Abuse of women in German camps during the Second World War. Correspondent: Camp bed

Auschwitz prisoners were released four months before the end of World War II. By that time there were few of them left. Almost one and a half million people died, most of them Jews. For several years, the investigation continued, which led to terrible discoveries: people not only died in gas chambers, but also became victims of Dr. Mengele, who used them as guinea pigs.

Auschwitz: the story of a city

A small Polish town in which more than a million innocent people were killed is called Auschwitz all over the world. We call it Auschwitz. Concentration camps, gas chamber experiments, torture, executions - all these words have been associated with the name of the city for more than 70 years.

It will sound quite strange in Russian Ich lebe in Auschwitz - “I live in Auschwitz.” Is it possible to live in Auschwitz? They learned about the experiments on women in the concentration camp after the end of the war. Over the years, new facts have been discovered. One is scarier than the other. The truth about the camp called shocked the whole world. Research continues today. Many books have been written and many films have been made on this topic. Auschwitz has become our symbol of painful, difficult death.

Where did mass murders of children take place and terrible experiments on women? Q What city do millions of people on earth associate with the phrase “death factory”? Auschwitz.

Experiments on people were carried out in a camp located near the city, which today is home to 40 thousand people. This is a calm town with a good climate. Auschwitz was first mentioned in historical documents in the twelfth century. In the 13th century there were already so many Germans here that their language began to prevail over Polish. In the 17th century, the city was captured by the Swedes. In 1918 it became Polish again. 20 years later, a camp was organized here, on the territory of which crimes took place, the likes of which humanity had never known before.

Gas chamber or experiment

In the early forties, the answer to the question of where the Auschwitz concentration camp was located was known only to those who were doomed to death. Unless, of course, you take the SS men into account. Some prisoners, fortunately, survived. Later they talked about what happened within the walls of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Experiments on women and children, which were carried out by a man whose name terrified the prisoners, are a terrible truth that not everyone is ready to listen to.

The gas chamber is a terrible invention of the Nazis. But there are worse things. Krystyna Zywulska is one of the few who managed to leave Auschwitz alive. In her book of memoirs, she mentions an incident: a prisoner sentenced to death by Dr. Mengele does not go, but runs into the gas chamber. Because death from poisonous gas is not as terrible as the torment from the experiments of the same Mengele.

Creators of the "death factory"

So what is Auschwitz? This is a camp that was originally intended for political prisoners. The author of the idea is Erich Bach-Zalewski. This man had the rank of SS Gruppenführer, and during the Second World War he led punitive operations. With his light hand, dozens were sentenced to death. He took an active part in suppressing the uprising that occurred in Warsaw in 1944.

The SS Gruppenführer's assistants found a suitable location in a small Polish town. There were already military barracks here, and in addition, there was a well-established railway connection. In 1940, a man named He arrived here. He will be hanged near the gas chambers by decision of the Polish court. But this will happen two years after the end of the war. And then, in 1940, Hess liked these places. He took on the new business with great enthusiasm.

Inhabitants of the concentration camp

This camp did not immediately become a “death factory.” At first, mostly Polish prisoners were sent here. Only a year after the organization of the camp, the tradition of writing a serial number on the prisoner’s hand appeared. Every month more and more Jews were brought. By the end of Auschwitz, they made up 90% of the total number of prisoners. The number of SS men here also grew continuously. In total, the concentration camp received about six thousand overseers, punishers and other “specialists.” Many of them were put on trial. Some disappeared without a trace, including Joseph Mengele, whose experiments terrified prisoners for several years.

We will not give the exact number of Auschwitz victims here. Let's just say that more than two hundred children died in the camp. Most of them were sent to gas chambers. Some ended up in the hands of Josef Mengele. But this man was not the only one who conducted experiments on people. Another so-called doctor is Karl Clauberg.

Beginning in 1943, a huge number of prisoners were admitted to the camp. Most of them should have been destroyed. But the organizers of the concentration camp were practical people, and therefore decided to take advantage of the situation and use a certain part of the prisoners as material for research.

Karl Cauberg

This man supervised the experiments carried out on women. His victims were predominantly Jewish and Gypsy women. The experiments included organ removal, testing new drugs, and radiation. What kind of person is Karl Cauberg? Who is he? What kind of family did you grow up in, how was his life? And most importantly, where did the cruelty that goes beyond human understanding come from?

By the beginning of the war, Karl Cauberg was already 41 years old. In the twenties, he served as chief physician at the clinic at the University of Königsberg. Kaulberg was not a hereditary doctor. He was born into a family of artisans. Why he decided to connect his life with medicine is unknown. But there is evidence that he served as an infantryman in the First World War. Then he graduated from the University of Hamburg. Apparently, he was so fascinated by medicine that he abandoned his military career. But Kaulberg was not interested in healing, but in research. In the early forties, he began searching for the most practical way to sterilize women who were not of the Aryan race. To conduct experiments he was transferred to Auschwitz.

Kaulberg's experiments

The experiments consisted of introducing a special solution into the uterus, which led to serious disturbances. After the experiment, the reproductive organs were removed and sent to Berlin for further research. There is no data on exactly how many women became victims of this “scientist”. After the end of the war, he was captured, but soon, just seven years later, oddly enough, he was released under an agreement on the exchange of prisoners of war. Returning to Germany, Kaulberg did not suffer from remorse. On the contrary, he was proud of his “achievements in science.” As a result, he began to receive complaints from people who suffered from Nazism. He was arrested again in 1955. He spent even less time in prison this time. He died two years after his arrest.

Joseph Mengele

The prisoners nicknamed this man the “angel of death.” Josef Mengele personally met the trains with new prisoners and carried out the selection. Some were sent to gas chambers. Others go to work. He used others in his experiments. One of the Auschwitz prisoners described this man as follows: “Tall, with a pleasant appearance, he looks like a film actor.” He never raised his voice and spoke politely - and this terrified the prisoners.

From the biography of the Angel of Death

Josef Mengele was the son of a German entrepreneur. After graduating from high school, he studied medicine and anthropology. In the early thirties he joined the Nazi organization, but soon left it for health reasons. In 1932, Mengele joined the SS. During the war he served in the medical forces and even received the Iron Cross for bravery, but was wounded and declared unfit for service. Mengele spent several months in the hospital. After recovery, he was sent to Auschwitz, where he began his scientific activities.

Selection

Selecting victims for experiments was Mengele's favorite pastime. The doctor only needed one glance at the prisoner to determine his state of health. He sent most of the prisoners to gas chambers. And only a few prisoners managed to delay death. It was hard with those whom Mengele saw as “guinea pigs.”

Most likely, this person suffered from an extreme form of mental illness. He even enjoyed the thought that he had a huge number of human lives in his hands. That is why he was always next to the arriving train. Even when this was not required of him. His criminal actions were driven not only by the desire for scientific research, but also by the desire to rule. Just one word from him was enough to send tens or hundreds of people to the gas chambers. Those that were sent to laboratories became material for experiments. But what was the purpose of these experiments?

An invincible belief in the Aryan utopia, obvious mental deviations - these are the components of the personality of Joseph Mengele. All his experiments were aimed at creating a new means that could stop the reproduction of representatives of unwanted peoples. Mengele not only equated himself with God, he placed himself above him.

Joseph Mengele's experiments

The Angel of Death dissected babies and castrated boys and men. He performed the operations without anesthesia. Experiments on women involved high-voltage electric shocks. He conducted these experiments to test endurance. Mengele once sterilized several Polish nuns using X-rays. But the main passion of the “Doctor of Death” was experiments on twins and people with physical defects.

To each his own

On the gates of Auschwitz it was written: Arbeit macht frei, which means “work sets you free.” The words Jedem das Seine were also present here. Translated into Russian - “To each his own.” At the gates of Auschwitz, at the entrance to the camp in which more than a million people died, a saying of the ancient Greek sages appeared. The principle of justice was used by the SS as the motto of the most cruel idea in the entire history of mankind.

The Great Patriotic War left an indelible mark on the history and destinies of people. Many lost loved ones who were killed or tortured. In the article we will look at the Nazi concentration camps and the atrocities that happened on their territories.

What is a concentration camp?

A concentration camp or concentration camp is a special place intended for the detention of persons of the following categories:

political prisoners (opponents of the dictatorial regime);
prisoners of war (captured soldiers and civilians).

Nazi concentration camps became notorious for their inhuman cruelty to prisoners and impossible conditions of detention. These places of detention began to appear even before Hitler came to power, and even then they were divided into women's, men's and children's. Mainly Jews and opponents of the Nazi system were kept there.

Life in the camp

Humiliation and abuse for prisoners began from the moment of transportation. People were transported in freight cars, where there was not even running water or a fenced-off latrine. Prisoners had to relieve themselves publicly, in a tank standing in the middle of the carriage.

But this was only the beginning; a lot of abuse and torture were prepared for the concentration camps of fascists who were undesirable to the Nazi regime. Torture of women and children, medical experiments, aimless exhausting work - this is not the whole list.

The conditions of detention can be judged from the prisoners’ letters: “they lived in hellish conditions, ragged, barefoot, hungry... I was constantly and severely beaten, deprived of food and water, tortured...”, “They shot me, flogged me, poisoned me with dogs, drowned me in water, beat me to death.” with sticks and starvation. They were infected with tuberculosis... suffocated by a cyclone. Poisoned with chlorine. They burned..."

The corpses were skinned and hair cut off - all this was then used in the German textile industry. The doctor Mengele became famous for his horrific experiments on prisoners, at whose hands thousands of people died. He studied mental and physical exhaustion of the body. He conducted experiments on twins, during which they received organ transplants from each other, blood transfusions, and sisters were forced to give birth to children from their own brothers. Had sex reassignment surgery.

All fascist concentration camps became famous for such abuses; we will consider the names and conditions of detention in the main ones below.

Camp diet

Typically, the daily ration in the camp was as follows:

bread - 130 gr;
fat - 20 g;
meat - 30 g;
cereal - 120 gr;
sugar - 27 gr.

Bread was handed out, and the rest of the products were used for cooking, which consisted of soup (issued 1 or 2 times a day) and porridge (150 - 200 grams). It should be noted that such a diet was intended only for working people. Those who, for some reason, remained unemployed received even less. Usually their portion consisted of only half a portion of bread.

List of concentration camps in different countries

Fascist concentration camps were created in the territories of Germany, allied and occupied countries. There are a lot of them, but let’s name the main ones:

In Germany - Halle, Buchenwald, Cottbus, Dusseldorf, Schlieben, Ravensbrück, Esse, Spremberg;
Austria - Mauthausen, Amstetten;
France - Nancy, Reims, Mulhouse;
Poland - Majdanek, Krasnik, Radom, Auschwitz, Przemysl;
Lithuania - Dimitravas, Alytus, Kaunas;
Czechoslovakia - Kunta Gora, Natra, Hlinsko;
Estonia - Pirkul, Pärnu, Klooga;
Belarus - Minsk, Baranovichi;
Latvia - Salaspils.

And this is not a complete list of all concentration camps that were built by Nazi Germany in the pre-war and war years.

Salaspils

Salaspils, one might say, is the most terrible Nazi concentration camp, because in addition to prisoners of war and Jews, children were also kept there. It was located on the territory of occupied Latvia and was the central eastern camp. It was located near Riga and operated from 1941 (September) to 1944 (summer).

Children in this camp were not only kept separately from adults and exterminated en masse, but were used as blood donors for German soldiers. Every day, about half a liter of blood was taken from all children, which led to the rapid death of donors.

Salaspils was not like Auschwitz or Majdanek (extermination camps), where people were herded into gas chambers and then their corpses were burned. It was used for medical research, which killed more than 100,000 people. Salaspils was not like other Nazi concentration camps. Torture of children was a routine activity here, carried out according to a schedule with the results carefully recorded.

Experiments on children

Testimony of witnesses and results of investigations revealed the following methods of extermination of people in the Salaspils camp: beating, starvation, arsenic poisoning, injection of dangerous substances (most often to children), surgical operations without painkillers, pumping out blood (only from children), executions, torture, useless heavy labor (carrying stones from place to place), gas chambers, burying alive. In order to save ammunition, the camp charter prescribed that children should be killed only with rifle butts. The atrocities of the Nazis in the concentration camps surpassed everything that humanity had seen in modern times. Such an attitude towards people cannot be justified, because it violates all conceivable and inconceivable moral commandments.

Children did not stay with their mothers for long and were usually quickly taken away and distributed. Thus, children under six years of age were kept in a special barracks where they were infected with measles. But they did not treat it, but aggravated the disease, for example, by bathing, which is why the children died within 3-4 days. The Germans killed more than 3,000 people in one year in this way. The bodies of the dead were partly burned and partly buried on the camp grounds.

The Act of the Nuremberg Trials “on the extermination of children” provided the following numbers: during the excavation of only a fifth of the concentration camp territory, 633 bodies of children aged 5 to 9 years, arranged in layers, were discovered; an area soaked in an oily substance was also found, where the remains of unburned children’s bones (teeth, ribs, joints, etc.) were found.

Salaspils is truly the most terrible Nazi concentration camp, because the atrocities described above are not all the tortures that the prisoners were subjected to. Thus, in winter, children brought in were driven barefoot and naked to a barracks for half a kilometer, where they had to wash themselves in icy water. After this, the children were driven in the same way to the next building, where they were kept in the cold for 5-6 days. Moreover, the age of the eldest child did not even reach 12 years. Everyone who survived this procedure was also subjected to arsenic poisoning.

Infants were kept separately and given injections, from which the child died in agony within a few days. They gave us coffee and poisoned cereals. About 150 children died from experiments per day. The bodies of the dead were carried out in large baskets and burned, dumped in cesspools, or buried near the camp.

Ravensbrück

If we start listing Nazi women's concentration camps, Ravensbrück will come first. This was the only camp of this type in Germany. It could accommodate thirty thousand prisoners, but by the end of the war it was overcrowded by fifteen thousand. Mostly Russian and Polish women were detained; Jews numbered approximately 15 percent. There were no prescribed instructions regarding torture and torment; the supervisors chose the line of behavior themselves.

Arriving women were undressed, shaved, washed, given a robe and assigned a number. Race was also indicated on clothing. People turned into impersonal cattle. In small barracks (in the post-war years, 2-3 refugee families lived in them) there were approximately three hundred prisoners, who were housed on three-story bunks. When the camp was overcrowded, up to a thousand people were herded into these cells, all of whom had to sleep on the same bunks. The barracks had several toilets and a washbasin, but there were so few of them that after a few days the floors were littered with excrement. Almost all Nazi concentration camps presented this picture (the photos presented here are only a small part of all the horrors).

But not all women ended up in the concentration camp; a selection was made beforehand. The strong and resilient, fit for work, were left behind, and the rest were destroyed. Prisoners worked at construction sites and sewing workshops.

Gradually, Ravensbrück was equipped with a crematorium, like all Nazi concentration camps. Gas chambers (nicknamed gas chambers by prisoners) appeared towards the end of the war. Ashes from crematoria were sent to nearby fields as fertilizer.

Experiments were also carried out in Ravensbrück. In a special barracks called the “infirmary,” German scientists tested new drugs, first infecting or crippling experimental subjects. There were few survivors, but even those suffered from what they had endured until the end of their lives. Experiments were also conducted with irradiating women with X-rays, which caused hair loss, skin pigmentation, and death. Excisions of the genital organs were carried out, after which few survived, and even those quickly aged, and at the age of 18 they looked like old women. Similar experiments were carried out in all Nazi concentration camps; torture of women and children was the main crime of Nazi Germany against humanity.

At the time of the liberation of the concentration camp by the Allies, five thousand women remained there; the rest were killed or transported to other places of detention. The Soviet troops who arrived in April 1945 adapted the camp barracks to accommodate refugees. Ravensbrück later became a base for Soviet military units.

Nazi concentration camps: Buchenwald

Construction of the camp began in 1933, near the town of Weimar. Soon, Soviet prisoners of war began to arrive, becoming the first prisoners, and they completed the construction of the “hellish” concentration camp.

The structure of all structures was strictly thought out. Immediately behind the gates began the “Appelplat” (parallel ground), specially designed for the formation of prisoners. Its capacity was twenty thousand people. Not far from the gate there was a punishment cell for interrogations, and opposite there was an office where the camp fuehrer and the officer on duty - the camp authorities - lived. Deeper down were the barracks for prisoners. All barracks were numbered, there were 52 of them. At the same time, 43 were intended for housing, and workshops were set up in the rest.

The Nazi concentration camps left behind a terrible memory; their names still evoke fear and shock in many, but the most terrifying of them is Buchenwald. The crematorium was considered the most terrible place. People were invited there under the pretext of a medical examination. When the prisoner undressed, he was shot and the body was sent to the oven.

Only men were kept in Buchenwald. Upon arrival at the camp, they were assigned a number in German, which they had to learn within the first 24 hours. The prisoners worked at the Gustlovsky weapons factory, which was located a few kilometers from the camp.

Continuing to describe the Nazi concentration camps, let us turn to the so-called “small camp” of Buchenwald.

Small camp of Buchenwald

The “small camp” was the name given to the quarantine zone. The living conditions here were, even compared to the main camp, simply hellish. In 1944, when German troops began to retreat, prisoners from Auschwitz and the Compiegne camp were brought to this camp; they were mainly Soviet citizens, Poles and Czechs, and later Jews. There was not enough space for everyone, so some of the prisoners (six thousand people) were housed in tents. The closer 1945 got, the more prisoners were transported. Meanwhile, the “small camp” included 12 barracks measuring 40 x 50 meters. Torture in Nazi concentration camps was not only specially planned or for scientific purposes, life itself in such a place was torture. 750 people lived in the barracks; their daily ration consisted of a small piece of bread; those who were not working were no longer entitled to it.

Relations among prisoners were tough; cases of cannibalism and murder for someone else's portion of bread were documented. A common practice was to store the bodies of the dead in barracks in order to receive their rations. The dead man's clothes were divided among his cellmates, and they often fought over them. Due to such conditions, infectious diseases were common in the camp. Vaccinations only worsened the situation, since injection syringes were not changed.

Photos simply cannot convey all the inhumanity and horror of the Nazi concentration camp. The stories of witnesses are not intended for the faint of heart. In each camp, not excluding Buchenwald, there were medical groups of doctors who conducted experiments on prisoners. It should be noted that the data they obtained allowed German medicine to step far forward - no other country in the world had such a number of experimental people. Another question is whether it was worth the millions of tortured children and women, the inhuman suffering that these innocent people endured.

Prisoners were irradiated, healthy limbs were amputated, organs were removed, and they were sterilized and castrated. They tested how long a person could withstand extreme cold or heat. They were specially infected with diseases and introduced experimental drugs. Thus, an anti-typhoid vaccine was developed in Buchenwald. In addition to typhus, prisoners were infected with smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria, and paratyphoid.

Since 1939, the camp was run by Karl Koch. His wife, Ilse, was nicknamed the “Witch of Buchenwald” for her love of sadism and inhumane abuse of prisoners. They feared her more than her husband (Karl Koch) and Nazi doctors. She was later nicknamed "Frau Lampshaded". The woman owed this nickname to the fact that she made various decorative things from the skin of killed prisoners, in particular, lampshades, which she was very proud of. Most of all, she liked to use the skin of Russian prisoners with tattoos on their backs and chests, as well as the skin of gypsies. Things made of such material seemed to her the most elegant.

The liberation of Buchenwald took place on April 11, 1945, at the hands of the prisoners themselves. Having learned about the approach of the allied troops, they disarmed the guards, captured the camp leadership and controlled the camp for two days until American soldiers approached.

Auschwitz (Auschwitz-Birkenau)

When listing Nazi concentration camps, it is impossible to ignore Auschwitz. It was one of the largest concentration camps, in which, according to various sources, from one and a half to four million people died. The exact details of the dead remain unclear. The victims were mainly Jewish prisoners of war, who were exterminated immediately upon arrival in gas chambers.

The concentration camp complex itself was called Auschwitz-Birkenau and was located on the outskirts of the Polish city of Auschwitz, whose name became a household name. The following words were engraved above the camp gate: “Work sets you free.”

This huge complex, built in 1940, consisted of three camps:

Auschwitz I or the main camp - the administration was located here;
Auschwitz II or "Birkenau" - was called a death camp;
Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz.

Initially, the camp was small and intended for political prisoners. But gradually more and more prisoners arrived at the camp, 70% of whom were destroyed immediately. Many tortures in Nazi concentration camps were borrowed from Auschwitz. Thus, the first gas chamber began to function in 1941. The gas used was Cyclone B. The terrible invention was first tested on Soviet and Polish prisoners totaling about nine hundred people.

Auschwitz II began its operation on March 1, 1942. Its territory included four crematoria and two gas chambers. In the same year, medical experiments on sterilization and castration began on women and men.

Small camps gradually formed around Birkenau, where prisoners working in factories and mines were kept. One of these camps gradually grew and became known as Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz. Approximately ten thousand prisoners were held here.

Like any Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz was well guarded. Contacts with the outside world were prohibited, the territory was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and guard posts were set up around the camp at a distance of a kilometer.

Five crematoria operated continuously on the territory of Auschwitz, which, according to experts, had a monthly capacity of approximately 270 thousand corpses.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. By that time, approximately seven thousand prisoners remained alive. Such a small number of survivors is due to the fact that about a year earlier, mass murders in gas chambers (gas chambers) began in the concentration camp.

Since 1947, a museum and memorial complex dedicated to the memory of all those who died at the hands of Nazi Germany began to function on the territory of the former concentration camp.

Conclusion

During the entire war, according to statistics, approximately four and a half million Soviet citizens were captured. These were mostly civilians from the occupied territories. It’s hard to even imagine what these people went through. But it was not only the bullying of the Nazis in the concentration camps that they were destined to endure. Thanks to Stalin, after their liberation, returning home, they received the stigma of “traitors.” The Gulag awaited them at home, and their families were subjected to serious repression. One captivity gave way to another for them. In fear for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, they changed their last names and tried in every possible way to hide their experiences.

Until recently, information about the fate of prisoners after release was not advertised and kept silent. But people who have experienced this simply should not be forgotten.

During the occupation of the territory of the USSR, the Nazis constantly resorted to various types of torture. All torture was permitted at the state level. The law also constantly increased repression against representatives of the non-Aryan nation - torture had an ideological basis.

Prisoners of war and partisans, as well as women, were subjected to the most brutal torture. An example of the inhuman torture of women by the Nazis is the actions that the Germans used against the captured underground worker Anela Chulitskaya.

The Nazis locked this girl in a cell every morning, where she was subjected to monstrous beatings. The rest of the prisoners heard her screams, which tore their souls apart. They carried Anel out when she lost consciousness and threw her like garbage into a common cell. The other captive women tried to ease her pain with compresses. Anel told prisoners that they hung her from the ceiling, cut out pieces of her skin and muscles, beat her, raped her, broke her bones and injected water under her skin.

In the end, Anel Chulitskaya was killed, the last time her body was seen was mutilated almost beyond recognition, her hands were cut off. Her body hung on one of the walls of the corridor for a long time, as a reminder and warning.

The Germans resorted to torture even for singing in cells. So Tamara Rusova was beaten for singing songs in Russian.

Quite often, not only the Gestapo and the military resorted to torture. The captured women were also tortured by German women. There is information that talks about Tanya and Olga Karpinsky, who were mutilated beyond recognition by a certain Frau Boss.

Fascist torture was varied, and each of them was more inhumane than the other. Often women were not allowed to sleep for several days, even a week. They were deprived of water, the women suffered from dehydration, and the Germans forced them to drink very salty water.

Women were very often underground, and the struggle against such actions was severely punished by the fascists. They always tried to suppress the underground as quickly as possible and for this they resorted to such cruel measures. Women also worked in the rear of the Germans, obtaining various information.

Most of the torture was carried out by Gestapo soldiers (the police of the Third Reich), as well as SS soldiers (elite soldiers subordinate to Adolf Hitler personally). In addition, the so-called “policemen” - collaborators who controlled order in the settlements - resorted to torture.

Women suffered more than men, as they succumbed to constant sexual harassment and numerous rapes. Often the rapes were gang rapes. After such abuse, girls were often killed so as not to leave traces. In addition, they were gassed and forced to bury corpses.

As a conclusion, we can say that fascist torture affected not only prisoners of war and men in general. The Nazis were the most cruel towards women. Many Nazi German soldiers frequently raped the female population of the occupied territories. The soldiers were looking for a way to “have fun.” Moreover, no one could stop the Nazis from doing this.

This name became a symbol of the brutal attitude of the Nazis towards captured children.

During the three years of the camp’s existence (1941–1944), according to various sources, about one hundred thousand people died in Salaspils, seven thousand of them were children.

The place from which you never return

This camp was built by captured Jews in 1941 on the territory of a former Latvian training ground 18 kilometers from Riga near the village of the same name. According to documents, initially “Salaspils” (German: Kurtenhof) was called an “educational labor camp” and not a concentration camp.

The area was of impressive size, fenced with barbed wire, and was built up with hastily constructed wooden barracks. Each was designed for 200-300 people, but often there were from 500 to 1000 people in one room.

Initially, Jews deported from Germany to Latvia were doomed to death in the camp, but since 1942, “undesirables” from a variety of countries were sent here: France, Germany, Austria, and the Soviet Union.

The Salaspils camp also became notorious because it was here that the Nazis took blood from innocent children for the needs of the army and abused young prisoners in every possible way.

Full donors for the Reich

New prisoners were brought in regularly. They were forced to strip naked and sent to the so-called bathhouse. It was necessary to walk half a kilometer through the mud, and then wash in ice-cold water. After this, those who arrived were placed in barracks, all their belongings were taken away.

There were no names, surnames, or titles - only serial numbers. Many died almost immediately; those who managed to survive after several days of captivity and torture were “sorted.”

Children were separated from their parents. If the mothers were not given back, the guards took the babies by force. There were terrible screams and screams. Many women went crazy; some of them were placed in the hospital, and some were shot on the spot.

Infants and children under six years of age were sent to a special barracks, where they died of hunger and disease. The Nazis experimented on older prisoners: they injected poisons, performed operations without anesthesia, took blood from children, which was transferred to hospitals for wounded soldiers of the German army. Many children became “full donors” - their blood was taken from them until they died.

Considering that the prisoners were practically not fed: a piece of bread and a gruel made from vegetable waste, the number of child deaths amounted to hundreds per day. The corpses, like garbage, were taken out in huge baskets and burned in the crematorium ovens or dumped in disposal pits.

Covering my tracks

In August 1944, before the arrival of Soviet troops, in an attempt to erase traces of the atrocities, the Nazis burned down many of the barracks. The surviving prisoners were taken to the Stutthof concentration camp, and German prisoners of war were kept on the territory of Salaspils until October 1946.

After the liberation of Riga from the Nazis, the commission to investigate Nazi atrocities discovered 652 children's corpses in the camp. Mass graves and human remains were also found: ribs, hip bones, teeth.

One of the most eerie photographs, clearly illustrating the events of that time, is the “Salaspils Madonna”, the corpse of a woman hugging a dead baby. It was established that they were buried alive.

The truth hurts my eyes

Only in 1967, the Salaspils memorial complex was erected on the site of the camp, which still exists today. Many famous Russian and Latvian sculptors and architects worked on the ensemble, including Ernst Neizvestny. The road to Salaspils begins with a massive concrete slab, the inscription on which reads: “Behind these walls the earth groans.”

Further on a small field rise symbolic figures with “speaking” names: “Unbroken”, “Humiliated”, “Oath”, “Mother”. On both sides of the road there are barracks with iron bars, where people bring flowers, children's toys and sweets, and on the black marble wall, notches measure the days spent by innocents in the “death camp.”

Today, some Latvian historians blasphemously call the Salaspils camp “educational-labor” and “socially useful”, refusing to acknowledge the atrocities that happened near Riga during the Second World War.

In 2015, an exhibition dedicated to the victims of Salaspils was banned in Latvia. Officials considered that such an event would harm the country's image. As a result, the exhibition “Stolen Childhood. Victims of the Holocaust through the eyes of young prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp Salaspils” was held at the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Paris.

In 2017, a scandal also occurred at the press conference “Salaspils camp, history and memory.” One of the speakers tried to present his original point of view on historical events, but received severe rebuff from the participants. “It hurts to hear how today you are trying to forget about the past. We cannot allow such terrible events to happen again. God forbid you experience something like this,” one of the women who managed to survive in Salaspils addressed the speaker.