THE LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ


Between 1940 and 1945, over 1.3 million people were deported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Poland. Around 1.1 million lost their lives there.

On 27 January 1945, approximately 7,000 sick and dying people were ‘liberated’ from the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Poland when the Soviet Red Army arrived at the concentration camp. Most of the ‘prisoners’ had been forced to evacuate the camp on death marches, leaving the seriously ill and the dying to their fate.

Hardened Soviet soldiers attempting to help the survivors were shocked and scarred by the scale of Nazi inhumanity.

This group of camps created by the SS was a monstrous killing ground: 300 prison barracks; four ‘shower blocks’ to gas prisoners, (up 6,000 Jews gassed each day) corpse cellars, cremating ovens. Thousands of prisoners were also used for medical experiments by the infamous and demonic camp doctor, Josef Mengele, known as the ‘Angel of Death’.

Approximately 1,000,000 Jews, 70,000 Poles, 25,000 Sinti and Roma, and some 15,000 prisoners of war from the USSR and other countries were murdered at Auschwitz.

As the Nazis fled in defeat, many thousands of deportees were forced on long death marches during the freezing winter months. Cheaper than a bullet, but equally efficient in achieving their goal, those who weren’t murdered for not keeping up died of hunger, cold and exhaustion.

British soldiers, arriving at the camp in April 1945 were met with around 10,000 unburied corpses lying where they had died. They had great difficulty distinguishing the living from the dead. A British medical officer described ‘piles of corpses of varying heights, both inside and outside the barracks, drainage ditches full corpses, and bunks in the barracks packed with dead and dying’.

Here in the Pyrenées-Orientales….

1,556 Jews were arrested here in the Pyrénées-Orientales and Aude and sent to various Nazi death camps. Many of them were already refugees from other parts of France or Europe, sheltering in the *free zone until its occupation.

Historians estimate that just 3% of those subsequently captured in the free zone survived!

READ ABOUT THE MILITIA AND THE CARLINGUE

*The Free Zone
From 1940 until 1942, Paris, the northern, southwestern and Atlantic coastline area of France was occupied by the Germans. A ‘demarcation line’ between North and South left a ‘free zone’ , (zone libre) uncontrolled initially by the occupiers and consisting of approximately one-third of the country. This was also the headquarters of the collaborating Pétain government so freedom was relative! In 1942, when the allies landed in North Africa, Germany extended the occupation to the south in a defensive move, ending the free zone.

RIVESALTES CAMP AND MEMORIAL MUSEUM

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