Concentration camp in Poland. Gloomy afternoon XXI century

On January 27, 1945, the Auschwitz death camp was liberated. He was released by the Ukrainians, as told by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland Grzegorz Schetyna, since the operation was carried out by the forces of the 1st Ukrainian Front. Both in Poland itself and in Europe, the historical "discoveries" of the head of the Polish Foreign Ministry caused a storm of indignation, and he himself had to make excuses. However, this is not the first attempt to rewrite the history of the Second World War.

Infernal factories statistics

Concentration camps were invented long before Nazi Germany began to build them in Europe. However, Hitler became a “revolutionary” in this matter, setting one of the main tasks for the administration of the camps to massacre the representatives of the “inferior nations” - Jews and Gypsies, as well as prisoners of war. Soon, when Germany began to suffer defeats on the Eastern Front, Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians were numbered among the nations to be destroyed as “representatives of the flawed Slavs”.

In total, fascist Germany created both on its territory, and mainly in Eastern Europe, more than one and a half thousand camps, in which 16 million people were kept. 11 million were killed or they died from disease, hunger and backbreaking work. There were more than 60 concentration camps in which more than 10 thousand people were kept.

The worst among them were the "death camps" designed exclusively for the mass extermination of people. There are a dozen of them on the list.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz (in German - Auschwitz), which had three departments, occupied an area of ​​40 square kilometers. It was the largest camp; according to various estimates, from 1.5 million to 3 million people died. At the Nuremberg Tribunal, a figure of 2.8 million was named. 90% of the victims were Jews. A significant percentage were Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.

It was a factory, soulless, mechanistic, and therefore even more terrible. At the first stage of the camp's existence, prisoners were shot. And in order to increase the "productivity" of this hellish machine, the technology was constantly "improved". Since the executioners could no longer cope with the burial of the constantly increasing number of those executed, a crematorium was built. Moreover, it was built by the prisoners themselves. The poison gas was then tested and found to be "effective." This is how gas chambers appeared in Auschwitz.

Security and surveillance functions were performed by the SS troops. All the same "routine work" was transferred to the prisoners themselves, the Sonderkommando: sorting clothes, carrying bodies, maintaining the crematorium. In the most "tense" periods, up to 8 thousand bodies were burned in the ovens of Auschwitz every day.

In this camp, as in everyone else, torture was practiced. Here the sadists got down to business. The doctor was in charge Joseph Mengele, which, unfortunately, did not reach the Mossad, and he died a natural death in Latin America. He set up medical experiments on prisoners, conducting monstrous abdominal operations without anesthesia.

Despite the heavily guarded camp, which included a high voltage fence and 250 guard dogs, escape attempts were made at Auschwitz. But almost all of them ended in the death of prisoners.

And on October 4, 1944, an uprising took place. The members of the 12th Sonderkommando, having learned that they were going to be replaced with a new composition, which implied certain death, decided on desperate actions. Having blown up the crematorium, they killed three SS men, set fire to two lore and punched a hole in the energized fence, having previously arranged a short circuit. Up to half a thousand people were at large. But soon all the fugitives were caught and taken to the camp for a demonstration execution.

When in mid-January 1945 it became clear that Soviet troops would inevitably come to Auschwitz, able-bodied prisoners, who then numbered 58 thousand people, were driven deep into German territory. Two thirds of them died on the way from exhaustion and disease.

On January 27 at 3 pm, troops under the command of Marshal entered Auschwitz I. S. Koneva... At that time, there were about 7 thousand prisoners in the camp, among whom there were 500 children from 6 to 14 years old. The soldiers, who had had time to look at many atrocities in the war, found traces of monstrous, transcendental atrocities in the camp. The scale of the "work done" was striking. In the warehouses were found mountains of men's suits and outerwear for women and children, several tons of human hair and ground bones, prepared for shipment to Germany.

In 1947, a memorial complex was opened on the territory of the former camp.

Treblinka

A death camp established in the Warsaw Voivodeship of Poland in July 1942. During the year of the camp's existence, about 800 thousand people, mostly Jews, were killed in it. Geographically, they were citizens of Poland, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Germany, USSR, Czechoslovakia, France and Yugoslavia. Jews were brought in boarded up freight cars. The rest were mostly invited “to a new place of residence,” and they bought train tickets with their own money.

The "technology" of mass murder here was different from that which existed in Auschwitz. Arriving and unsuspecting people were invited to the gas chambers, on which were written "Showers". Not poison gas was used, but exhaust gases from working tank engines. First, the bodies were buried in the ground. In the spring of 1943, the crematorium was built.

There was an underground organization among the members of the Sonderkommando. On August 2, 1943, she organized an armed uprising, seizing weapons. Part of the guards was killed, several hundred prisoners managed to escape. However, almost all of them were soon found and killed.

One of the few surviving participants in the uprising was Samuel Willenberg, who wrote the book "The Treblinka Uprising" after the war. Here's what he said in a 2013 interview about his first impression of the Death Factory:

“I had no idea what was happening in the infirmary. I just entered this wooden building and at the end of the corridor I suddenly saw all this horror. On the wooden chair sat bored Ukrainian guards with guns. In front of them is a deep hole. It contains the remains of bodies that have not yet been devoured by the fire lit under them. Remains of men, women and small children. This picture just paralyzed me. I heard burning hair and bones breaking. There was acrid smoke in my nose, tears welling up in my eyes ... How to describe and express this? There are things that I remember, but they cannot be expressed in words. "

After the brutal suppression of the uprising, the camp was liquidated.

Majdanek

The Majdanek camp located in Poland was originally intended to become a "universal" camp. But after the capture of a large number of Red Army soldiers who were encircled near Kiev, it was decided to convert it to a "Russian" camp. With the number of prisoners up to 250 thousand. Prisoners of war were engaged in construction. By December 1941, due to hunger, hard work, and also because of the outbreak of typhoid, all prisoners died, of which at that time there were about 10 thousand.

Subsequently, the camp lost its "national" orientation, and not only prisoners of war, but also Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and representatives of other nations were brought into it for the destruction.

The 270-hectare camp was divided into five sections. One was reserved for women and children. The prisoners were housed in 22 huge barracks. On the territory of the camp there were also industrial premises where prisoners worked. In Maidanek, according to various sources, from 80 thousand to 500 thousand people died.

In Majdanek, as in Auschwitz, poison gas was used in the gas chambers.

Against the background of daily crimes, the operation with the code name "Enterfest" (German - harvest festival) stands out. On November 3 and 4, 1943, 43 thousand Jews were shot. At the bottom of the ditch 100 meters long, 6 meters wide and 3 meters deep, the prisoners were tightly packed in one layer. Then they were successively killed by a shot in the back of the head. Then the second layer was laid ... And so on until the ditch was completely filled.

When the Red Army occupied Majdanek on July 22, 1944, there were several hundred surviving prisoners of various nationalities in the camp.

Sobibor

This camp operated in Poland from May 15, 1942 to October 15, 1943. Killed a quarter of a million people. The extermination of people took place according to a well-established "technology" - gas chambers based on exhaust gases, a crematorium.

The overwhelming majority of the prisoners were killed on the first day. And only a few were left to perform various works in the workshops in the production area.

Sobibor became the first German camp in which an uprising took place. An underground group operated in the camp, led by Soviet officer, lieutenant Alexander Pechersky... Pechersky and his deputy rabbi Leon Feldhendler planned and led an uprising that began on October 14, 1943.

According to the plan, the prisoners were to secretly, one by one, eliminate the SS personnel of the camp, and then, taking possession of the weapons that were in the camp warehouse, interrupt the guards. It was only partially successful. 12 SS men were killed and 38, according to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Ukrainian guards. But they failed to take possession of the weapon. Out of 550 prisoners working area 320 began to break out of the camp, 80 of them died in the escape. The rest managed to escape.

130 prisoners refused to flee, all of them were shot the next day.

A massive hunt was organized for the fugitives, which lasted two weeks. We managed to find 170 people who were immediately shot. Subsequently, another 90 people were extradited to the Nazis by the local population. 53 participants of the uprising survived until the end of the war.

The leader of the uprising, Alexander Aronovich Pechersky, was able to get into Belarus, where, before reuniting with the regular army, he fought as a demolitionist in a partisan detachment. Then, as part of the assault battalion of the 1st Baltic Front, he fought to the west, reaching the rank of captain. The war ended for him in August 1944, when Pechersky became disabled as a result of his injury. He died in 1990 in Rostov-on-Don.

Soon after the uprising, the Sobibor camp was liquidated. After the demolition of all buildings, its territory was plowed up and sown with potatoes and cabbage.

A snapshot in the opening article: surviving children after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz by Soviet troops, Poland, January 27, 1945 / Photo: TASS

Whether the Nazis took the experience of handling prisoners from the Poles, or from someone else - the Poles, in any case, were ahead of them by a couple of decades.

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Poles destroy monuments today Soviet soldiers who saved their grandfathers from the Nazi gas chamber. In such a situation, it is unacceptable to keep silent about the Red Army soldiers and other immigrants from the territory of the former Russian Empire who perished in Polish death camps, says Oleg Nazarov, a member of the Zinoviev Club, Doctor of Historical Sciences.

In October 1920, the Soviet-Polish war ended. One of the consequences of the war unleashed by the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the mass death of Soviet prisoners of war and other immigrants from the territory of the former Russian Empire in Polish camps.
Cynical statements of the provocateur Schetyna

If the question of the perpetrators of the shooting of Poles in Katyn and Medny still causes heated debate among historians, and they are still far from over, then the Polish side is definitely guilty of the deaths of 60 to 83.5 thousand Red Army soldiers (according to various estimates).

Official Warsaw, being unable to refute the massive loss of life in the camps and torture chambers of Poland, firstly, tries in every possible way to minimize the number of victims, and secondly, shifts the responsibility for the tragedy from the Polish military and officials to objective circumstances. Although there was no hunger or crop failures in Poland in those years.

• At the same time, Warsaw reacts extremely nervously to any proposals to perpetuate the memory of the people who died in the camps of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The initiative of the Russian Military Historical Society (RVIO) to start raising funds for the opening of a monument to killed prisoners of war in Krakow angered Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna. He called it a provocation aimed at splitting Polish society.

The system of Polish camps emerged immediately after the emergence of the political map Europe of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth- long before the emergence of the Stalinist Gulag and the coming of the Nazis to power in Germany.

The "islands" of the Polish, figuratively speaking, the "GULAG" were the camps in Domba, Wadowice, Lancut, Strzhalkovo, Shchyperno, Tuchola, Brest-Litovsk, Pikulitsa, Aleksandruv-Kujawski, Kalisz, Plock, Lukov, Siedltsy, Zdunska-Wola, Dorog Petrkowo, Ostrow omrzyński and other places.

When Russian historians and publicists call the places of detention of captured Red Army soldiers "Polish death camps", this provokes protests in Warsaw.

To figure out who is right here, let's turn to the collection of documents " Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity in 1919 - 1922 "

• When looking at the documents, the word "inhuman" is striking. It is often found when describing the situation in which the Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews, Tatars, Latvians and other prisoners of war were.As stated in one of the documents, in a country that called itself a bastion of Christian civilization, the prisoners were treated "not as people of equal race, but as slaves. Beating of prisoners of war was practiced at every step."

• "The prisoners are in the casemate, they are enough raw; when asked about food, they answered that they receive everything that is due and have no complaints. But the hospital doctors unanimously stated that all the prisoners give the impression of being extremely hungry, since they rake and eat raw potatoes straight from the ground, collect in the trash heaps and eat all kinds of waste, such as bones, cabbage leaves, etc. "

• In total, in 1919 - 1921. in Polish death camps, this very death was met in agony, according to various estimates, from 60 to 83.5 thousand Red Army soldiers. And this, not counting those wounded, whom the Polish God-fearing warriors, having prayed, left to die in the field.

Concentration camps in Poland were 20 years before the German "death factories"

The hell of Polish concentration camps and captivity destroyed tens of thousands of our compatriots. Two decades before Khatyn and Auschwitz.
The military GULAG of the second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is more than a dozen concentration camps, prisons, marshalling yards, concentration points and various military facilities like the Brest Fortress (there were four camps here) and Modlin. Strzhalkovo (in the west of Poland between Poznan and Warsaw), Pikulice (in the south, not far from Przemysl), Domba (near Krakow), Wadowice (in the south of Poland), Tuchola, Shiptyurno, Bialystok, Baranovichi, Molodechino, Vilno, Pinsk, Bobruisk ...

And also - Grodno, Minsk, Pulawy, Powonzki, Lancut, Kovel, Stryi (in the western part of Ukraine), Shchelkovo ... Here tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers found a terrible, painful death, who ended up in Polish captivity after the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-1920 ...

The attitude of the Polish side towards them was very clearly expressed by the commandant of the camp in Brest, who declared in 1919: “You Bolsheviks wanted to take our lands away from us - well, I will give you the land. I have no right to kill you, but I will feed you so that you yourself will die. " Words did not diverge from deeds. According to the recollections of one of those who arrived from Polish captivity in March 1920, “We did not receive bread for 13 days, on day 14, it was at the end of August, we received about 4 pounds of bread, but very rotten, moldy ... The patients were not treated, and they died in dozens ... ".

From a report on the visit to the camps in Brest-Litovsk by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the presence of a doctor from the French military mission in October 1919: “A nauseating smell emanates from the guard rooms, as well as from the former stables in which prisoners of war are housed. The prisoners huddle chilly around an improvised stove, where several logs are burning - the only way to heat it. At night, hiding from the first cold weather, they are packed in tight rows in groups of 300 people in poorly lit and poorly ventilated barracks, on boards, without mattresses and blankets. The prisoners are mostly dressed in rags ... Complaints. They are the same and boil down to the following: we are starving, are we freezing, when are we released? However, it should be noted as an exception that confirms the rule: the Bolsheviks assured one of us that they would prefer their present fate to the fate of soldiers in the war. Conclusions. This summer due to overcrowding of premises that are not suitable for living; joint close living of healthy prisoners of war and infectious patients, many of whom died immediately; malnutrition, as evidenced by numerous cases of malnutrition; edema, hunger for three months in Brest - the camp in Brest-Litovsk was a real necropolis ... Two severe epidemics devastated this camp in August and September - dysentery and typhus. The consequences were aggravated by the close cohabitation of the sick and the healthy, lack of medical care, food and clothing ... The mortality record was set in early August, when 180 people died of dysentery in one day ... In the period from July 27 to September 4, t .e. in 34 days, 770 Ukrainian prisoners of war and internees died in the Brest camp. It should be recalled that the number of prisoners imprisoned in the fortress in August gradually reached, if there is no mistake, 10,000 people, and on October 10 it was 3,861 people. "

So the Soviets came to Poland in 1920

Later, "due to inappropriate conditions", the camp in the Brest Fortress was closed. However, in other camps, the situation was often even worse. In particular, Professor Thorvald Madsen, a member of the League of Nations commission, who visited the "usual" Polish camp for Red Army prisoners in Wadowice at the end of November 1920, called it "one of the most terrible things that he has seen in life." In this camp, as former prisoner Kozerovsky recalled, the prisoners were "beaten around the clock." An eyewitness recalls: “Long rods were always at the ready ... in my presence they spotted two soldiers caught in a neighboring village ... The suspicious were often transferred to a special penalty barrack, and almost no one left there. They were fed "once a day with a decoction of dried vegetables and a kilogram of bread for 8 people." There were cases when the starving Red Army soldiers ate carrion, garbage and even hay. In the Shchelkovo camp, “prisoners of war are forced to carry their own feces instead of horses. They carry both plows and harrows ”AVP RF.F.0384.Op.8.D.18921.P.210.L.54-59.

Conditions were not the best in transit and in prisons, where political prisoners were also kept. Major Khlebovsky, the head of the distribution station in Puławy, described the situation of the Red Army soldiers in a very eloquent manner: “intolerable prisoners in order to spread riots and enzymes in Poland” constantly eat potato peelings from a manure heap. In just 6 months of the autumn-winter period of 1920-1921, 900 out of 1100 prisoners of war died in Pulawy. the assembly station for prisoners - it was a real torture chamber. Nobody cared about these unfortunates, so it’s not surprising that a person unwashed, undressed, poorly fed and placed in inappropriate conditions as a result of infection was doomed only to death. ” In Bobruisk "there were up to 1600 prisoners of the Red Army (as well as the Belarusian peasants of the Bobruisk district sentenced to death. - Auth.), Most of whom are completely naked" ...

According to the testimony of the Soviet writer, an employee of the Cheka in the 1920s, Nikolai Ravich, who was arrested by the Poles in 1919 and who was in the prisons of Minsk, Grodno, Powonzki and the Domba camp, the cells were so crowded that only the lucky ones slept on bunks. In the Minsk prison, lice were everywhere in the cell, the cold was especially felt, since outerwear was selected. “In addition to an eight piece of bread (50 grams), in the morning and in the evening, hot water, at 12 o'clock the same water, seasoned with flour and salt. " The transit point in Powazki "was filled with Russian prisoners of war, most of whom were crippled with artificial arms and legs." The German revolution, writes Ravich, freed them from the camps and they spontaneously went through Poland to their homeland. But in Poland they were detained by special barriers and driven into camps, and some to forced labor. "

And such a "reception" awaited them in captivity ...

Most of the Polish concentration camps were built in a very short period of time, some were built by the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. For long-term detention of prisoners, they were completely unsuitable. For example, the camp in Domba near Krakow was a whole city with numerous streets and squares. Instead of houses - barracks with loose wooden walls, many without wooden floors. All of this is surrounded by rows of barbed wire. Conditions of detention of prisoners in winter: “most of them are barefoot without shoes ... There are almost no beds and bunks ... There is no straw or hay at all. Sleep on the ground or planks. There are very few blankets. " From a letter from the chairman of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation at the peace talks with Poland, Adolf Ioffe, to the chairman of the Polish delegation, Jan Dombsky, dated January 9, 1921: "In Domba, most of the prisoners are barefoot, and in the camp at the headquarters of the 18th division, most of them have no clothes."

The situation in Bialystok is evidenced by letters from the military doctor and the head of the sanitary department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, General Zdzislav Gordynski-Yukhnovich, preserved in the Central Military Archives. In December 1919, in despair, he reported to the chief physician of the Polish Army about his visit to the marshalling yard in Bialystok: “I visited the prisoner camp in Bialystok and now, under the first impression, I dared to turn to Mr. General as the chief doctor of the Polish troops with a description of that terrible picture , which appears before the eyes of everyone who ends up in the camp ... Again, the same criminal neglect of their duties of all the bodies operating in the camp brought shame on our name, on the Polish army, just as it happened in Brest-Litovsk ... the camp is filled with unimaginable dirt and disorder. At the door of the barracks, heaps of human waste are trampled and spread throughout the camp by thousands of feet. Patients are so weak that they are unable to walk to latrines. Those, in turn, are in such a state that it is impossible to approach the seats, since the entire floor is covered with a thick layer of human excrement. The barracks are overcrowded, the healthy are full of the sick. According to my data, among the 1,400 prisoners there are no healthy ones at all. Covered in rags, they huddle together, trying to keep warm. The stench reigns from patients with dysentery and gangrene, legs swollen from hunger. Two especially gravely ill were lying in their own feces that flowed from their torn pants. They did not have the strength to move to a dry place. What a terrible picture. " Former inmate of the Polish camp in Bialystok, Andrei Matskevich, later recalled that a lucky prisoner received a day "a small portion of black bread weighing about 1/2 pound (200 grams), one shard of soup that looked more like slop, and boiling water."

The concentration camp at Strzalkowo, located between Poznan and Warsaw, was considered the worst. It appeared at the turn of 1914-1915 as a German prisoner camp from the fronts of the First World War on the border between Germany and The Russian empire- near the road connecting two border areas - Stshalkovo on the Prussian side and Sluptsy on the Russian side. After the end of World War I, it was decided to liquidate the camp. However, instead, it passed from the Germans to the Poles and began to be used as a concentration camp for Red Army prisoners of war. As soon as the camp became Polish (from May 12, 1919), the death rate of prisoners of war in it increased more than 16 times during the year. On July 11, 1919, by order of the Ministry of Defense of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it was named “Prisoner of War Camp No. 1 near Strzałkowo” (Obóz Jeniecki Nr 1 pod Strzałkowem).

One could only dream of such a dinner ...

After the conclusion of the Riga Peace Treaty, the concentration camp in Stshalkovo was also used to keep internees, including Russian White Guards, servicemen of the so-called Ukrainian People's Army and the formations of the Belarusian "batka" ataman Stanislav Bulak-Bulakhovich. What happened in this concentration camp is evidenced not only by the documents, but also by the publications of the press of that time.

In particular, the “New Courier” dated January 4, 1921, in a sensational article then described the shocking fate of a detachment of several hundred Latvians. These soldiers, led by their commanders, deserted from the Red Army and went over to the Polish side in order to return to their homeland in this way. They were very welcomed by the Polish military. Before they were sent to the camp, they were given a certificate that they voluntarily went over to the side of the Poles. The robbery began on the way to the camp. All clothes were removed from the Latvians, except for underwear. And those who managed to hide at least part of their belongings were taken away in Stshalkovo. They were left in rags, without shoes. But this is a trifle compared to the systematic bullying they were subjected to in the concentration camp. It all started with 50 blows with barbed wire lashes, while the Latvians were told that they were Jewish mercenaries and would not leave the camp alive. More than 10 people have died from blood poisoning. After that, the prisoners were left without food for three days, forbidding to go out for water on pain of death. Two were shot without any reason. Most likely, the threat would have been carried out, and not one of the Latvians would have left the camp alive if its chiefs - Captain Wagner and Lieutenant Malinovsky - had not been arrested and brought to justice by the commission of inquiry.

In the course of the investigation, among other things, it turned out that walking around the camp, accompanied by corporals with whips made of wire, and beating prisoners were Malinovsky's favorite pastimes. If the beaten groaned or asked for mercy, he was shot. For the murder of a prisoner, Malinowski encouraged the sentries with 3 cigarettes and 25 Polish stamps. The Polish authorities tried to quickly hush up the scandal and the case.

In November 1919, the military authorities reported to the Polish Sejm Commission that the largest Polish prisoner camp No. 1 in Strzalkow was "very well equipped." In reality, at that time the roofs of the camp barracks were full of holes, and bunks were not equipped in them. Probably, it was believed that this was good for the Bolsheviks. Stefania Sempolovska, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross, wrote from the camp: "The communist barrack was so overcrowded that the crushed prisoners were unable to lie down and stood propping up one another." The situation in Strzhalkov did not change in October 1920: “Clothes and footwear are very scarce, most of them walk barefoot ... There are no beds - they sleep on straw ... Due to lack of food, prisoners who are busy peeling potatoes secretly eat it raw”.

The report of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation states: “Keeping the prisoners in their underwear, the Poles treated them not as people of equal race, but as slaves. Beating of war / prisoners was practiced at every step ... ". Eyewitnesses say: “Every day the arrested are driven out into the street and instead of walking they are chased at a run, ordered to fall into the mud ... If the prisoner refuses to fall or, having fallen, cannot get up, exhausted, he is beaten with rifle butts”.

Poles' victory and their inspirer Józef Piłsudski

As the largest of the camps, Stshalkovo was designed for 25 thousand prisoners. In reality, the number of prisoners sometimes exceeded 37 thousand. The numbers changed rapidly as people died like flies in the cold. Russian and Polish compilers of the collection “Red Army Men in Polish Captivity in 1919-1922. Sat. documents and materials "claim that" in Stshalkovo in 1919-1920. died about 8 thousand prisoners. " At the same time, the committee of the RCP (b), operating clandestinely in the Stshalkovo camp, in its report to the Soviet Commission on Prisoners of War Affairs in April 1921 stated that: “during the last epidemic of typhus and dysentery, 300 people died each. per day ... the serial number of the list of the buried exceeded 12 thousand ... ". Such a statement about the huge mortality rate in Stshalkovo is not the only one.

Despite claims by Polish historians that the situation in Polish concentration camps had improved once again by 1921, documents show otherwise. In the minutes of the meeting of the Mixed (Polish-Russian-Ukrainian) Commission on Repatriation of July 28, 1921, it was noted that in Strzhalkov “the command, as it were, in revenge after the first arrival of our delegation, sharply intensified their repressions ... for no reason ... the beatings took the form of an epidemic. " In November 1921, when, according to Polish historians, “the situation in the camps has radically improved,” RUD officials described the living quarters for prisoners in Strzalkow as follows: “Most of the barracks are underground, damp, dark, cold, with broken glass, broken floors and thin roof. The holes in the roofs allow you to freely admire the starry sky. Those placed in them get wet and chilly day and night ... There is no lighting. "

The fact that the Polish authorities did not consider "Russian Bolshevik prisoners" to be people is also evidenced by the following fact: in the largest Polish prisoner of war camp in Strzalkowo, for 3 (three) years they could not resolve the issue of sending prisoners of war of their natural needs at night. There were no toilets in the barracks, and the camp administration, on pain of execution, forbade people to leave the barracks after 6 pm. Therefore, the prisoners "were forced to send their natural needs to the bowlers, from which they then have to eat."

The second largest Polish concentration camp, located in the area of ​​the city of Tuchola (Tucheln, Tuchola, Tuchola, Tuchol, Tuchola, Tuchol), can rightfully challenge Strzhalkovo's title of the most terrible. Or, at least, the most disastrous for people. It was built by the Germans during the First World War in 1914. Initially, the camp contained mainly Russians, later they were joined by Romanian, French, English and Italian prisoners of war. Since 1919, the camp has been used by the Poles to concentrate soldiers and commanders of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian formations and civilians who sympathized with the Soviet regime. In December 1920, the representative of the Polish Red Cross Society Natalia Kreits-Velezhinska wrote: “The camp in Tucholi is the so-called. dugouts, which are entered by steps going down. On both sides there are bunks on which the prisoners sleep. Senniki, straw, blankets are missing. No heat due to irregular fuel supply. Lack of linen, clothes in all departments. The most tragic conditions for the new arrivals, who are transported in unheated wagons, without appropriate clothing, cold, hungry and tired ... After such a journey, many of them are sent to the hospital, and the weaker die. "

From a letter from a White Guard: “... The internees are housed in barracks and dugouts. Those are absolutely not adapted for winter time. The barracks are made of thick corrugated iron, from the inside covered with thin wooden panels, which burst in many places. The door and partly the windows are very poorly fitted, they are blowing desperately ... The internees are not even given bedding under the pretext of "malnutrition of the horses." We think with extreme anxiety about the coming winter ”(Letter from Tuchola, October 22, 1921).

The camp in Tucholi then and now ...

The State Archives of the Russian Federation contains the memoirs of Lieutenant Kalikin, who passed through the concentration camp in Tucholi. The lieutenant, who was lucky enough to survive, writes: “Even in Thorn, all sorts of horrors were told about Tuchol, but the reality surpassed all expectations. Imagine a sandy plain near the river, fenced off by two rows of barbed wire, inside which dilapidated dugouts are located in regular rows. Nowhere were there trees, not a blade of grass, just sand. Not far from the main gate are corrugated iron barracks. When you walk past them at night, there is a strange, soul-crushing sound, as if someone is quietly sobbing. During the day from the sun in the barracks it is unbearably hot, at night it is cold ... When our army was interned, the Polish minister Sapieha was asked what would become of it. “It will be dealt with as the honor and dignity of Poland requires,” he replied proudly. Was Tuchol really necessary for this "honor"? So, we arrived in Tuchol and settled in the iron barracks. Cold weather set in, and the stoves were not heated for lack of firewood. A year later, 50% of the women who were here and 40% of the men fell ill, mainly with tuberculosis. Many of them have died. Most of my friends died, and there were also those who hanged themselves.

The Red Army soldier Valuev said that at the end of August 1920 he was with other prisoners: “We were sent to the Tucholi camp. There lay the wounded, not bandaged for whole weeks, worms wound up on their wounds. Many of the wounded died, 30-35 people were buried every day. The wounded lay in cold barracks without food or medicine. "

In frosty November 1920, the Tucholsk hospital resembled a death conveyor: “Hospital buildings are huge barracks, in most cases iron, like hangars. All buildings are dilapidated and damaged, in the walls there are holes through which you can stick your hand ... The cold is usually terrible. They say that during the night frosts, the walls are covered with ice. The sick lie on awful beds ... All are on dirty mattresses without bedding, only 1/4 have some blankets, all are covered with dirty rags or a blanket made of paper. "

Stefania Sempolovskaya, commissioner of the Russian Red Cross Society, on the November (1920) inspection in Tuchol: “The patients are lying on terrible beds, without bed linen, only a fourth of them have blankets. Injured people complain of the terrible cold, which not only interferes with wound healing, but, according to doctors, increases pain during healing. Medical personnel complain about the complete lack of dressings, cotton wool and bandages. I saw bandages drying in the forest. In the camp, typhus and dysentery are widespread, which has spread to the prisoners working in the area. The number of patients in the camp is so great that one of the barracks in the communist ward has been turned into an infirmary. On November 16, more than seventy patients lay there. Much of it is on earth. "

The mortality rate from wounds, diseases and frostbite was such that, according to the conclusion of the American representatives, after 5-6 months there should have been no one left in the camp. Stefania Sempolovskaya, authorized by the Russian Red Cross Society, estimated the mortality rate among prisoners in a similar way: the whole camp would have died out in 4-5 months. "

Tombstones of Soviet prisoners of war in mud and oblivion

The Russian émigré press, published in Poland and, to put it mildly, not sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, directly wrote about Tucholi as a "death camp" for the Red Army. In particular, the émigré newspaper Svoboda, published in Warsaw and completely dependent on the Polish authorities, reported in October 1921 that at that time 22 thousand people had died in the Tuchola camp. A similar figure of the dead is given by the head of the II Department of the General Staff of the Polish Army (military intelligence and counterintelligence), Lieutenant Colonel Ignatsy Matuszewski.

In his report dated February 1, 1922 to the cabinet of the Polish War Minister to General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, Ignacy Matuszewski asserts: “From the materials at the disposal of the II Department ... other camps, both for communists and for interned whites. These escapes are caused by the conditions in which the communists and internees find themselves (lack of fuel, linen and clothing, poor food, and long waiting times to leave for Russia). Particularly famous was the camp in Tucholi, which the internees call the "death camp" (about 22,000 Red Army prisoners died in this camp. "

Analyzing the content of the document signed by Matuszewski, Russian researchers, first of all, emphasize that it “was not a personal message of a private person, but an official response to the order of the Minister of War of Poland No. 65/22 of January 12, 1922 with a categorical instruction to the head of the II Department of the General Staff : "... to provide an explanation of the conditions under which the escape of 33 communists from the camp of the Stshalkovo prisoners took place and who is responsible for this." Such orders are usually given to special services when it is required to establish with absolute certainty the true picture of what happened. It was not by chance that the minister instructed Matushevsky to investigate the circumstances of the escape of the communists from Stshalkovo. The head of the II Department of the General Staff in 1920-1923 was the most informed person in Poland about the real state of affairs in the prisoner of war and internment camps. The officers of the II department subordinate to him were engaged not only in "sorting" the arriving prisoners of war, but also in control of the political situation in the camps. The real state of affairs in the camp in Tucholi Matushevsky was simply obliged to know because of his official position. Therefore, there can be no doubt that long before writing his letter of February 1, 1922, Matushevsky had comprehensive, documented and verified information about the death of 22 thousand Red Army prisoners in the Tucholi camp. Otherwise, you have to be a political suicide to, on your own initiative, inform the country's leadership of unverified facts of this level, especially on the problem at the center of a high-profile diplomatic scandal! After all, at that time in Poland the passions had not yet cooled down after the famous note of the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR Georgy Chicherin of September 9, 1921, in which he, in the harshest terms, accused the Polish authorities of the deaths of 60,000 Soviet prisoners of war.

In addition to Matushevsky's report, the reports of the Russian émigré press about the huge number of deaths in Tucholi are actually confirmed by the reports of hospital services. In particular, a relatively “clear picture of the deaths of Russian prisoners of war can be observed in the“ death camp ”in Tucholi, which had official statistics, but even then only during certain periods of the prisoners' stay there. According to this, although not complete statistics, since the opening of the hospital in February 1921 (and the winter months of 1920-1921 were the most difficult for prisoners of war) and until May 11 of the same year, there were 6491 epidemic diseases in the camp, non-epidemic diseases - 17294. In total - 23785 diseases. The number of prisoners in the camp during this period did not exceed 10-11 thousand, so more than half of the prisoners who were there had had epidemic diseases, and each of the prisoners had to be ill at least twice in 3 months. Officially, during this period, 2561 deaths were registered, i.e. in 3 months at least 25% of the total number of prisoners of war died. "

Modern monument on the site of a Polish concentration camp for the Soviet

The mortality rate in Tucholi in the worst months of 1920/1921 (November, December, January and February), according to Russian researchers, “one can only guess. It must be assumed that it was in no way less than 2,000 people a month. " When assessing the mortality rate in Tuchola, it should also be remembered that the representative of the Polish Red Cross Society Kreutz-Velezynska, in her report on her visit to the camp in December 1920, noted that: , hungry and tired ... After such a journey, many of them are sent to the hospital, and the weaker die. " The mortality rate in such echelons reached 40%. Those who died in echelons, although they were considered sent to the camp and were buried in the camp burial grounds, were not officially recorded anywhere in the general camp statistics. Their number could be taken into account only by officers of the II Department, who supervised the reception and "sorting" of prisoners of war. Also, apparently, the mortality rate of newly arrived prisoners of war who died in quarantine was not reflected in the final camp reporting.

In this context, not only the above-cited testimony of the head of the 2nd department of the Polish General Staff, Matuszewski, about deaths in a concentration camp, but also the recollections of local residents of Tuchola, is of particular interest. According to them, back in the 1930s, there were many areas "on which the earth collapsed under our feet, and human remains protruded from it" ...

... The military GULAG of the second Rzecz Pospolita existed for a relatively short time - about three years. But during this time he managed to destroy tens of thousands of human lives. The Polish side still admits the death of "16-18 thousand". According to Russian and Ukrainian scientists, researchers and politicians, in reality this figure could be about five times higher ...

Nikolay MALISHEVSKY, "Eye of the Planet"

“To know in order to remember. Remember so as not to repeat "- this capacious phrase perfectly reflects the meaning of this article, the meaning of your reading it. Each of us needs to remember the brutal cruelty that a person is capable of, when an idea stands above human life.

Creation of concentration camps

In the history of the creation of concentration camps, we can distinguish the following main periods:

1. Before 1934... This phase marked the beginning of Nazi rule, when the need arose to isolate and repress opponents of the Nazi regime. The camps were more like prisons. They immediately became the place where the law did not work, and no organization had the opportunity to get inside. So, for example, in the event of a fire, fire brigades were not allowed to enter the territory.
2. 1936 —1938 During this period, new camps were built: the previous ones were no longer enough, because now not only political prisoners got there, but also citizens declared a disgrace of the German nation (parasites and homeless people). Then the number of prisoners increased sharply due to the outbreak of the war and the first exile of the Jews, which took place after Kristallnacht (November 1938).
3. 1939-1942 Prisoners from the occupied countries - France, Poland, Belgium - were sent to the camps.
4. 1942 —1945 During this period, the persecution of Jews intensified, and Soviet prisoners of war were also in the hands of the Nazis. In this way,

The Nazis needed new places for the organized murder of millions of people.

Victims of concentration camps

1. Representatives of the "lower races"- Jews and Gypsies, who were kept in separate barracks and were subjected to complete physical extermination, they were starved to death and sent to the most exhausting jobs.

2. Political opponents of the regime... Among them were members of anti-Nazi parties, primarily communists, social democrats, members of the Nazi party accused of serious crimes, listeners of foreign radio, members of various religious sects.

3. Criminals whom the administration often used as overseers for political prisoners.

4. "Unreliable elements", which were considered homosexuals, alarmists, etc.

Decals

The duty of each prisoner was to wear a distinctive sign on his clothes, a serial number and a triangle on his chest and right knee. Political prisoners were marked with a red triangle, criminals - green, “unreliable” - black, homosexuals - pink, gypsies - brown, Jews - yellow, plus they had to wear the six-pointed Star of David. Defiler Jews (those who violated racial laws) wore a black border around a green or yellow triangle.

Foreigners were marked with a sewn capital beech name of the country: for the French - the letter "F", for the Poles - "P", etc.

The letter "A" (from the word "Arbeit") was sewn for violators of labor discipline, the letter "K" (from the word "Kriegsverbrecher") - for war criminals, the word "Blid" (fool) - for those lagging behind in mental development. A red and white target on the chest and back was required for prisoners who participated in the escape.

Buchenwald

Buchenwald is considered one of the largest concentration camps built in Germany. On July 15, 1937, the first prisoners arrived here - Jews, Gypsies, criminals, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, opponents of the Nazi regime. For moral suppression, a phrase was engraved on the gate, increasing the cruelty of the situation in which the prisoners found themselves: "To each his own."

In the period 1937-1945. more than 250 thousand people were imprisoned in Buchenwald. In the main part of the concentration camp and in 136 branches, the prisoners were mercilessly exploited. 56 thousand people died: they were killed, died of hunger, typhus, dysentery, died in the course of medical experiments (to test new vaccines, prisoners were infected with typhus and tuberculosis, poisoned with poison). In 1941. Soviet prisoners of war get here. In the entire history of Buchenwald's existence, 8 thousand prisoners from the USSR were shot.

Despite the harsh conditions, the prisoners managed to create several resistance groups, the strongest of which was a group of Soviet prisoners of war. The prisoners, risking their lives every day, had been preparing an uprising for several years. The capture was supposed to happen at the time of the arrival of the Soviet or American army. However, they had to do it earlier. In 1945. Nazi leaders, who were already aware of the sad outcome of the war for them, proceeded to the complete extermination of prisoners in order to hide the evidence of such a large-scale crime. April 11, 1945 the prisoners started an armed uprising. After 30 minutes, two hundred SS men were captured, by the end of the day Buchenwald was completely under the control of the rebels! Only two days later, American troops arrived there. More than 20 thousand prisoners were released, including 900 children.

In 1958. a memorial complex was opened on the territory of Buchenwald.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz is a complex of German concentration camps and death camps. In the period 1941-1945. 1 million 400 thousand people were killed there. (According to some historians, this figure reaches 4 million). Of these, 15 thousand are Soviet prisoners of war. Unable to install exact amount victims, since many documents were deliberately destroyed.

Even before arriving at this center of violence and cruelty, people were subjected to physical and mental oppression. They were taken to the concentration camp by trains, where the presence of toilets was not provided, and there were no stops. The unbearable smell could be heard even away from the train. People were not given food or water - no wonder that thousands of people died on the way. The survivors still had to experience all the horrors of being in a real human hell: separation from loved ones, torture, brutal medical experiments and, of course, death.

Upon arrival, the prisoners were divided into two groups: those who were immediately destroyed (children, the disabled, the elderly, the wounded) and those who could be exploited before the destruction. The latter were kept in unbearable conditions: they slept next to rodents, lice, bedbugs on the straw that lay on the concrete floor (later it was replaced by thin mattresses with straw, later three-tiered bunks were invented). In a space that could accommodate 40 people, 200 people lived. The prisoners had almost no access to water, they washed very rarely, which is why various infectious diseases flourished in the barracks. The prisoners' diet was more than meager: a slice of bread, some acorns, a glass of water for breakfast, beetroot and potato peel soup for lunch, a slice of bread for dinner. In order not to die, the captives had to eat grass and roots, which often entailed poisoning and death.

The morning began with roll calls, where the prisoners had to stand for several hours and hope that they would not be recognized as unfit for work, because in this case they were immediately destroyed. Then they went to places of exhausting work - buildings, factories and factories, to Agriculture(people were harnessed instead of bulls and horses). The efficiency of their work was rather low: a hungry, exhausted person is simply not able to do the job efficiently. Therefore, the prisoner worked for 3-4 months, after which he was sent to a crematorium or a gas chamber, and a new one came in his place. Thus, a continuous pipeline of labor was established, which fully satisfied the interests of the Nazis. Only the phrase "Arbit macht frei" carved on the gate (with German "work leads to freedom") was completely meaningless - work here led only to inevitable death.

But this fate was not the most terrible. Those who fell under the knife of so-called doctors who practiced chilling medical experiments had the hardest time for everyone. It should be noted that the operations were carried out without pain relievers, the wounds were not treated, which, of course, led to painful death. The value of a human life - child's or adult's - was zero, meaningless and grievous suffering was not taken into account. Studied the effects of chemicals on the human body. The latest pharmaceuticals have been tested. Prisoners were artificially infected with malaria, hepatitis and others dangerous diseases as an experiment. Castration of men and sterilization of women, especially young women, were often carried out, accompanied by the removal of the ovaries (mainly Jewish and gypsy women fell under these terrible experiments). Such painful operations were carried out to realize one of the main goals of the Nazis - to stop childbearing among the peoples objectionable to the Nazi regime.

The key figures in the course of this abuse of the human body were the leaders of the experiments Karl Kauberg and Joseph Mengel.The last one, from the memories of the survivors, was a polite and courteous man, which further terrified the prisoners.

Karl Kauberg

Joseph Mengel

In the book of Christina Zhivulskaya, a former prisoner of the camp, a case is mentioned when a woman sentenced to death does not go, but runs into the gas chamber - the thought of poisonous gas terrified her much less than the prospect of being an experimental subject of Nazi doctors.

Silaspils

"The child's cry was choked
And melted away like an echo
Woe with mournful silence
Floats over the Earth
Over you and me.

On a granite slab
Put your candy ...
He was like you were a child
Like you, he loved them,
Salaspils killed him. "

An excerpt from the song "Silaspils"

They say there are no children in war. The Silaspils camp located on the outskirts of Riga is a confirmation of this sad saying. The mass destruction of not only adults, but also children, their use as a donor, torture - something that you and I cannot imagine has become a harsh reality within the walls of this truly terrible place.

After getting into "Silaspils" the babies were almost immediately separated from their mothers. These were excruciating scenes, full of despair and pain of distraught mothers - it was obvious to everyone that they were seeing each other for the last time. The women clung tightly to their children, shouted, fought, some turned gray in front of their eyes ...

Then what is happening is difficult to describe in words - so mercilessly dealt with both adults and children. They were beaten, starved, tortured, shot, poisoned, killed in gas chambers,

performed surgical operations without anesthesia, injected hazardous substances. Blood was pumped out of children's veins, then used for wounded SS officers. The number of donor children reaches 12 thousand. It should be noted that 1.5 liters of blood were taken from the child every day - it is not surprising that the death of a small donor came pretty soon.

To save ammunition, the camp charter ordered the destruction of children with rifle butts. Children under 6 years old were placed in a separate barrack, infected with measles, and then they did what is absolutely impossible with this disease - they bathed. The disease progressed, after which they died within two to three days. So, in one year, about 3 thousand people were killed.

Sometimes the children were sold to the owners of the farms for the price of 9-15 marks. The weakest, not suitable for labor use, and as a result, not bought, were simply shot.

The children were kept in terrible conditions. From the memoirs of a boy who miraculously survived: “Children in the orphanage went to bed very early, hoping to forget themselves in their sleep from eternal hunger and disease. There were so many lice and fleas that even now, remembering those horrors, the hair stands on end. Every evening I undressed my sister and took off handfuls of these creatures, but there were a lot of them in all the seams and stitches of the clothes. "

Now on that place, soaked in children's blood, there is a memorial complex that reminded us of those terrible events.

Dachau

Camp Dachau - one of the first concentration camps in Germany - was founded in 1933. in Dachau, located near Munich. Dachau hostages were more than 250 thousand. people, tortured or killed about 70 thousand. people (12 thousand were Soviet citizens). It should be noted that this camp mostly needed healthy and young victims aged 20-45, but there were other age groups as well.

Initially, the camp was created to "re-educate" the opposition of the Nazi regime. Soon it turned into a platform for working off punishments, cruel experiments, protected from prying eyes. One of the directions of medical experiments was the creation of a superwarrior (this was Hitler's idea long before the outbreak of World War II), therefore Special attention was devoted to researching the capabilities of the human body.

It is difficult to imagine what kind of torment the prisoners of Dachau had to go through when they fell into the hands of K. Schilling and Z. Rascher. The first infected with malaria and then carried out treatment, mostly unsuccessful, leading to lethal outcome... Freezing people was another passion of his. They were left in the cold for tens of hours, doused cold water or immersed in it. Naturally, all this was carried out without anesthesia - it was considered too expensive. True, sometimes narcotic drugs were still used as a pain reliever. However, this was not done out of humane considerations, but in order to preserve the secrecy of the process: the subjects shouted too loudly.

Also, unthinkable experiments were carried out to "warm" frozen bodies through intercourse using captured women.

Dr. Ruscher specialized in simulating extreme conditions and establishing human endurance. He put the prisoners in a pressure chamber, changed the pressure and loads. As a rule, the unfortunate died from torture, the survivors went crazy.

In addition, the situation of a person entering the sea was modeled. The people were placed in a special cell and given only salt water for 5 days.

So that you can understand how cynical the attitude of the doctors towards the prisoners in the Dachau camp was, try to imagine the following. The skin was removed from the corpses to make saddles and items of clothing from them. The corpses were boiled, skeletons were removed and used as models, visual aids. For such a mockery of human bodies, whole blocks with the necessary settings were created.

Dachau was liberated by American troops in April 1945.

Majdanek

This death camp is located near the Polish city of Lublin. Its prisoners were mainly prisoners of war transferred from other concentration camps.

According to official statistics, the victims of Majdanek were 1 million 500 thousand prisoners, of whom 300 thousand died. However, at present, the exposition of the State Museum of Majdanek provides completely different data: the number of prisoners has decreased to 150 thousand, killed - 80 thousand.

The mass extermination of people in the camp began in the fall of 1942. At the same time, a brutal action was carried out

with the cynical name "Erntefes", which is translated from him. means "harvest festival". All the Jews were herded into one place and ordered to lie along the ditch according to the tile principle, then the SS men shot the unfortunates with a shot in the back of the head. After the layer of people was killed, the SS men again forced the Jews into the ditch and fired - and so on until the three-meter trench was filled with corpses. The massacre was accompanied by loud music, which was quite in the spirit of the SS.

From the story of a former concentration camp prisoner who, while still a boy, fell into the walls of Majdanek:

“The Germans loved both cleanliness and order. Daisies bloomed around the camp. And in exactly the same way - neat and tidy - the Germans destroyed us. "

"When we were fed in our barracks, they gave us rotten gruel - all the food bowls were covered with a thick layer of human saliva - the children licked these bowls several times."

“The Germans began to take children away from the Jews, supposedly in a bathhouse. But parents are hard to deceive. They knew that children were taken in order to burn them alive in the crematorium. There was a loud shouting and crying over the camp. Shots were heard, dogs barking. Until now, my heart is breaking from our complete helplessness and defenselessness. Many Jewish mothers were doused with water - they fainted. The Germans took the children away, and over the camp then for a long time there was a heavy smell of burnt hair, bones, human body. The children were burned alive. "

« During the day, grandfather Petya was at work. They worked with a pickaxe - they mined limestone. In the evening they were driven. We saw how they were lined up and forced to lie down on the table in turn. They were beaten with sticks. Then they were forced to run a long distance. Those who fell during the run were shot by the Nazis on the spot. And so every evening. For what they were beaten, what they were guilty of, we did not know. "

“And the day of parting has come. They drove the column with my mother. Here mom is already at the checkpoint, now - on the highway behind the checkpoint - mom leaves. I see everything - she waves me her yellow handkerchief. My heart was breaking. I shouted at the whole Majdanek camp. To somehow calm me down, a young German woman in military uniform took me in her arms and began to calm me down. I kept screaming. I beat her with my little, childish feet. The German woman pitied me and only stroked my head with her hand. Of course, the heart of any woman, be it a German, will tremble. "

Treblinka

Treblinka - two concentration camps (Treblinka 1 - "labor camp" and Treblinka 2 - "death camp") in occupied Poland, near the village of Treblinka. In the first camp, about 10 thousand were killed. people, in the second - about 800 thousand. 99.5% of those killed were Jews from Poland, about 2 thousand were Roma.

From the memoirs of Samuel Willenberg:

“In the pit there were the remains of bodies that had not yet been devoured by the fire lit under them. Remains of men, women and small children. This picture just paralyzed me. I heard burning hair and bones breaking. There was acrid smoke in my nose, tears welling up in my eyes ... How to describe and express this? There are things that I remember, but they cannot be expressed in words. "

“Once I came across something familiar. Children's brown coat with bright green trim on the sleeves. Exactly with such a green cloth, my mother used to put on the coat of my younger sister Tamara. It was hard to make a mistake. Nearby was a skirt with flowers - my older sister Itta's. They both disappeared somewhere in Czestochowa before they took us away. I kept hoping that they were saved. Then I realized that no. I remember how I held these things and pursed my lips in helplessness and hatred. Then I wiped my face. It was dry. I couldn't even cry anymore. "

Treblinka II was liquidated in the summer of 1943, Treblinka I in July 1944 when the Soviet troops approached.

Ravensbrück

Camp "Ravensbrück" was founded near the city of Fürstenberg in 1938. 132 thousand women and several hundred children of more than 40 nationalities passed through the death camp. 93 thousand people were killed.

Monument to women and children who died in the Ravensbrück camp

This is what one of the prisoners of Blanca Rothschild recalls about her arrival at the camp.

Auschwitz is a city that has become a symbol of the ruthlessness of the fascist regime; the city where one of the most meaningless dramas in human history unfolded; a city where hundreds of thousands of people were brutally murdered. In the concentration camps located here, the Nazis built the most terrible conveyors of death, destroying up to 20 thousand people every day ... Today I begin to talk about one of the most terrible places on earth - the concentration camps in Auschwitz. I warn you, the photos and descriptions left below can leave a heavy mark on the soul. Although personally I believe that everyone should touch and let these terrible pages of our history pass through themselves ...

There will be very few comments on the photographs in this post - this is a too delicate topic, to express my point of view on which, it seems to me, I have no moral right. I honestly admit that visiting the museum left a heavy scar on my heart, which still does not want to heal ...

Most of the photo comments are based on the travel guide (

The Auschwitz concentration camp was the largest Nazi concentration camp for Poles and prisoners of other nationalities, whom Nazism condemned to isolation and gradual destruction by hunger, hard work, experiments, as well as immediate death as a result of mass and individual executions. Since 1942, the camp has become the largest extermination center for European Jews. Most of the Jews deported to Auschwitz perished in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival, without registration or camps. That is why it is very difficult to establish the exact number of those killed - historians agree on a figure of about one and a half million people.

But back to the history of the camp. In 1939, Auschwitz and its surroundings became part of the Third Reich. The city was renamed Auschwitz. In the same year, the fascist command had the idea of ​​creating a concentration camp. The empty pre-war barracks near Auschwitz were chosen as the site for the creation of the first camp. The concentration camp is named Auschwitz-I.

The education order is dated April 1940. Rudolf Goess is appointed commandant of the camp. On June 14, 1940, the Gestapo sent the first prisoners to Auschwitz I - 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnow.

A gate with a cynical inscription “Arbeit macht frei” (Labor makes free) leads to the camp, through which prisoners went to work every day and returned ten hours later. In a small square next to the kitchen, the camp band played marches that were supposed to speed up the movement of the prisoners and make it easier for the Nazis to recount them.

At the time of its foundation, the camp consisted of 20 buildings: 14 one-story and 6 two-story. In 1941-1942, by the forces of prisoners, one floor was added on all one-story buildings and eight more buildings were built. The total number of multi-storey buildings in the camp was 28 (except for the kitchen and utility buildings). The average number of prisoners ranged from 13-16 thousand prisoners, and in 1942 it reached over 20 thousand. The prisoners were placed in blocks, using for this purpose also attics and basements.

Along with the increase in the number of prisoners, the territorial volume of the camp increased, which gradually turned into a huge plant for the extermination of people. Auschwitz I became the base for a whole network of new camps.

In October 1941, after there was no more room for the newly staying prisoners in Auschwitz I, work began on the construction of another concentration camp, called Auschwitz II (also known as Bireknau and Brzezinka). This camp was destined to become the largest in the Nazi death camp system. I AM .

In 1943, another camp was built in Monowitz near Auschwitz on the premises of the IG Ferbenindustrie plant - Auschwitz III. In addition, in 1942-1944, about 40 branches of the Auschwitz camp were built, which were subordinate to Auschwitz III and were located mainly near metallurgical plants, mines and factories using prisoners as cheap labor.

Clothes and all personal items were taken from the prisoners who arrived, they were cut, disinfected and washed, and then they were given numbers and registered. Initially, each of the prisoners was photographed in three positions. In 1943, prisoners began to be tattooed - Auschwitz became the only Nazi camp in which prisoners were tattooed with their number.

Depending on the reasons for the arrest, the prisoners received triangles of different colors, which were sewn onto the camp clothes together with the numbers. Political prisoners were supposed to have a red triangle, Jews wore a six-pointed star, consisting of a yellow triangle and a triangle of the color that corresponded to the reason for the arrest. Gypsies and those prisoners whom the Nazis considered antisocial elements received black triangles. Purple triangles were sewn on to Jehovah's Witnesses, pink to homosexuals, and green to criminals.

The scarce striped clothing of the camp did not protect the prisoners from the cold. The linen was changed at intervals of several weeks, and sometimes even at monthly intervals, and the prisoners did not have the opportunity to wash it, which led to epidemics of various diseases, especially typhus and typhoid fever, as well as scabies.

The hands of the camp clock ruthlessly and monotonously measured the prisoner's life time. From morning to evening gong, from one bowl of soup to the next, from the first check to the moment when the prisoner's corpse was counted for the last time.

One of the scourges of camp life was verification, which was used to check the number of prisoners. They lasted several, and sometimes more than ten hours. The camp authorities very often announced penal checks, during which prisoners had to squat or kneel. There were also such cases when they were ordered to keep their hands up in the air for several hours.

Along with executions and gas chambers, exhausting work was an effective means of exterminating prisoners. The prisoners were employed in various sectors of the economy. At first, they worked during the construction of the camp: they built new buildings and barracks, roads and drainage ditches. A little later, the cheap labor of prisoners began to be used more and more often. industrial enterprises Third Reich. The prisoner was ordered to do the work at a run, without a second of rest. The pace of work, scanty portions of food, as well as constant beatings and bullying increased mortality. During the return of the prisoners to the camp, the killed or wounded were dragged or transported in wheelbarrows or carts.

The daily diet of the prisoner was 1300-1700 calories. For breakfast, the prisoner received about a liter of "coffee" or a decoction of herbs, for lunch - about 1 liter of lean soup, often made from rotten vegetables. Dinner consisted of 300-350 grams of black clay bread and a small amount of other additives (eg 30 g. Sausage or 30 g. Margarine or cheese) and a drink made from herbs or "coffee".

In Auschwitz I, most of the prisoners lived in two-story brick buildings. Housing conditions at all times of the existence of the camp were catastrophic. The prisoners, brought in by the first echelons, slept on straw scattered on the concrete floor. Later, hay bedding was introduced. The room, which barely accommodated 40-50 people, slept about 200 prisoners. The three-tiered bunks installed later did not at all improve the living conditions. More often than not, 2 prisoners lay on one tier of the bunks.

Malarial climate of Auschwitz, bad living conditions, hunger, scanty clothes, unchangeable for a long time, unwashed and unprotected from the cold, rats and insects led to massive epidemics, which sharply reduced the number of prisoners. A large number of patients who went to the hospital were not admitted due to overcrowding. In this regard, SS doctors periodically carried out selection both among patients and among prisoners in other buildings. Weakened, and not giving hope for a quick recovery, they were sent to death in gas chambers or killed in a hospital, injecting them directly into the heart with a dose of phenol.

That is why the inmates called the hospital "the vestibule of the crematorium." In Auschwitz, prisoners were subjected to numerous criminal experiments carried out by SS doctors. For example, Professor Karl Klauberg, in order to develop a quick method of biological destruction of the Slavs, conducted criminal sterilization experiments on Jewish women in building No. 10 of the main camp. Dr. Josef Mengele, within the framework of genetic and anthropological experiments, conducted experiments on twins and children with physical disabilities.

In addition, various experiments were carried out in Auschwitz with the use of new drugs and drugs: toxic substances were rubbed into the epithelium of prisoners, skin grafts were carried out ... During these experiments, hundreds of prisoners and prisoners died.

Despite the difficult living conditions, constant terror and danger, the prisoners of the camp conducted secret underground activities against the Nazis. She took different shapes... Establishing contacts with the Polish population living in the vicinity of the camp made possible the illegal transfer of food and medicine. From the camp information was transmitted about the crimes committed by the SS, surname lists of prisoners, SS men and material evidence of crimes. All parcels were hidden in various, often specially designed objects, and the correspondence between the camp and the centers of the resistance movement was encrypted.

In the camp, work was carried out to help prisoners and explanatory work in the field of international solidarity against Hitlerism. Cultural activities were also carried out, which consisted of organizing discussions and meetings at which prisoners recited best works domestic literature, as well as in the secret holding of divine services.

Verification area - here the SS members checked the number of prisoners.

Here, public executions were carried out on a portable or common gallows.

In July 1943, the SS men hung 12 Polish prisoners on it for maintaining relations with the civilian population and helping 3 comrades escape.

The courtyard between buildings No. 10 and No. 11 is fenced with a high wall. Wooden shutters on the windows in block 10 were supposed to make it impossible to observe the executions taking place here. Before the "Wall of Death" SS men shot several thousand prisoners, mostly Poles.

There was a camp prison in the dungeons of building No. 11. In the halls on the right and left sides of the corridor, prisoners were placed awaiting sentencing. court-martial, who came to Auschwitz from Katowice and during the session, which lasted 2-3 hours, pronounced from several dozen to over a hundred death sentences.

Before the execution, everyone had to undress in the washrooms, and if the number of those sentenced to death was too small, the sentence was carried out right there. If the number of those sentenced was sufficient, they were taken through a small door to be shot to the “Wall of Death”.

The SS system of punishment in Hitler's concentration camps was part of a well-planned, deliberate extermination of prisoners. The prisoner could be punished for everything: for picking an apple, relieving himself while working, or for pulling out his own tooth in order to exchange it for bread, even for too slow, in the opinion of the SS man, work.

The prisoners were punished with lashes. They were hanged by their twisted arms on special poles, placed in the dungeons of the camp prison, forced to perform penalty exercises, racks, or sent to penalty teams.

In September 1941, an attempt was made here to massacre people using the poisonous gas "Cyclone B". Then about 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick prisoners from the camp hospital died.

Cells located in the basements housed prisoners and civilians who were suspected of having links with prisoners or assisting in escapes, prisoners sentenced to starvation for the escape of a cellmate and those whom the SS considered guilty of violating camp rules or against whom an investigation was conducted ...

All the property that the people deported to the camp brought with them was taken away by the SS. It was sorted and stacked in huge barracks in Auszivets II. These warehouses were called "Canada". I will tell you more about them in the next report.

The property located in the warehouses of concentration camps was then exported to the Third Reich for the needs of the Wehrmacht.The gold teeth that were removed from the corpses of the killed people were melted into ingots and sent to the Central Sanitary Directorate of the SS. The ashes of the burned prisoners were used as manure or were covered with nearby ponds and riverbeds.

Items that previously belonged to people who died in the gas chambers were used by SS men who were part of the camp staff. For example, they turned to the commandant with a request to issue baby carriages, things for babies and other items. Despite the fact that the looted property was constantly taken out by whole trains, the warehouses were overflowing, and the space between them was often filled with piles of unsorted luggage.

As the Soviet Army approached Auschwitz, the most valuable things were urgently removed from the warehouses. A few days before the liberation, the SS men set fire to the warehouses, wiping out the traces of the crime. Thirty barracks burned down, and in those that remained, after liberation, many thousands of pairs of shoes, clothes, toothbrushes, shaving brushes, glasses, prostheses were found ...

While liberating the Auschwitz camp, the Soviet Army found about 7 tons of hair in the warehouses, packed in bags. These were the remnants that the camp authorities did not manage to sell and send to the factories of the Third Reich. The analysis showed that they have traces of hydrogen cyanide, a special poisonous component of drugs called "Cyclone B". From human hair, German firms, among other products, produced a hair tailor's collar. Found in one of the cities, rolls of bead, which are in a showcase, were given for analysis, the results of which showed that it was made of human hair, most likely female.

It is very difficult to imagine the tragic scenes that were played out in the camp every day. Former prisoners - artists - tried to convey the atmosphere of those days in their work.

Hard work and hunger led to complete exhaustion of the body. From hunger, the prisoners fell ill with dystrophy, which very often ended in death. These photographs were taken after release; they show adult prisoners weighing from 23 to 35 kg.

In Auschwitz, in addition to adults, there were also children who were sent to the camp with their parents. First of all, these were the children of Jews, Gypsies, as well as Poles and Russians. Most Jewish children died in the gas chambers immediately after arriving at the camp. Few of them, after careful selection, were sent to the camp, where they obeyed the same strict rules as adults. Some of the children, such as twins, were subjected to criminal experiments.

One of the scariest exhibits is a model of one of the crematoria in the Auschwitz II camp. On average, about 3 thousand people were killed and burned in such a building per day ...

And this is the crematorium in Auschwitz-I. It was located behind the camp fence.

The largest room in the crematorium was the morgue, which was converted into a temporary gas chamber. Here in 1941 and 1942 Soviet prisoners and Jews from the ghettos organized by the Germans in Upper Silesia were killed.

In the second part there are reconstructed from the preserved original metal elements two of the three furnaces in which about 350 bodies were burned during the day. Each retort simultaneously contained 2-3 corpses.