It held around 1.3 million prisoners with 1.1 million men, women and children murdered here alone. It was divided into 44 sub-camps. Auschwitz 1 (the main camp held 30,000 prisoners and had the first gas chamber where from 1941-1942 60,000 people were gassed); Auschwitz 2 (Auschwitz- Birkenau was the main death camp with 4 gas chambers and crematoria.)The rest of the Auschwitz sub-camps were concentration and labor camps. There were 7,000 German SS guards (less than 800 were ever tried for their crimes) at Auschwitz. At least 802 prisoners tried to escape from Auschwitz with 144 of those being successful. From 1943-1944 (the height of the gassings at Auschwitz) 6,000 men, women and children were gassed every day. On October 7, 1944 the Sonderkommando (prisoners, mostly Jews, forced by the Germans to work in the gas chambers and crematoria) revolted. 3 SS were killed and 12 SS were injured. 451 Sonderkommandos were killed.  In November 1944 (with the Red Army approaching) the Germans stopped gassing at Auschwitz and forced the Sonderkommandos to dig up and burn thousands of bodies. On January 17, 1945 the Germans forced 58,000 prisoners to leave Auschwitz on a Death March (anyone who stopped was shot on the road.) On January 20, 1945 the Germans blew-up the gas chambers. On January 27, 1945 the Soviet Red Army liberated Auschwitz. Due to the vast extent of the camp area, at least four divisions took part in liberating the camp: 100th Rifle Division (established in Vologda, Russia), 322nd Rifle Division (Gorky, Russia), 286th Rifle Division (Leningrad), and 107th Motor Rifle Division (Tambov, Russia)The soldiers found 7,500 prisoners alive and over 600 corpses. Among items found by the Soviet soldiers were 370,000 men's suits, 837,000 women's garments, and 7.7 tons (8.5 short tons) of human hair. 4,500 of the 7,500 liberated prisoners were sent to hospital barracks where around 500 died after the liberation.