The Soviet army was the first to liberate the Nazi extermination camps, because the camps were located in occupied Poland and the Red Army reached them first as it advanced from the east. The Soviet liberations took place over six months, from July 1944 to January 1945. Each one revealed the scale of the killing programme to a degree that the Western Allies would not catch up with for a further three or four months.
Majdanek, July 1944
Majdanek was the first major camp to be liberated. Soviet forces of the First Belorussian Front reached the camp on the outskirts of Lublin on 24 July 1944. The SS had attempted to evacuate the camp and to destroy the evidence, but the Soviet advance had been too quick. The gas chambers were intact. The crematorium had been set on fire but the structure was still standing. The warehouses still held the personal possessions of murdered prisoners, including thousands of pairs of shoes.
The Soviet army deliberately preserved Majdanek as evidence. Western journalists were brought to the site within days of liberation. Their reports, the first from a death camp, were widely published, but were often met with disbelief in the Western press, partly because Soviet sources were under suspicion of exaggeration and partly because the scale of what had been described was difficult to accept.
Auschwitz, January 1945
The Soviet 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front reached Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. The SS had evacuated most of the prisoners on the death marches nine days earlier and had destroyed many of the records and dynamited the gas chambers and crematoria. Around 7,000 surviving prisoners were found at the camp, mostly in the infirmary, mostly close to death.
Soviet medical units took immediate charge. Several thousand of the survivors died in the days and weeks after liberation, of starvation, typhus and dysentery. Soviet investigators worked in parallel with the medical effort to document the camp. Photographs and film of the liberation were widely distributed in Soviet media but were less prominent in the Western press until the Western liberations of April 1945.
The 27th of January is now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, by United Nations resolution of 2005.
Other Soviet liberations
The Soviet army also liberated the camps at Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck and other smaller sites in eastern Germany during the months that followed. Each was found largely empty, the prisoners having been evacuated on the death marches westwards. The pattern was now established: the camps reached by the Red Army were the camps where the killing had been done.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards