Russia's Pivotal Role in Ending the Holocaust
We must remember that without the efforts of the Red Army , the Nazis would have been able to complete their attempted genocide of Europe’s Jews, writes Geoffrey Roberts.
The fact remains that it was the Soviet Army that ended the holocaust at Auschwitz, as it did at most other German concentration camps. Auschwitz (in Polish, Oswiecim) was captured by the Marshal Konev’s First Ukrainian Front at the end of January 1945. Many Ukrainians served in Konev’s armies — including some who were among the first to enter Auschwitz — but the majority of his troops were Russian.
Auschwitz was not the first death camp captured by the Red Army. That dubious distinction belonged to Maidenak in Eastern Poland, which was overrun by advancing Soviet forces in July 1944. Maidenak’s “liberation” was followed by that of camps at Belzec, Chelmo, Sobibor, and Treblinka — killing grounds where more than two million victims were exterminated — most of them Jews from ghettos created by the Nazis to concentrate and contain the Jewish populations of Poland and Germany.
Stories of mass deaths and destruction wreaked by the Nazis were a staple of Soviet war reporting. But when it came to describing Maidenak the Soviet writer and journalist, Konstantin Simonov, warned his readers its horrors were beyond human imagination and comprehension; not simply another scene of atrocities but the site of systematic murder on a massive scale.
When Soviet soldiers advanced on Auschwitz they expected to capture a large prison camp and to be welcomed as liberators. What they found shocked even their battle-hardened sensibilities. Few among the 8,000 survivors were able to talk or move let alone welcome the Soviets. Indeed, many were terrified new persecutors had arrived.
Colonel Anatoly Shapiro recalled: “I had seen many innocent people killed. I had seen hanged people. I had seen burned people. But I was still unprepared for Auschwitz.”
Shapiro remembered, too, the evidence of mass murder: “We discovered mountains of artificial teeth, spectacles and human hair”. In the children’s barracks there were only two survivors, the rest gassed or dead as subjects of horrific medical experiments. Another Soviet officer recalled that when clean-up crews went to inspect the crematorium chimneys, they found human fat deposits on the walls 45in (115cm) thick.
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