“The sky was red, and the air smelled like burned meat. I didn’t understand it then, but my mother told me it was people. People like us.” — Ceija Stojka, Auschwitz survivor
Eighty years ago, the Soviet Red Army liberated survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi extermination camp in the Silesian region of southern Poland. The arrival of the Allies gave the world its first real glimpse of the horrors of the camp — even though there is evidence that British and American intelligence agencies knew of the industrial-scale killings in Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps.
More than one million people, the vast majority of them Jews, were murdered at the Auschwitz camp, which operated from May 1940 until its liberation on January 27, 1945 – now observed as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in honour of the victims. Other victims included the Roma, Polish political prisoners, homosexuals, communists, Soviet prisoners of war and disabled people.
We look back at what happened at Auschwitz, the way different categories of victims were treated, and the testimonies of some of the survivors.
What were the different German internment and death camps?
The Nazis, driven by their ideology of racial supremacy and territorial expansion, established more than 44,000 camps that served a range of purposes across Germany and its occupied territories from 1939 to 1945.
This vast network was known as the “Lager”, where between 15 and 20 million people were imprisoned or killed. It included concentration camps for “undesirable” ethnic groups and political prisoners; labour camps where enslaved prisoners carried out industrial or agricultural work, including for German firms such as the IG Farben chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate and the Krupp engineering company; transit camps for holding detainees before deportation to other camps; and six extermination camps where people were taken to be murdered.
Auschwitz was a complex that had many of these types of camps. It was also the largest of the Nazi death camps. People were sent to Auschwitz from transit camps across Europe and from labour camps if they were deemed unfit to work. Some were sent from Auschwitz to other locations to be used for forced labour elsewhere.
What was Auschwitz used for?
After the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, they converted Auschwitz, an army barracks, into a set of more than 40 camps, of which Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau were the two most significant facilities. Auschwitz became a central part of the Final Solution, the German plan for the genocide of Jews.
Auschwitz I was established in 1940, primarily for Polish political prisoners, and later expanded to include Jews and others. It also served as the administrative centre of the complex. Situated near the town of Oswiecim in southern Poland, the camp was strategically connected to a dense network of railways, allowing the efficient transport of those it imprisoned from locations across Europe.
Auschwitz II-Birkenau was built in 1941 and 1942 in the nearby village of Brzezinka (Germanised as Birkenau), about 3km (1.9 miles) from Auschwitz I. It functioned as the largest extermination and forced labour camp in the Nazi system, equipped with gas chambers and crematoria. Along with Einsatzgruppen paramilitary death squads, Auschwitz was the single biggest killing machine during the Holocaust. Approximately 1.3 million people were held in Auschwitz over its four years of operation – at least 1.1 million of them, the vast majority Jewish, were murdered.
Auschwitz handled up to 90,000 prisoners at any one time. Inmates carried out various duties within the camp, such as cleaning, administrative work, supervising other inmates or performing the grim task of pulling bodies out from gas ovens, removing any gold teeth and women’s hair, and burning bodies. They were also marched off to do hard labour in outside locations such as factories, quarries and farms, where inmates would work by day and return to their camps at night.
Auschwitz was also a site for medical experiments and pseudo-scientific research, using the inmates as guinea pigs. Dr Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death”, was infamous for his horrific experiments at Auschwitz, particularly on twins and individuals with physical anomalies.
These experiments involved injections of chemicals into the eyes to attempt to change eye colour, deliberate infection with diseases to study immune responses and the dissection of one twin after death to compare with the surviving sibling.
In mass sterilisation programmes targeting minorities such as the Roma and people with disabilities, victims underwent forced exposure to radiation targeting reproductive organs, injection of caustic chemicals into the uterus or testicles and surgical sterilisation without anaesthesia.
Who was held at Auschwitz and what happened to them?
Jews made up 90 percent of the victims of Auschwitz while other groups were also sent to the camp. Each was targeted for specific reasons, and life in the camp differed significantly depending on the group to which prisoners belonged.
Jews
“It is not possible to sink lower than this. No human condition is more miserable than this.” — Primo Levi, Italian Jewish chemist, author, and Auschwitz survivor
Jews were the principal target of the Holocaust and the worst sufferers – by far – of Nazi brutalities. Between 1939 and 1945, some six million Jews were murdered across Europe. They were gassed, shot, or starved and worked to death.
Of those murdered, nearly 1.1 million Jews were killed at Auschwitz alone – about 85 percent to 90 percent of the camp’s victims – making it the deadliest Nazi extermination camp.
Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz faced some of the harshest and most brutal conditions of all the prisoner groups. The Nazi racial ideology targeted Jews for extermination above all others.
In his 1947 memoir, Survival in Auschwitz (If This Is a Man), Primo Levi described how he was immediately subjected to the “selection” process on arriving at the camp in January 1944. Those who failed the fit-to-work test deemed unfit for labour were sent to the gas chambers. In all, 75 to 80 percent of Jewish deportees were immediately sent to the gas chambers on arrival.
Jews had to live in overcrowded barracks, with as many as 1,000 prisoners crammed into spaces designed for 400. They received minimal food rations, leading to starvation and extreme malnutrition. Sanitation was almost non-existent, with limited access to water or latrines, leading to rampant disease.
Levi, on arrival stripped of his personal belongings, shaved, tattooed and given a uniform, was assigned to gruelling forced labour, enduring starvation, freezing temperatures, disease and the constant fear of death. “We had to move like automatons,” he wrote, “following orders mechanically, to avoid attracting attention and punishment”.
Jewish inmates worked under constant abuse and beatings from SS (Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary organisation) guards and “kapos” — fellow inmates who agreed to work as supervisors for the Nazis — often until they collapsed and died.
Jews were also singled out for especially humiliating and dehumanising treatment, such as being forced to witness or participate in public executions, stand naked for hours or endure beatings. Jewish women often faced sexual violence.
Though he eventually survived and later went on to become a highly acclaimed author of many books, Levi remained haunted throughout his life by the traumas he had experienced during the Holocaust. He eventually took his own life in 1987.
Roma
“The screams of the children still echo in my ears. They screamed until they were no longer there.” — Ceija Stojka, Roma Auschwitz survivor
An estimated 23,000 Roma were deported to Auschwitz, mostly between February 1943 and July 1944, of whom 19,000 perished. Defined as “racially inferior”, the Roma were placed in a designated “Gypsy family camp”, or “Zigeunerlager”, located in the southern part of Auschwitz II-Birkenau and adjacent to the gas chambers and crematoria.
Among those sent to Auschwitz was Stojka, the fifth of six children born to Roman Catholic Roma parents who made their living as itinerant horse traders. Their family wagon travelled as part of a Roma caravan that spent winters in the Austrian capital of Vienna and summers in the Austrian countryside.
In her 1988 memoir, Stojka relates that she was five years old when Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. Her parents were ordered to remain in Vienna and convert their wooden wagon into a permanent house. Stojka remembers them having to learn how to cook with an oven instead of an open fire.
In 1940, Roma families received new orders from the Nazi regime to register as members of a non-Aryan race. The settlement where Stojka lived was fenced off and placed under police guard. Stojka was eight when her father was taken away to the Dachau concentration camp; a few months later, her mother received his ashes in a box.
Soon afterwards, Stojka, her mother, and siblings were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the mother and children were crammed with thousands of others into overcrowded barracks with little food or water. They lived in the shadows of a smoking crematorium.
“Auschwitz was like hell on Earth,” Stojka said. “The smell of burning flesh was constant, and it became part of our lives – part of our breath.”
The camp was overcrowded, filthy and rife with disease. Roma prisoners were kept on the edge of starvation and often subjected to brutal medical experiments, particularly the children. Death rates were extremely high due to disease and malnutrition.
Stojka described how she would helplessly watch as prisoners, including children, were selected for medical experiments or sent to be eliminated by gassing.
“In Auschwitz, we were no longer people,” Stojka wrote. “We were numbers, things to be disposed of, with no value except the work we could do before we died.”
In mid-1944, Stojka, her mother, and siblings were transferred to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in central Germany – miraculously escaping the so-called “liquidation” of Birkenau’s Roma.
On August 2, 1944, SS guards, with their rifles and dogs, surrounded the camp. The inmates initially resisted, with whatever tools, sticks and rocks they could use as weapons. They were soon overpowered, dragged to the gas chambers and murdered with the Zyklon B cyanide-based pesticide.
The Roma Family Camp massacre was part of the broader Nazi genocide of Roma people, known in the Romani language as the Porajmos (“Devouring”). At least 220,000, and possibly as many as 500,000, Roma were murdered in the course of the Porajmos, representing 25 to 50 percent of their pre-war population.
Stojka and her family members were moved from Ravensbruck to yet another facility, Bergen-Belsen, in north-central Germany, from which she was liberated on April 15, 1945, weighing just 28kg (62 pounds).
Polish resistance
“The hardest part was the psychological terror – the idea that you could be executed at any moment for any reason made the fear constant.” — Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, member of the Polish resistance, Auschwitz survivor
Some 150,000 Polish intellectuals, clergy, educators and resistance members were sent to Auschwitz in a German effort to suppress any opposition to Nazism and hinder the country from rebuilding after the war. While harsh, their treatment was generally less brutal than that of Jewish prisoners.
Even then, about 75,000 Poles were killed at Auschwitz. Many Polish political prisoners were given administrative roles within the camp, which sometimes meant privileges like better food or clothing.
Among the Polish resistance members held at Auschwitz was Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and sent to Auschwitz. In a 1988 interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Bartoszewski described that immediately on arriving in the dead of night, he and others on his train were “thrown into a muddy yard, and immediately subjected to the brutality of the SS guards”.
“They shouted at us, beat us with clubs, and forced us to strip. We were herded into the barracks like cattle, overcrowded and filthy. There was no space to sleep, and the smell of death was already present.”
Bartoszewski was assigned to work in the commander’s kitchen. But despite that job, he and his comrades were fed barely enough to survive, and he witnessed many prisoners dropping dead from exhaustion and hunger.
Some imprisoned Poles succeeded in forming underground resistance networks to provide mutual aid and sabotage camp operations, making use of the fact that Auschwitz was situated in their own country. They gathered information about the Nazis’ plans, movements of goods and extermination efforts, and smuggled this data to Polish resistance leadership and Allied forces.
“I remember one night, during roll call, when we overheard some SS officers discussing a mass transport of prisoners being sent to the gas chambers the next day,” Bartoszewski, who later became Poland’s foreign minister, recalled. “We managed to secretly alert others, which allowed many to avoid the selection process. It wasn’t a victory, but it was a small act of defiance that gave us hope.”
Resistance figures also destroyed or altered records to delay the identification and deportation of prisoners, and played a key role in documenting the systematic killings at Auschwitz. They sabotaged industrial operations, slowing down work and damaging equipment, organised escape routes and smuggled food, medicine and other essentials into the camp – all at great personal risk, as those caught helping prisoners were usually executed.
As the war progressed and supplies depleted, conditions worsened for Bartoszewski and all the other prisoners in Auschwitz. When the Nazis ordered inmates to line up and walk out under the shadow of their guns in January 1945, as the Soviets approached, many, like Bartoszewski and Levi, were too weak to leave. Both survived until the Soviet troops reached Auschwitz. Most people held in Auschwitz did not.
Conscientious objectors
Many conscientious objectors were held in Auschwitz, including some 3,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to serve in the military or swear allegiance to Hitler, even under torture.
Jehovah’s Witnesses were not kept separately from other prisoners, but could be identified by a purple triangle on their uniforms. Although treated less harshly than other groups, they too were subject to starvation and forced labour.
Jehovah’s Witnesses conducted secret Bible readings and prayers, both of which were strictly forbidden, and often shared their meagre rations with other prisoners who were weaker or in worse condition. They also refused to engage in the camp’s hierarchical brutality, such as becoming kapos – supervisors of forced labour – or participating in acts of violence against fellow inmates.
Simone Arnold Liebster, a Jewish French survivor of Ravensbruck (another concentration camp located in central Germany), would later describe the kindness and spiritual strength of the Jehovah’s Witnesses she knew during her imprisonment, noting: “Their steadfastness and peace gave me strength to endure. They reminded me that even in the darkest places, kindness and faith could survive.”
Prisoners of war
Tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were held in Auschwitz, treated as “subhuman” according to Nazi ideology, and often kept in dire conditions, with little food and no medical attention. Although positioned near the bottom of the Nazi hierarchy of prejudice, they were not subjected to the systematic genocide directed at Jews and Roma. However, they were usually assigned to the harshest forms of slave labour, such as construction or forestry work in sub-zero temperatures, with many, if not most, perishing from starvation, cold and disease.
Aleksei Vaitsen, one of the few Soviet prisoners of war to survive Auschwitz, later said: “We were stripped of everything – our uniforms, our dignity and our humanity. To them, we were not soldiers. We were animals.”
Other minorities
Other Auschwitz inmates included homosexual men, who were identified by a pink triangle sewn onto their uniforms and subjected to brutal experiments to “cure” their sexual orientation.
Also held at Auschwitz were people with disabilities, deemed “unworthy of life” under Nazi eugenics policies that aimed to create a “racially pure” Aryan population by promoting selective breeding and eliminating those deemed “unfit”. This included the forced sterilisation of some 400,000 individuals with hereditary conditions, mental illnesses or other disabilities. Under the “T4 Programme” of euthanasia, about 300,000 disabled people, including children, were systematically murdered in gas chambers, with injections or through starvation. At Auschwitz, many of these disabled prisoners were subjected to horrific medical experimentation at the hands of Mengele and his associates.
Another class of Auschwitz prisoners were German and Austrian common criminals, arrested for theft, murder or other non-political crimes, who were identified by the green triangles on their uniforms. As Aryan citizens, these inmates occupied a higher status among those imprisoned, with many being appointed kapos, allowing them benefits such as better food rations. The kapos were notorious for abusing other prisoners, especially Jews and political detainees. However, a few of these criminal prisoners resisted, helping fellow inmates or refusing to carry out SS orders.
When and how were the victims of Auschwitz liberated?
In mid-January 1945, approximately 60,000 Auschwitz prisoners were marched westwards to other concentration camps, ahead of the Soviet advance. On these so-called “death marches”, they staggered for days in freezing temperatures with little food or clothing. Thousands died from exhaustion, starvation or exposure, and many others were shot by SS guards along the way.
The liberation of Auschwitz itself took place on January 27, 1945, when Soviet troops from the 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front entered the camp. They discovered about 7,000 remaining survivors, including 700 children, most of whom were severely emaciated, sick or dying – those too weak or ill to join the death marches.
The Soviet troops found piles of corpses and ashes, gas chambers and crematoria, as well as warehouses filled with victims’ belongings, including shoes, clothing and human hair.
The liberation exposed the scale of Nazi crimes to the world and became a defining moment in the history of the Holocaust.
