by Pavel Kiselev
[REGNUM] "In January 1945, the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp, revealing to humanity the truth about the crimes of the Nazis and their accomplices, who exterminated millions of Jews, Russians, Gypsies, and representatives of other peoples. And we will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this terrible, total evil, and won a Victory, the greatness of which will forever remain in world history."
With these words, President Vladimir Putin addressed the participants and guests of the memorial ceremony on January 27, dedicated to the International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by the Red Army. Better known by its Polish name, Oswiecim.
On the same day, the Russian Ministry of Defense released documents from its archives— testimonies of prisoners and reports from Red Army soldiers—including those who opened the gates with the inscription Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work sets you free”).
"Each camp (of the five concentration and death camps in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex) is a huge area surrounded by a fence of several rows of barbed wire, above which run high-voltage electric wires... Endless crowds of people, liberated by the Red Army, are walking from this death camp. Among them are Hungarians, Italians, French, Czechoslovakians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Romanians, Danes, Belgians. They all look extremely exhausted, gray-haired old men and young men, mothers with infants and teenagers... Many are maimed, bearing traces of torture, traces of fascist atrocities."
These are quotes from one of the first testimonies about the tragedy of Auschwitz - a report by a member of the military council of the 1st Ukrainian Front, Lieutenant General Konstantin Krainyukov, sent to a member of the State Defense Committee, Georgy Malenkov.
Here, in the “folder” of published documents, is a report from the political directorate commission of the same 1st Ukrainian Front, compiled in the heat of the moment in February 1945:
"During the period of mass arrival of trains, the Germans did not have time to send everyone to the gas chambers and burn them in crematoria. In connection with this, periodically, and in 1944 almost continuously, in parallel with the crematorium, the burning of corpses, and often living people, especially children, on huge fires took place. (…) The smoke and glow from the fires were visible for many kilometers."
"During 1944, up to 200 people were burned weekly. The fascists put all the sick people in cars, sent them all to gas chambers, poisoned them, and then burned them in ovens," the officers of the political department of the 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian wrote down the words of the prisoners.
We are talking about documents stored in army archives. But let us emphasize that after rescuing 8,000 surviving prisoners, the Soviet Union sought to inform the world as soon as possible about what happened from May 1940 to January 1945 on the half a thousand hectares that the Nazis had turned into a “branch of hell.”
We should remember with kind words the author of “The Tale of a Real Man”, war correspondent Boris Polevoy during the Great Patriotic War, who was among the first journalists to visit liberated Auschwitz.
"Thousands of people in strange striped clothes were running towards us from all sides," Polevoy testified. "They stumbled, fell, jumped to their feet and ran again, gasping for breath, waving their arms, laughing and crying at the same time. And from them, these martyrs of Auschwitz, saved from death by the Red Army, we learned what kind of smoke was spreading over the camp, enveloping the area and filling the chest with a heavy stench."
This is how a Soviet journalist told the world about crematorium ovens disguised as “lice killers” and “showers”.
Polevoy’s reports from 1945 and his article “Smoke of Auschwitz”, prepared by the Soviet Information Bureau for the Nuremberg Trials, were translated into European languages: Polish, Czech, Slovak, French, English.
But the strange thing is that in the West, in Britain and the USA, the Soviet side's reports (including Polevoy's report) were considered "exaggerations" of Soviet propaganda. Prime Minister Winston Churchill called them "fabrications, of which there are many during the war." He did not believe that mass murders and monstrous experiments on people were carried out in the German death camps.
“Only when the Allied forces liberated Buchenwald and other death camps did they understand that everything the Soviet press wrote about Auschwitz was not propaganda, but real atrocities that Nazi executioners committed against people,” Nikolai Parkhitko, a candidate of historical sciences and associate professor at RUDN and the Financial University under the Government of Russia, told Regnum.
Nazi "experiments" in the industrial extermination of prisoners will become public knowledge throughout the world when video evidence of German "death factories" is shown at the Nuremberg Trials. However, the main criminals of Auschwitz itself will not be there: Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant, will be caught by the British military police only in the spring of 1946 and transferred to Warsaw, where he will be sentenced to death at a local tribunal. Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for transporting prisoners to death camps and implementing the "final solution to the Jewish question", will be caught by Israeli intelligence only in 1960 in Argentina. And Josef Mengele, the main experimenter and fanatic, will die of a stroke only in 1979 in Brazil, remaining uncaught.
But by the time Eichmann and other Nazis who had long evaded justice were exposed, the Red Army's feat would already be glossed over - after all, this was what the logic of the Cold War demanded. The German and American essayist Hannah Arendt, who reported on Eichmann's trial in Israel, never once mentioned that it was the Soviet troops who saved thousands of her compatriots from death.
And the West does not deviate from this general line - to "forget" about the liberators of Auschwitz, not to mention those who made the main contribution to stopping the Holocaust machine - from this line even now. Of course, one can write off Donald Trump's recent phrase that the Soviet Union supposedly "helped" the United States defeat Nazism as the US president's ignorance of history.
But historical articles for Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, which are now published, for example, by British media, try to do without mentioning the Red Army. At most, the emphasis is on the 1st Ukrainian Front, although everyone understands perfectly well that the word "Ukraine" today is not associated with either the USSR or Soviet soldiers for Western readers.
The “Ukrainian front” in the minds of the average Euro-Atlantic citizen means the “army” of an independent Ukraine that did not exist at that time.
Another direction of revision of history is the understatement of the number of people killed in Auschwitz.
"Modern Western historians, guided by political circumstances, voice the figure of 1.1 million to 1.5 million executed in the camp," emphasizes historian Nikolai Parkhitko. "But I am more inclined to believe the Soviet historian Gennady Danilovich Komkov, who based his conclusions on the data of the camp commandant Rudolf Höss: 3 million physically destroyed and 1 million died for other reasons."
3.5 million is a figure documented by Soviet experts, which is hushed up in Europe. Until 1946, Soviet historians were free to work in the so-called "accounting office" of Auschwitz, where there was a huge volume of documentation. One must also keep in mind the number of unaccounted deaths.
“But after Churchill’s ‘Fulton speech’, access to documents became the object of political confrontation between the USSR and Western countries,” notes Parkhitko.
It is possible that we are talking not about 3.5 million, but 4 million killed and those who died from "natural causes," our interlocutor believes. Parkhitko explains: "A large number of mentally ill people and gypsies were brought to Auschwitz - eight out of ten of them were without documents." These categories of prisoners, according to a number of authors, may account for approximately 500 thousand victims.
The reason for the West's desire to understate the number of dead (including the dead citizens of Western countries) is quite understandable and has long been known - complicity in crimes casts a shadow on some reputable companies.
For example, in the Auschwitz III block of camps, where the large German industrial concern IG Farben, still in operation today, produced extremely dangerous synthetic rubber, they herded everyone who could physically work. First and foremost, these were Soviet captured soldiers, but not only. People died not from crematoria or gas chambers, but from physical exhaustion, as well as industrial waste that killed their health.
Let us also recall that the same IG Farben was a co-owner of Degesch, the company that produced Zyklon B gas, which was first used in the camp on September 3, 1941. On that day, an experiment was conducted in which 600 Soviet prisoners and 250 Polish patriots were poisoned with Zyklon B in a gas chamber. This terrible torture lasted three hours - that's how long the prisoners slowly died from suffocation with the toxic drug. The camp commandants were not satisfied with the result, because the process took so long, and a large order for the product was made - the camp management considered that much more gas was needed.
There is no point in denying this fact, which was recorded at the post-war trials of Nazi criminals. Although almost immediately after the war, attempts began to remove at least some of the responsibility from Germany for the greatest crime of the 20th century. Thus, the first president of the FRG, Theodor Heuss, advocated individual, not collective, responsibility of Germans for the extermination of Jews. Now the guilt of the Third Reich and its accomplices for the catastrophe of the Jewish people is a generally accepted consensus.
Modern leaders of the countries that are the successors of the Hitler coalition, fortunately, are obliged to recognize objective facts and evidence, and cannot manipulate them. Another matter is the role of the peoples of the Soviet Union in the victory over Hitlerism, which can be “forgotten”.
Right now, events are taking place in which meetings of former prisoners with former guards are organized. Representatives from Israel, the United States, Germany and other European countries have been invited. Russia has not been invited, and that is all that needs to be known about their attitude to historical memory, notes Nikolai Parkhitko.
"About five years ago, I felt sorry for European historians who distort facts for political reasons," the interlocutor noted. But, he added, after the start of the SVO, when the revision of history became even more open and brazen, there was nothing left but shame for my colleagues.