The liberation of Auschwitz: What the Soviets discovered on January 27, 1945
Eighty years ago on January 27, 1945, soldiers from Russia's Red Army entered the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and were the first to discover the horrors of the concentration camp where more than a million people, most of them Jews, had been murdered. They found just a few thousand survivors in a sprawling complex where the SS had tried to erase all traces of their crimes.
In his Holocaust memoir, "The Truce", Italian prisoner Primo Levi recounted his first contact with the Red Army soldiers when Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was liberated.
“The first Russian patrol came in sight of the camp about midday on 27 January 1945,” he wrote. “They were four young soldiers on horseback, who advanced along the road that marked the limits of the camp, cautiously holding their sten-guns. When they reached the barbed wire, they stopped to look, exchanging a few timid words, and throwing strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive."
Imprisoned since February 1944 in Monowitz, one of the three camps located in the sprawling concentration camp grounds, Levi witnessed the men's unease as they caught sight of a place that has since become a symbol of Nazi brutality.
“They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funeral scene.”
Facing the ‘unimaginable’
On January 27, 1945, these Soviet soldiers witnessed the unimaginable.
“They were contingents from the first Ukrainian front. The Red Army stumbled upon this site by chance. Going into Auschwitz wasn’t a war goal. You can imagine these people's astonishment as they discovered one concentration camp after another,” said historian Alexandre Bande, a Holocaust specialist.
In his latest book, Auschwitz 1945, Bande has tried to shed light on what happened that historic day and in the weeks that followed.
While many books have focused on the workings of Auschwitz-Birkenau, with its selections and extermination process, Bande chose to look at the gaps in the story of its liberation.
“What happened on this site has left such a profound imprint on people's minds that historians, the general public and eye witnesses have been more interested in what occurred during (the liberation) rather than what happened afterwards.”
On the morning of the liberation at the end of January, the Soviet soldiers encountered fierce resistance from German troops. Intense fighting took place on the outskirts of the camp. Once they had overpowered these enemy soldiers, the Red Army discovered a handful of survivors: some 7,000 to 8,000 people. “They were mainly men, women and children who were deemed too incapacitated to be moved,” Bande said.
‘The snow was red with blood’
Just a few days earlier, on January 17, the Germans had begun evacuating Auschwitz-Birkenau. Hitler had ordered that no prisoner should fall into enemy hands alive. Nearly 60,000 people were dragged off in rags onto the roads in the middle of winter, heading west in what became known as the notorious death marches.
“We left in columns of 500. We walked for practically three days and three nights,” Raphaël Esrail, who was deported by convoy no. 67, told FRANCE 24 in 2020.
“What I remember most, and can't forget, are those men and women on the side of the road who had died. They'd been shot in the head by an SS man, or had to walk barefoot for hours. They had fallen as if in prayer, their legs frozen,” he said, recounting the transfer to the Gross-Rosen camp.
“I never expected this. The death marches were harrowing. The snow was red with blood. We were surrounded every 50 metres by the SS,” Léa Schwartzmann, a prisoner on the same convoy who was evacuated to the Ravensbrück camp, said in an interview in 2016.
Before dragging prisoners onto death marches, the SS tried to destroy as much evidence of their crimes as possible. As early as autumn 1944, Nazi authorities were making preparations to abandon Auschwitz-Birkenau. Pits containing the ashes of victims were liquidated, while the crematoria and gas chambers were demolished. When the Soviets entered the camp, however, much of the physical evidence remained.
“When they arrived at the barracks where the bags full of hair were stored, they understood that these were human remains. But it took them some time to understand the reality of the murders of hundreds of thousands of people,” Bande said.
Reconstructing the past
Evidence of the atrocities was captured in pictures by photographers attached to the Red Army. They photographed or filmed the dying in the barracks, the piled-up corpses and the 40,000 pairs of spectacles and 50,000 hairbrushes in storage.
“The first series of images taken in the immediate aftermath were of poor quality, due to the lighting conditions and the equipment used,” Bande explained.
“The second set of images is more recognisable. You can see, for example, prisoners falling into the arms of soldiers, but these are reconstructions. They were made by the Soviets in the weeks that followed. The idea was not to dwell on the suffering of the prisoners, but to highlight the heroism of the soldiers of the glorious Red Army.”
For some survivors, liberation did not end the suffering. As Albert Grinholtz, deported on convoy no. 4, recalled in 1991: “The soldiers, shocked by our starvation and skeletal bodies, immediately prepared soup in a wheelbarrow. (...) Closing my eyes, I remember this scene, the first bit of nourishment after so much deprivation and suffering. It caused many casualties among our comrades, who were unable to resist so much food, it was too rich.”
Symbolic of the Holocaust
Survivors took weeks, sometimes months, to return to their home town or country. Of the almost 69,000 people transported from France to Auschwitz-Birkenau, only 3% ever returned home. In the aftermath of the liberation, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was repurposed. The Soviets interned German prisoners of war and Poles suspected of collaboration there, while locals scoured the many barracks that were torn down salvaging scraps of timber. Trials and executions were also held at Auschwitz, including that of former camp commander Rudolf Höss.
In 1947, a memorial museum was finally opened to “protect the site and ensure knowledge is passed down of the crimes committed there”. Eighty years on, Auschwitz-Birkenau has become an important place of remembrance, symbolic of the Holocaust. Last year, it welcomed 1.83 million visitors.
“It's a symbol, especially in France, because the majority of Jewish deportees died there, but also because it's one of the best-preserved sites. It's more difficult attracting hundreds of thousands of tourists to a simple monument or memorial,” Bande explained.
“Auschwitz allows us to show the magnitude of the atrocities.”
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