Magda Adam, Tova Friedman, Boris Braun, Yehuda Bacon, Anton Korek, Silvia Vesela, Eva Vatovova, Otto Pressburger, Tadeusz Rybacki, Vera Alexander, Miriam Mozes, Jona Laks and Peter Greenfeld.
Ring a bell, these names? They are the descendants of one of the largest evils of the human race. These are the names of the survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camps. These are titles that will live to be remembered in the books of history, not to blame the blame, but to remind the people of the consequences of power in the wrong hands.
On January 27 1945, Red Army soldiers entered the Auschwitz complex in the then-occupied Poland and discovered a crime scene that was so huge, Satanic and well-organised that it forever changed the way the whole human race thinks of the concept of evil. What they discovered was not a battlefield conquest but tangible remnants of an industrialised genocide, carefully documented, planned and carried out by the state of Nazi Germany. The emancipation of Auschwitz was not the end of the Holocaust but its practical manifestation.
Table of Contents
Auschwitz by the Numbers: Dimension of the Crime.
Auschwitz was a complex of rather than a single camp, with Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Auschwitz III-Monowitz, and over 40 sub-camps. As has been confirmed by Nazi transport documents and post-war investigations, around 1.3 million individuals were deported to Auschwitz, with at least 1.1 million of them being killed. Approximately 90 per cent of the victims were Jews, with other victims comprising Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents.
Most of them were exterminated within hours of their arrival at gas chambers with the use of Zyklon B, which was a pesticide that was reused in mass killing. The crematoria at Birkenau had a capacity of 4,400 bodies per day, calculated based on SS(Schutzstaffel) construction records and not just eyewitness accounts, which further underlines the bureaucratic aspect of the murders.
Why Not Germany, Why Poland?
One of the questions that is yet to be answered is, Why were Polish Jews more persecuted than German Jews? This can be answered by the mere demographics of both nations. The singling out, discrimination, and treatment of German jews like garbage was going on even before the holocaust occurred. As a result, they started migrating to Poland. In addition, there was already a larger population of Jews in Poland even prior to WWII. It is estimated that more than 3.5 to 4 million Jews were home to Poland, and only 500,000 were German.
The other important difference was the resident directories Poland possessed. Polish population was very well documented, and this facilitated the SS officers to locate the Jewish population in Poland. The SS officers possessed the addresses, names and other information of the Jews in Poland.
What the Liberators Found: Not Allegation, Evidence.
Upon the arrival of Soviet troops, they discovered about 7000 survivors, but the majority were in a state of extreme starvation, hypothermia and illness. There were more than 600 unburied corpses all over the campgrounds, and warehouses were full of 370,000 suits of men, 837,000 of women, 7.7 tonnes of human hair, and thousands of shoes, spectacles and artificial limbs. These numbers were recorded on the spot and subsequently utilised as forensic evidence in the war crimes investigations.
Prolonged starvation was confirmed by medical checkups by Soviet and Polish physicians who recorded average body weights of adult men prisoners of less than 40 kilograms. Typhus, dysentery and tuberculosis were rampant, and death persisted weeks after the liberation because of the permanent damage to organs. According to a number of accounts, the psychological trauma of the holocaust survivors was so overwhelming that most of them abandoned their families in fear, confusion or even in pure dread.
Why The Camps Were Abandoned?
It might be a little hard to believe, but the SS officers already knew their demise; as a result, they never intended the camps to be found intact. According to several accounts, between 17 and 21 January 1945, SS officers evacuated at least 56,000 prisoners, which later became known as the ‘death marches’ because 15,000 of those prisoners couldn’t make the journey and died because of starvation, injury or disease.
Besides, the gas chambers and crematorium were partly damaged to prevent the gathering of evidence. However, the magnitude of the documentation, material remains, and the testimonies of the survivors could not leave any room for denial and created quite a terrifying image of the dark truth about Auschwitz.
Legal and Moral Consequences.
The Nuremberg Trials were directly influenced by evidence collected at Auschwitz, which made crimes against humanity a prosecutable offence under international law. The camp served as a key reference point of the Genocide Convention of 1948, which gave a legal definition of genocide based on the criteria of the Nazi practices revealed during and after liberation.
Auschwitz is the best-documented crime scene in the history of humanity today, and more than 110,000 separate records of prisoners, architectural plans, SS letters, and transport lists are preserved. Denial is not an opinion here; that is, denial of evidence. Evidence so terrible and horrible that to this day, the world becomes uneasy even when it is spoken of.
