Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[RIA Novosti] The Poles from among the bandits and robbers, together with the Nazis, killed the prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Auschwitz - the corresponding declassified document was published by the FSB on the eve of the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the largest "death factory" by the Soviet troops.
The German concentration camp "Auschwitz" in Auschwitz has become one of the main symbols of the Holocaust. In 1941-1945, about 1.4 million people died there, of which about 1.1 million were Jews. On January 27, 1945, units of the 1st Ukrainian Front liberated the concentration camp. This date is celebrated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
| This year Russia was uninvited to the commemorative ceremony because of the invasion of Ukraine. See link at the bottom of this post. |
Even before the liberation of Auschwitz, the bodies of the Soviet military counterintelligence Smersh began to collect and document evidence of the crimes of the concentration camp administration and prisoners who agreed to cooperate with the Nazis. In addition to the guards from the local Polish population, the Nazis actively used in their interests "kapos" (from the German "Kameradschaft-Polizei", literally "comradely police"), which included barracks elders, overseers, and senior workers' teams.
The FSB published a document with the story of a former Auschwitz prisoner, senior lieutenant of the Red Army Pavel Gavrish, who was lucky enough to escape from a concentration camp. Since the officer had a good literary style, employees of the Smersh department of the 1st Ukrainian Front in August 1944 asked him to present information about the "death factory" in the form of a brief essay. This document was then transferred to the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the Nazi Invaders and Their Accomplices.
Once in the concentration camp, the prisoner became "a slave with a number pierced on the chest of prisoners of war or on the arm of civilians," Gavrish testified.
| That number corresponded to each slave or prisoner’s IBM computer file, set up with the help of Thomas Watson, then CEO of the company. |
"Together with political prisoners, robbers, murderers and pederasts were thrown into the concentration camp, who were instructed to maintain internal order in the camp," the Soviet officer added.
Internal order and discipline, Gavrish reported, was maintained by the senior barracks (bloc) and senior workers of the teams (kapos), appointed from Germans or Poles, who were serving sentences for banditry, murder and robbery.
According to him, the administration of the concentration camp was faced with the task of destroying as many prisoners as possible, "which was carried out with zeal."
"Only a certain part of the prisoners was employed in the construction of the camp, all other work carried out within the camp did not make any sense. Taking the teams to work, each capo received the task of destroying a certain number of prisoners. When returning to the camp, each team was a funeral procession, carrying 50-100 corpses. Zeal at the same time was due to the fact that the portions of the dead remained for the bloc, the kapos and their henchmen," said Gavrish.
As the officer recalled, "the daily ration of the prisoners consisted of 0.75 liters of soup, 250 grams of ersatz bread and 20 grams of stinky cheese or ersatz margarine, which was not always and not completely managed to be obtained."
Having captured Poland in September 1939 , the German Nazis renamed the Polish city of Auschwitz into Auschwitz, naming the concentration camp created on the personal instructions of the Reichsführer SS Himmler in April 1940.
Initially, political prisoners from among the Poles were kept there. After the German attack on the Soviet Union, captured soldiers of the Red Army began to be sent to the camp, on whom in August 1941 the SS men first experienced gassing. Then "Auschwitz" became the main center for the extermination of Jews by the Nazis and their henchmen. It was a complex of concentration camps, which were based on "Auschwitz I", "Auschwitz II - Birkenau" and "Auschwitz III - Monowitz".
At the beginning of the 20th century, concentration camps were created by Great Britain , the German Empire, and then by Nazi Germany, the USA and a number of other countries. Poland has made a considerable "contribution" to this inhumane practice.
After the defeat of the Red Army near Warsaw and Lvov in the summer of 1919, more than 150,000 Red Army prisoners ended up in Poland. They were concentrated in about 20 camps. The best known of these are the camps in Bialystok, Brest-Litovsk, Wadowice , Domba, Strzalkow and Tuchol.
Due to the insensitive and irresponsible attitude of the Polish authorities in these concentration camps, as a result of cruel treatment of prisoners, complete unsanitary conditions, disease and hunger, according to various estimates, from 20 to 80 thousand soldiers and commanders of the Red Army died.
And a year after the creation by the Nazis of the first concentration camp for political prisoners in Dachau (1933), in 1934 a concentration camp was created in Poland for the extrajudicial detention of political prisoners in Bereza-Kartuzskaya. From 1934 to 1939, opponents of the ruling Pilsudski's regime were kept there in extremely difficult conditions on charges of "anti-state activity": oppositionists, communists, leaders of the Jewish, Ukrainian and Belarusian national movements. During the period of its existence, according to various estimates, 8-10 thousand prisoners passed through this camp. In the fall of 1939, the camp was liberated by units of the Red Army during its "Liberation Campaign".
In Poland, Jews were exterminated not only in concentration camps. On July 10, 1941, during a Jewish pogrom in the town of Jedwabne in the east of the country, Polish nationalists killed, according to various sources, from 340 to 1,500 Jews. For a long time it was believed that the Nazis, who occupied the city at that time, were to blame for that tragedy, but in the 1990s it was proved that the Poles were responsible for what happened. Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski apologized for this crime in 2001, but the current head of state , Andrzej Duda , speaking at an election debate in 2015, said that the Poles allegedly did not participate in the Holocaust, and the accusations of this were false.
In modern Poland, a version is spreading that the mass murder of Jews in Jedwabna in 1941 was committed not by the Poles, but by the Germans, although the Institute of National Remembrance had previously recognized that local residents, and not the Nazi occupiers, were responsible for this crime.
|
