Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. Reference
An 18-year-old Soviet girl is extremely exhausted. The photo was taken during the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in 1945. This is the first German concentration camp, founded on March 22, 1933, near Munich (a city on the Isar River in southern Germany). It housed more than 200 thousand prisoners, according to official data, of which 31,591 prisoners died from disease, malnutrition or committed suicide. The conditions were so terrible that hundreds of people died here every week.
This photo was taken between 1941 and 1943 by the Paris Holocaust Memorial. This shows a German soldier taking aim at a Ukrainian Jew during a mass execution in Vinnitsa (a city located on the banks of the Southern Bug, 199 kilometers southwest of Kyiv). On the back of the photo it was written: “The last Jew of Vinnitsa.”
The Holocaust was the persecution and mass extermination of Jews living in Germany during World War II, from 1933 to 1945.
German soldiers interrogate Jews after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Thousands of people died from disease and starvation in the overcrowded Warsaw ghetto, where the Germans herded more than 3 million Polish Jews back in October 1940.
The uprising against the Nazi occupation of Europe in the Warsaw Ghetto took place on April 19, 1943. During this riot, approximately 7,000 ghetto defenders were killed and approximately 6,000 were burned alive as a result of massive burning of buildings by German troops. The surviving residents, about 15 thousand people, were sent to the Treblinka death camp. On May 16 of the same year, the ghetto was finally liquidated.
The Treblinka death camp was established by the Nazis in occupied Poland, 80 kilometers northeast of Warsaw. During the existence of the camp (from July 22, 1942 to October 1943), about 800 thousand people died in it.
To preserve the memory of tragic events 20th century international public figure Vyacheslav Kantor founded and headed the World Holocaust Forum.
1943 A man takes the bodies of two Jews from the Warsaw ghetto. Every morning, several dozen corpses were removed from the streets. The bodies of Jews who died of starvation were burned in deep pits.
The officially established food standards for the ghetto were designed to allow the inhabitants to die from starvation. In the second half of 1941, the food standard for Jews was 184 kilocalories.
On October 16, 1940, Governor General Hans Frank decided to organize a ghetto, during which the population decreased from 450 thousand to 37 thousand people. The Nazis claimed that Jews were carriers infectious diseases, and their isolation will help protect the rest of the population from epidemics.
German soldiers escort on April 19, 1943 Warsaw ghetto a group of Jews, including small children. This photograph was attached to the report of SS Gruppenführer Stroop to his military commander and was used as evidence in Nuremberg trials in 1945.
After the uprising, the Warsaw ghetto was liquidated. 7 thousand (out of more than 56 thousand) captured Jews were shot, the rest were transported to death camps or concentration camps. The photo shows the ruins of a ghetto destroyed by SS soldiers. The Warsaw ghetto lasted for several years, and during this time 300 thousand Polish Jews died there.
In the second half of 1941, the food standard for Jews was 184 kilocalories.
Mass execution of Jews in Mizoche (urban-type settlement, center of the Mizochsky village council of the Zdolbunovsky district, Rivne region of Ukraine), Ukrainian SSR. In October 1942, the residents of Mizoch opposed the Ukrainian auxiliary units and German policemen who intended to liquidate the ghetto population. Photo courtesy of the Paris Holocaust Memorial.
Deported Jews in the Drancy transit camp, on their way to a German concentration camp, 1942. In July 1942, French police herded more than 13 thousand Jews (including more than 4 thousand children) to the Vel d'Hiv winter velodrome in southwestern Paris, and then sent them to the train terminal in Drancy, northeast of Paris. Paris and deported to the east. Almost no one returned home...
Drancy was a Nazi concentration camp and transit point that existed from 1941 to 1944 in France, used to temporarily hold Jews who were later sent to death camps.
This photo is courtesy of the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It depicts Anne Frank, who in August 1944, along with her family and others, was hiding from the German occupiers. Later, everyone was captured and sent to prisons and concentration camps. Anna died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen (a Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxony, located a mile from the village of Belsen and a few miles southwest of Bergen) at the age of 15. After the posthumous publication of her diary, Frank became a symbol of all Jews killed during World War II.
Arrival of a trainload of Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia at the Auschwitz II extermination camp, also known as Birkenau, in Poland, May 1939.
Auschwitz, Birkenau, Auschwitz-Birkenau - a complex of German concentration camps located in 1940-1945 in the west of the General Government, near the city of Auschwitz, which in 1939 was annexed by Hitler's decree to the territory of the Third Reich.
At Auschwitz II, hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Russians, Gypsies and prisoners of other nationalities were kept in one-story wooden barracks. The number of victims of this camp was more than a million people. New prisoners arrived daily by train at Auschwitz II, where they were divided into four groups. The first - three quarters of all those brought (women, children, old people and all those who were not fit for work) were sent to the gas chambers for several hours. The second was sent to hard labor at various industrial enterprises (most of the prisoners died from disease and beatings). The third group went to various medical experiments with Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the “angel of death.” This group consisted mainly of twins and dwarfs. The fourth consisted primarily of women who were used by the Germans as servants and personal slaves.
14-year-old Cheslava Kwoka. Photo provided State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, was taken by Wilhelm Brasse, who worked as a photographer at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where huge numbers of people, mostly Jews, died during World War II. In December 1942, Polish Catholic Czeslawa was sent to a concentration camp along with her mother. Three months later they both died. In 2005, photographer and former prisoner Brasset described how he photographed Czeslava: “She was young and very scared, she didn’t understand why she was there or what they were telling her. And then the prison guard took a stick and hit her in the face. The girl cried, but could not do anything. I felt as if I had been beaten, but I could not intervene. It would have ended fatally for me."
A victim of Nazi medical experiments that were carried out in the German city of Ravensbrück. The photo, which shows a man's hand with a deep burn from phosphorus, was taken in November 1943. During the experiment, a mixture of phosphorus and rubber was applied to the skin of the test subject, which was then set on fire. After 20 seconds the flame was extinguished with water. After three days, the burn was treated with liquid echinacin, and after two weeks the wound healed.
Josef Mengele was a German doctor who conducted experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz camp during World War II. He personally selected prisoners for his experiments; on his orders, more than 400 thousand people were sent to the gas chambers of the death camp. After the war, he moved from Germany to Latin America (fearing persecution), where he died in 1979.
Jewish prisoners in Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps in Germany, located near Weimar in Thuringia. Many tests were carried out on the prisoners medical experiments, as a result of which the majority died a painful death. People were infected with typhus, tuberculosis and other dangerous diseases (to test the effect of vaccines), which later almost instantly developed into epidemics due to overcrowding in the barracks, insufficient hygiene, poor nutrition, and because all this infection did not was amenable to treatment.
There is huge camp documentation on hormonal experiments carried out by secret order of the SS by Dr. Karl Wernet - he performed implantation operations on homosexual men groin area capsules with a “male hormone” that was supposed to make them heterosexuals.
American soldiers inspect carriages containing the bodies of those who died at the Dachau concentration camp on May 3, 1945. During the war, Dachau was known as the most sinister concentration camp, where the most sophisticated medical experiments were carried out on prisoners, which many high-ranking Nazis came regularly to observe.
An exhausted Frenchman sits among the dead at Dora-Mittelbau, a Nazi concentration camp established on August 28, 1943, located 5 kilometers from the city of Nordhausen in Thuringia, Germany. Dora-Mittelbau is a subdivision of the Buchenwald camp.
The bodies of the dead are piled up against the wall of the crematorium in German concentration camp"Dachau". The photo was taken on May 14, 1945 by soldiers of the US 7th Army who entered the camp.
Throughout the history of Auschwitz, there were about 700 escape attempts, 300 of which were successful. If someone escaped, then all his relatives were arrested and sent to the camp, and all prisoners from his block were killed - this was the most effective method, who thwarted escape attempts. January 27 is the official Holocaust Remembrance Day.
An American soldier inspects thousands of gold wedding rings that were taken from Jews by the Nazis and hidden in the salt mines of Heilbronn (a city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany).
American soldiers examine lifeless bodies in a crematorium oven, April 1945.
A pile of ashes and bones at the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. Photo dated April 25, 1945. In 1958, a memorial complex was founded on the territory of the camp - in place of the barracks, only a foundation laid with cobblestones remained, with a memorial inscription (the number of the barracks and who was in it) at the place where the building had previously been located. Also, the building of the crematorium has survived to this day, in the walls of which there are plaques with the names of different languages(relatives of the victims perpetuated their memory), observation towers and several rows of barbed wire. The entrance to the camp lies through the gate, untouched since those terrible times, the inscription on which reads: “Jedem das Seine” (“To each his own”).
Prisoners greet American soldiers near the electric fence at the Dachau concentration camp (one of the first concentration camps in Germany).
General Dwight D. Eisenhower and other American officers at the Ohrdruf concentration camp shortly after its liberation in April 1945. When the American army began to approach the camp, the guards shot the remaining prisoners. The Ohrdruf camp was created in November 1944 as a subdivision of Buchenwald to house prisoners forced to build bunkers, tunnels and mines.
A dying prisoner in a concentration camp in Nordhausen, Germany, April 18, 1945.
Death march of prisoners from the Dachau camp through the streets of Grunwald on April 29, 1945. When the Allied forces went on the offensive, thousands of prisoners were moved from remote prisoner of war camps into the German interior. Thousands of prisoners who could not stand such a road were shot on the spot.
American soldiers walk past corpses (more than 3 thousand bodies) lying on the ground behind the barracks in Nazi concentration camp in Nordhausen, April 17, 1945. The camp is located 112 kilometers west of Leipzig. The US Army found only a small group of survivors.
The lifeless body of a prisoner lies near a carriage near the Dachau concentration camp, May 1945.
Soldiers-liberators of the Third Army under the command of Lieutenant General George S. Paton on the territory of the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 11, 1945.
On the way to the Austrian border, soldiers of the 12th Armored Division under the command of General Patch witnessed terrible sights that took place in the prisoner of war camp at Schwabmünchen, southwest of Munich. More than 4 thousand Jews of different nationalities were kept in the camp. The prisoners were burned alive by the guards, who set fire to the barracks with the people sleeping in them and shot at anyone who tried to escape. The photo shows the bodies of some Jews found by soldiers of the US 7th Army in Schwabmunich, May 1, 1945.
A dead prisoner lies on a barbed wire fence at Leipzig Thekle (a concentration camp part of Buchenwald).
By order of the American army, German soldiers carried the bodies of victims of Nazi repression from the Austrian concentration camp Lambach and buried them on May 6, 1945. The camp housed 18 thousand prisoners, with 1,600 people living in each barracks. The buildings had no beds or any sanitary conditions, and every day between 40 and 50 prisoners died here.
A pensive man sits next to a charred body at the Thekla camp near Leipzig, April 18, 1954. Workers at the Tekla plant were locked in one of the buildings and burned alive. The fire claimed the lives of about 300 people. Those who managed to escape were killed by members of the Hitler Youth, a youth paramilitary National Socialist organization led by the Reich Youth Führer (the highest position in the Hitler Youth).
The charred bodies of political prisoners lie at the entrance to a barn in Gardelegen (a city in Germany, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt) on April 16, 1945. They died at the hands of the SS men, who set fire to the barn. Those trying to escape were overtaken by Nazi bullets. Of the 1,100 prisoners, only twelve managed to escape. 
Human remains at the German concentration camp at Nordhausen, discovered by soldiers of the US Army's 3rd Armored Division on April 25, 1945.
When American soldiers liberated prisoners from the German Dachau concentration camp, they killed several SS men and threw their bodies into the moat that surrounded the camp.
Lt. Col. Ed Sayler of Louisville, Kentucky, stands among the bodies of Holocaust victims and addresses 200 German civilians. The photo was taken at the Landsberg concentration camp, May 15, 1945.
Hungry and extremely malnourished prisoners in the Ebensee concentration camp, where the Germans carried out “scientific” experiments. Photo taken on May 7, 1945.
One of the prisoners recognizes the former guard who brutally beat prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Thuringia.
The lifeless bodies of exhausted prisoners lie on the territory of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The British army discovered the bodies of 60 thousand men, women and children who had died from starvation and various diseases.
SS men pile the bodies of the dead into a truck at the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen on April 17, 1945. British soldiers with guns stand in the background.
Residents of the German city of Ludwigslust inspect a nearby concentration camp, May 6, 1945, on the territory of which the bodies of victims of Nazi repression were discovered. In one of the pits there were 300 emaciated bodies.
Many decomposing bodies were found by British soldiers in the German concentration camp Bergen-Belsen after its liberation on April 20, 1945. About 60 thousand civilians died from typhus, typhoid fever and dysentery.
Arrest of Josef Kramer, commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, April 28, 1945. Kramer, nicknamed the "Beast of Belsen", was executed after his trial in December 1945.
SS women unload the bodies of victims at the Belsen concentration camp on April 28, 1945. British soldiers with rifles stand on a pile of earth that will be used to fill a mass grave.
An SS man is among hundreds of corpses in a mass grave of concentration camp victims in Belsen, Germany, April 1945.
About 100 thousand people died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp alone.
A German woman covers her son's eyes with her hand as she walks past the exhumed bodies of 57 Soviet citizens who were killed by the SS and buried in a mass grave shortly before the arrival of the American army.
There is not a person in the world today who does not know what a concentration camp is. During the Second World War, these institutions, created to isolate political prisoners, prisoners of war and persons who posed a threat to the state, turned into houses of death and torture. Not many who ended up there managed to survive the harsh conditions; millions were tortured and died. Years after the end of the most terrible and bloody war in the history of mankind, memories of the Nazi concentration camps still cause trembling in the body, horror in the soul and tears in people’s eyes.
What is a concentration camp
Concentration camps are special prisons created during military operations on the territory of the country, in accordance with special legislative documents.
There were few repressed people present in them; the main contingent were representatives of lower races, according to the Nazis: Slavs, Jews, Gypsies and other nations subject to extermination. For this purpose, the Nazi concentration camps were equipped by various means, with the help of which people were killed in tens and hundreds.
They were destroyed morally and physically: raped, experimented on, burned alive, poisoned gas chambers Oh. Why and for what was justified by the ideology of the Nazis. Prisoners were considered unworthy to live in the world of the “chosen ones.” The chronicle of the Holocaust of those times contains descriptions of thousands of incidents confirming the atrocities.
The truth about them became known from books, documentaries, stories of those who managed to become free and get out of there alive.
The institutions built during the war were conceived by the Nazis as places of mass extermination, for which they received their true name - death camps. They were equipped with gas chambers, gas chambers, soap factories, crematoria where hundreds of people could be burned a day, and other similar means for murder and torture.
No fewer people died from exhausting work, hunger, cold, punishment for the slightest disobedience and medical experiments.
Living conditions
For many people who passed the “road of death” beyond the walls of concentration camps, there was no turning back. Upon arrival at the place of detention, they were examined and “sorted”: children, old people, disabled people, wounded, mentally retarded and Jews were subjected to immediate destruction. Next, people “suitable” for work were distributed among men’s and women’s barracks.
Most of the buildings were built on a quick fix, often they did not have a foundation or were converted from barns, stables, and warehouses. They had bunks in them, in the middle of the huge room there was one stove for heating in winter, there were no latrines. But there were rats.
Roll call, carried out at any time of the year, was considered a difficult test. People had to stand for hours in the rain, snow, and hail, and then return to cold, barely heated rooms. It is not surprising that many died from infectious and respiratory diseases and inflammation.
Each registered prisoner had a serial number on his chest (in Auschwitz he was tattooed) and a patch on his camp uniform indicating the “article” under which he was imprisoned in the camp. A similar winkel (colored triangle) was sewn onto left side chest and right knee of the trouser leg.
The colors were distributed as follows:
- red - political prisoner;
- green - convicted of a criminal offense;
- black - dangerous, dissident persons;
- pink - persons with non-traditional sexual orientation;
- brown - gypsies.
Jews, if left alive, wore a yellow winkel and a hexagonal "Star of David". If a prisoner was considered a “racial polluter,” a black border was sewn around the triangle. Persons prone to escape wore a red and white target on their chest and back. The latter faced execution for just one glance towards a gate or wall.
Executions were carried out daily. Prisoners were shot, hanged, and beaten with whips for the slightest disobedience to the guards. Gas chambers, whose operating principle was to simultaneously exterminate several dozen people, operated around the clock in many concentration camps. Prisoners who helped remove the corpses of those strangled were also rarely left alive.
Gas chamber
The prisoners were also mocked morally, erasing their human dignity under conditions in which they ceased to feel like members of society and just people.
What did they feed?
In the early years of the concentration camps, the food provided to political prisoners, traitors and “dangerous elements” was quite high in calories. The Nazis understood that prisoners must have the strength to work, and at that time many sectors of the economy relied on their labor.
The situation changed in 1942-43, when the bulk of the prisoners were Slavs. If the diet of the German repressed was 700 kcal per day, the Poles and Russians did not receive even 500 kcal.
The diet consisted of:
- a liter per day of a herbal drink called “coffee”;
- water soup without fat, the basis of which was vegetables (mostly rotten) - 1 liter;
- bread (stale, moldy);
- sausages (approximately 30 grams);
- fat (margarine, lard, cheese) - 30 grams.
The Germans could count on sweets: jam or preserves, potatoes, cottage cheese and even fresh meat. They received special rations, which included cigarettes, sugar, goulash, dry broth, etc.
Since 1943, when there was a turning point in the Great Patriotic War and Soviet troops liberated European countries from German invaders; concentration camp prisoners were massacred to hide traces of crimes. Since that time, in many camps the already meager rations were cut, and in some institutions they stopped feeding people completely.
The most terrible tortures and experiments in human history
Concentration camps will forever remain in human history as places where the Gestapo carried out the most terrible tortures and medical experiments.
The task of the latter was considered to be “helping the army”: doctors determined the boundaries of human capabilities, created new types of weapons, drugs that could help the fighters of the Reich.
Almost 70% of the experimental subjects did not survive such executions; almost all turned out to be incapacitated or crippled.
Above women
One of the main goals of the SS men was to cleanse the world of non-Aryan nations. To achieve this, experiments were carried out on women in the camps to find the easiest and cheapest method of sterilization.
Representatives of the fairer sex had special chemical solutions infused into their uterus and fallopian tubes, designed to block the functioning of the reproductive system. Most of experimental subjects died after such a procedure, the rest were killed in order to examine the condition of the genital organs during autopsy.
Women were often turned into sex slaves, forced to work in brothels and brothels run by the camps. Most of them left the establishments dead, having not survived not only huge amount“clients”, but also monstrous bullying of oneself.
Over children
The purpose of these experiments was to create a superior race. Thus, children with mental disabilities and genetic diseases were subjected to forced death (euthanasia) so that they would not have the opportunity to further reproduce “inferior” offspring.
Other children were placed in special “nurseries”, where they were raised in home conditions and strict patriotic sentiments. They were periodically exposed to ultraviolet rays so that the hair acquires a light shade.
Some of the most famous and monstrous experiments on children are those carried out on twins, representing an inferior race. They tried to change the color of their eyes by injecting them with drugs, after which they died from pain or remained blind.
There were attempts to artificially create Siamese twins, that is, sew children together and transplant each other's body parts into them. There are records of viruses and infections being administered to one of the twins and further study of the condition of both. If one of the couple died, the other was also killed in order to compare the condition internal organs and systems.
Children born in the camp were also subject to strict selection, almost 90% of them were killed immediately or sent for experiments. Those who managed to survive were brought up and “Germanized.”
Above men
Representatives of the stronger sex were subjected to the most cruel and terrible torture and experiments. To create and test drugs that improve blood clotting, which were needed by the military at the front, men were inflicted with gunshot wounds, after which observations were made about the speed of bleeding cessation.
The tests included studying the effect of sulfonamides - antimicrobial substances designed to prevent the development of blood poisoning in front conditions. To do this, prisoners were injured in body parts and bacteria, fragments, and earth were injected into the incisions, and then the wounds were stitched up. Another type of experiment is ligation of veins and arteries on both sides of the wound.
Means for recovery from chemical burns were created and tested. The men were doused with a composition identical to that found in phosphorus bombs or mustard gas, which was used to poison enemy “criminals” and the civilian population of cities during the occupation at that time.
Attempts to create vaccines against malaria and typhus played a major role in drug experiments. The experimental subjects were injected with the infection, and then were given test compounds to neutralize it. Some prisoners were given no immune protection at all, and they died in terrible agony.
To study the human body's ability to resist low temperatures and to recover from significant hypothermia, men were placed in ice baths or driven naked into the cold outside. If after such torture the prisoner had signs of life, he was subjected to a resuscitation procedure, after which few managed to recover.
Basic measures for resurrection: irradiation with ultraviolet lamps, having sex, introducing boiling water into the body, placing in a bath with warm water.
In some concentration camps, attempts were made to convert sea water to drinking water. It was processed in different ways, and then given to prisoners, observing the body's reaction. They also experimented with poisons, adding them to food and drinks.
Attempts to regenerate bone and nerve tissue are considered one of the most terrible experiences. During the research, joints and bones were broken, their fusion was observed, nerve fibers were removed, and joints were swapped.
Almost 80% of the experiment participants died during the experiments from unbearable pain or blood loss. The rest were killed in order to study the results of the research “from the inside.” Only a few survived such abuses.
List and description of death camps
Concentration camps existed in many countries of the world, including the USSR, and were intended for a narrow circle of prisoners. However, only Nazi ones received the name “death camps” for the atrocities carried out in them after Adolf Hitler came to power and the beginning of the Second World War.
Buchenwald
Located in the vicinity of the German city of Weimar, this camp, founded in 1937, has become one of the most famous and largest of its kind. It consisted of 66 branches where prisoners worked for the benefit of the Reich.
Over the years of its existence, about 240 thousand people visited its barracks, of which 56 thousand prisoners officially died from murder and torture, among whom were representatives of 18 nations. How many of them there actually were is not known for certain.
Buchenwald was liberated on April 10, 1945. On the site of the camp, a memorial complex was created in memory of its victims and hero-liberators.
Auschwitz
In Germany it is better known as Auschwitz or Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was a complex that occupied a vast area near Polish Krakow. The concentration camp consisted of 3 main parts: a large administrative complex, the camp itself, where torture and massacres of prisoners were carried out, and a group of 45 small complexes with factories and working areas.
According to official data alone, the victims of Auschwitz were more than 4 million people, representatives of “inferior races”, according to the Nazis.
The “death camp” was liberated on January 27, 1945 by troops Soviet Union. Two years later, the State Museum was opened on the territory of the main complex.
It features displays of things that belonged to prisoners: toys they made from wood, pictures, and other crafts that were exchanged for food with passing civilians. Scenes of interrogation and torture by the Gestapo are stylized, reflecting the violence of the Nazis.
The drawings and inscriptions on the walls of the barracks, made by prisoners doomed to death, remained unchanged. As the Poles themselves say today, Auschwitz is the bloodiest and most terrible point on the map of their homeland.
Sobibor
Another concentration camp on Polish territory, created in May 1942. The prisoners were mainly representatives Jewish nation, the number of killed is about 250 thousand people.
One of the few institutions where a prisoner uprising took place in October 1943, after which it was closed and razed to the ground.
Majdanek
The year the camp was founded is considered to be 1941; it was built in the suburbs of Lublin, Poland. It had 5 branches in the south-eastern part of the country.
Over the years of its existence, about 1.5 million people of different nationalities died in its cells.
The surviving prisoners were released by Soviet soldiers on July 23, 1944, and 2 years later a museum and research institute were opened on its territory.
Salaspils
The camp, known as Kurtengorf, was built in October 1941 in Latvia, near Riga. It had several branches, the most famous being Ponar. The main prisoners were children on whom medical experiments were carried out.
IN last years prisoners were used as blood donors for wounded German soldiers. The camp was burned down in August 1944 by the Germans, who were forced by the advance of Soviet troops to evacuate the remaining prisoners to other institutions.
Ravensbrück
Built in 1938 near Fürstenberg. Before the start of the war of 1941-1945, it was exclusively for women; it consisted mainly of partisans. After 1941 it was completed, after which it received a men's barracks and a children's barracks for young girls.
Over the years of “work” the number of his captives amounted to more than 132 thousand representatives of the fairer sex different ages, of which almost 93 thousand died. The release of prisoners took place on April 30, 1945 by Soviet troops.
Mauthausen
Austrian concentration camp, built in July 1938. At first it was one of the large branches of Dachau, the first such institution in Germany, located near Munich. But since 1939 it functioned independently.
In 1940, it merged with the Gusen death camp, after which it became one of the largest concentration settlements in Nazi Germany.
During the war years, there were about 335 thousand natives of 15 European countries, 122 thousand of whom were brutally tortured and killed. The prisoners were released by the Americans, who entered the camp on May 5, 1945. A few years later, 12 states created a memorial museum here and erected monuments to the victims of Nazism.
Irma Grese - Nazi overseer
The horrors of the concentration camps imprinted in the memory of people and the annals of history the names of individuals who can hardly be called human. One of them is considered to be Irma Grese, a young and beautiful German woman whose actions do not fit into the nature of human actions.
Today, many historians and psychiatrists are trying to explain her phenomenon by the suicide of her mother or the propaganda of fascism and Nazism characteristic of that time, but it is impossible or difficult to find a justification for her actions.
Already at the age of 15, the young girl was part of the Hitler Youth movement, a German youth organization whose main principle was racial purity. At the age of 20 in 1942, having changed several professions, Irma became a member of one of the SS auxiliary units. Her first place of work was the Ravensbrück concentration camp, which was later replaced by Auschwitz, where she acted as second in command after the commandant.
The abuse of the “Blonde Devil,” as Grese was called by the prisoners, was felt by thousands of captive women and men. This “Beautiful Monster” destroyed people not only physically, but also morally. She beat a prisoner to death with a braided whip, which she carried with her, and enjoyed shooting prisoners. One of the favorite pastimes of the “Angel of Death” was setting dogs on captives, who were first starved for several days.
Irma Grese's last place of service was Bergen-Belsen, where, after its liberation, she was captured by the British military. The tribunal lasted 2 months, the verdict was clear: “Guilty, subject to death by hanging.”
An iron core, or perhaps ostentatious bravado, was present in the woman even on the last night of her life - she sang songs until the morning and laughed loudly, which, according to psychologists, hid the fear and hysteria of the upcoming death - too easy and simple for her.
Josef Mengele - experiments on people
The name of this man still causes horror among people, since it was he who came up with the most painful and scary experiences over the human body and psyche.
According to official data alone, tens of thousands of prisoners became its victims. He personally sorted the victims upon arrival at the camp, then they were subjected to a thorough medical examination and terrible experiments.
The “Angel of Death from Auschwitz” managed to avoid a fair trial and imprisonment during the liberation of European countries from the Nazis. For a long time he lived in Latin America, carefully hiding from his pursuers and avoiding capture.
This doctor is responsible for the anatomical dissection of living newborns and castration of boys without the use of anesthesia, experiments on twins and dwarfs. There are reports of women being tortured for sterilization using x-ray radiation. They were assessed for endurance human body when exposed to electric current.
Unfortunately for many prisoners of war, Josef Mengele still managed to avoid fair punishment. After 35 years of living under false names and constantly running away from his pursuers, he drowned in the ocean, losing control of his body as a result of a stroke. The worst thing is that until the end of his life he was firmly convinced that “in his entire life he had never personally harmed anyone.”
Concentration camps were present in many countries around the world. The most famous for the Soviet people was the Gulag, created in the first years of the Bolsheviks coming to power. In total, there were more than a hundred of them and, according to the NKVD, in 1922 alone they housed more than 60 thousand “dissidents” and “dangerous to the authorities” prisoners.
But only the Nazis made the word “concentration camp” go down in history as a place where people were massively tortured and exterminated. A place of abuse and humiliation committed by people against humanity.
The fight for life: the survival of children in concentration camps krezova wrote in May 18th, 2015
The Second World War claimed the lives of millions of people. The Nazis did not spare anyone: women, old people, children... Such a terrible and hopeless Famine in besieged Leningrad. Constant Fear. For yourself, for your loved ones, for a future that may not exist. Never. What the witnesses and participants in the bloody meat grinder perpetrated by the Third Reich experienced cannot be experienced by anyone ever again.
Many children ended up with adults in concentration camps, where they were most vulnerable to the atrocities committed by the Nazis. How did they survive? What conditions were you in? This is their story.
Children's camp Salaspils –
Whoever saw it will not forget.
There are no more terrible graves in the world,
There was once a camp here -
Salaspils death camp.
A child's cry is drowned out
And melted away like an echo,
Grief in mournful silence
Floats over the Earth
Above you and above me.
On a granite slab
Place your candy...
He was like you as a child,
He loved them just like you,
Salaspils killed him.
The children were taken away with their parents - some to concentration camps, some to forced labor to the Baltic states, Poland, Germany or Austria. The Nazis drove thousands of children to concentration camps. Torn away from their parents, experiencing all the horrors of concentration camps, most of them died in gas chambers. These were Jewish children, children of executed partisans, children of murdered Soviet party and government workers.
But, for example, the anti-fascists of the Buchenwald concentration camp managed to place many children in a separate barracks. The solidarity of adults protected children from the most terrible abuses inflicted by SS bandits and from being sent for liquidation. Thanks to this, 904 children were able to survive in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Fascism has no age limit. Everyone was subjected to the most terrible experiences, everyone was shot and burned in gas oven. There was a separate concentration camp for child donors. Blood was taken from children for Nazi soldiers. Most of the guys died due to exhaustion or lack of blood. It is impossible to establish the exact number of children killed.
The first child prisoners ended up in fascist camps already in 1939. These were the children of gypsies who, together with their mothers, arrived by transport from the Austrian state of Burgenland. Jewish mothers were also thrown into the camp with their children. After the outbreak of the Second World War, mothers and children arrived from countries subject to fascist occupation - first from Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, then from Holland, Belgium, France and Yugoslavia. Often the mother died and the child was left alone. To get rid of children deprived of their mothers, they were sent by transport to Bernburg or Auschwitz. There they were destroyed in gas chambers.
Very often, when SS gangs captured a village, they killed most of the people on the spot, and the children were sent to “orphanages”, where they were destroyed anyway.
What I found on one site dedicated to the events of the Second World War:
“Children were forbidden to cry, and they forgot how to laugh. There were no clothes or shoes for the children. The prisoners’ clothes were too big for them, but they were not allowed to alter them. Children in these clothes looked especially pitiful. The huge wooden shoes were too big for them lost, which also resulted in punishment.
If an orphaned little creature became attached to a prisoner, she considered herself his camp mother - caring for him, raising him and protecting him. Their relationship was no less cordial than that between mother and child. And if a child was sent to die in a gas chamber, then the despair of his camp mother, who saved his life with her sacrifices and hardships, knew no bounds. After all, many women and mothers were supported precisely by the knowledge that they had to take care of the child. And when they were deprived of a child, they were deprived of the meaning of life.
All women in the block felt responsible for the children. During the day, when relatives and camp mothers were at work, the children were looked after by those on duty. And the children willingly helped them. How great was the child’s joy when he was allowed to “help” bring bread! Toys for children were prohibited. But how little a child needs to play! His toys were buttons, pebbles, empty matchboxes, colored threads, spools of thread. A planed piece of wood was especially expensive. But all the toys had to be hidden; the child could only play in secret, otherwise the guard would take away even these primitive toys.
In their games, children imitate the world of adults. Today they play “mothers and daughters”, “kindergarten”, “school”. Children of war also played, but in their games there was what they saw in the terrible world of adults around them: selection for gas chambers or standing on the ramp, death. As soon as they were warned that the warden was coming, they hid the toys in their pockets and ran to their corner.
Children school age secretly taught reading, writing and arithmetic. Of course, there were no textbooks, but the prisoners found a way out here too. Letters and numbers were cut out from cardboard or wrapping paper, which was thrown away when parcels were delivered, and notebooks were sewn together. Deprived of any communication with the outside world, the children had no idea about the simplest things. It took a lot of patience while learning. Using cut-out pictures from illustrated magazines, which occasionally ended up in the camp with new arrivals and were taken from them upon arrival, they were explained to them what a tram, a city, mountains or sea was. The children were understanding and learned with great interest."
It was the teenagers who had the hardest time. They remembered peacetime, a happy life in the family.... Girls at the age of 12 were taken to work in production, where they died of tuberculosis and exhaustion. Boys were taken before they turned twelve.
Here is the recollection of one of the Auschwitz prisoners who had to work in the Sonderkommando: “In broad daylight, six hundred Jewish boys aged from twelve to eighteen were brought to our square. They wore long, very thin prison robes and boots with wooden soles. The camp commander ordered them to undress. The children noticed smoke coming from the chimney and immediately realized that they were going to be killed. In horror, they began to run around the square and tear out their hair in despair. Many were crying and calling for help.
Finally, overwhelmed by fear, they undressed. Naked and barefoot, they huddled together to avoid the guards' blows. One daredevil approached the head of the camp who was standing nearby and asked to save his life - he was ready to do any hard work. The answer was a blow to the head with a baton.
Some boys ran up to the Jews from the Sonderkommando, threw themselves on their necks, and begged for salvation. Others ran naked into different sides looking for a way out. The chief called another SS guard armed with a baton.
The sonorous boyish voices became louder and louder until they merged into one terrible howl, which could probably be heard far around. We stood literally paralyzed by these screams and sobs. And self-satisfied smiles wandered on the faces of the SS men. With the air of winners, without showing the slightest signs of compassion, they drove the boys into the bunker with terrible blows of their batons.
Many children were still running around the square in a desperate attempt to escape. The SS men, giving blows right and left, chased them until they forced the last boy to enter the bunker. You should have seen their joy! Don’t they have children of their own?”
Children without childhood. Unhappy victims of a disastrous war. Remember these boys and girls, they also gave us life and a future, like all the victims of World War II. Just remember.
Instead of a preface:
"When there were no gas chambers, we shot on Wednesdays and Fridays. The children tried to hide on these days. Now the crematorium ovens work day and night and the children no longer hide. The children are used to it.
- This is the first eastern subgroup.
- How are you, children?
- How do you live, children?
- We live well, our health is good. Come.
- I don’t need to go to the gas station, I can still give blood.
“The rats ate my rations, so I didn’t bleed.”
- I am assigned to load coal into the crematorium tomorrow.
- And I can donate blood.
- And I...
Take it.
- They don't know what it is?
- They forgot.
- Eat, children! Eat!
- Why didn’t you take it?
- Wait, I'll take it.
- You might not get it.
- Lie down, it doesn’t hurt, it’s like falling asleep. Get down!
- What's wrong with them?
- Why did they lie down?
“The children probably thought they were given poison...”
A group of Soviet prisoners of war behind barbed wire
Majdanek. Poland
The girl is a prisoner of the Croatian concentration camp Jasenovac
KZ Mauthausen, jugendliche
Children of Buchenwald
Joseph Mengele and child
Photo taken by me from Nuremberg materials
Children of Buchenwald
Mauthausen children show numbers etched into their hands
Treblinka
Two sources. One says that this is Majdanek, the other says Auschwitz
Some creatures use this photo as “proof” of hunger in Ukraine. It is not surprising that it is from Nazi crimes that they draw “inspiration” for their “revelations”
These are the children released in Salaspils
“Since the fall of 1942, masses of women, old people, and children from the occupied regions of the USSR: Leningrad, Kalinin, Vitebsk, Latgale were forcibly brought to the Salaspils concentration camp. Children from infancy to 12 years old were forcibly taken away from their mothers and kept in 9 barracks of which the so-called 3 sick leaves, 2 for crippled children and 4 barracks for healthy children.
The permanent population of children in Salaspils was more than 1,000 people during 1943 and 1944. Their systematic extermination took place there by:
A) organizing a blood factory for the needs of the German army, blood was taken from both adults and healthy children, including babies, until they fainted, after which the sick children were taken to the so-called hospital, where they died;
B) gave children poisoned coffee;
C) children with measles were bathed, from which they died;
D) they injected children with child, female and even horse urine. Many children's eyes festered and leaked;
D) all children suffered from dysenteric diarrhea and dystrophy;
E) naked children in winter time they were driven to a bathhouse through the snow at a distance of 500-800 meters and kept in barracks naked for 4 days;
3) children who were crippled or injured were taken away to be shot.
Mortality among children from the above causes averaged 300-400 per month during 1943/44. to the month of June.
According to preliminary data, over 500 children were exterminated in the Salaspils concentration camp in 1942, and in 1943/44. more than 6,000 people.
During 1943/44 More than 3,000 people who survived and endured torture were taken from the concentration camp. For this purpose, a children's market was organized in Riga at 5 Gertrudes Street, where they were sold into slavery for 45 marks per summer period.
Some of the children were placed in children's camps organized for this purpose after May 1, 1943 - in Dubulti, Bulduri, Saulkrasti. After this, the German fascists continued to supply the kulaks of Latvia with slaves of Russian children from the above-mentioned camps and export them directly to the volosts of the Latvian counties, selling them for 45 Reichsmarks over the summer period.
Most of these children who were taken out and given away to be raised died because... were easily susceptible to all kinds of diseases after losing blood in the Salaspils camp.
On the eve of the expulsion of German fascists from Riga, on October 4-6, they loaded infants and small children under 4 years of age from Riga onto the ship "Menden". orphanage and the Mayor's orphanage, where the children of executed parents were kept, who came from the dungeons of the Gestapo, prefectures, prisons and partly from the Salaspils camp, and 289 small children were exterminated on that ship.
They were driven away by the Germans to Libau, an orphanage for infants located there. Children from Baldonsky and Grivsky orphanages; nothing is known about their fate yet.
Not stopping at these atrocities, the German fascists in 1944 sold low-quality products in Riga stores only using children's cards, in particular milk with some kind of powder. Why did small children die in droves? More than 400 children died in the Riga Children's Hospital alone in 9 months of 1944, including 71 children in September.
In these orphanages, the methods of raising and maintaining children were police and under the supervision of the commandant of the Salaspils concentration camp, Krause, and another German, Schaefer, who went to the children's camps and houses where the children were kept for “inspection.”
It was also established that in the Dubulti camp, children were put in a punishment cell. To do this, the former head of the Benoit camp resorted to the assistance of the German SS police.
Senior NKVD operative officer, security captain /Murman/
Children were brought from the eastern lands occupied by the Germans: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine. Children ended up in Latvia with their mothers, where they were then forcibly separated. Mothers were used as free work force. Older children were also used in various kinds of auxiliary work.
According to the People's Commissariat of Education of the LSSR, which investigated the facts of the abduction of civilians into German slavery, as of April 3, 1945, it is known that 2,802 children were distributed from the Salaspils concentration camp during the German occupation:
1) on kulak farms - 1,564 people.
2) to children's camps - 636 people.
3) taken into care by individual citizens - 602 people.
The list is compiled on the basis of data from the card index of the Social Department of Internal Affairs of the Latvian General Directorate “Ostland”. Based on the same file, it was revealed that children were forced to work from the age of five.
IN last days during their stay in Riga in October 1944, the Germans broke into orphanages and houses infants, children were taken into apartments, driven to the port of Riga, where they were loaded like cattle into the coal mines of steamships.
Through mass executions in the vicinity of Riga alone, the Germans killed about 10,000 children, whose corpses were burned. 17,765 children were killed in mass shootings.
Based on the investigation materials for other cities and counties of the LSSR, the following number of exterminated children was established:
Abrensky district - 497
Ludza County - 732
Rezekne County and Rezekne - 2,045, incl. through Rezekne prison more than 1,200
Madona County - 373
Daugavpils - 3,960, incl. through Daugavpils prison 2,000
Daugavpils district - 1,058
Valmiera County - 315
Jelgava - 697
Ilukstsky district - 190
Bauska County - 399
Valka County - 22
Cesis County - 32
Jekabpils County - 645
Total - 10,965 people.
In Riga, dead children were buried in the Pokrovskoye, Tornakalnskoye and Ivanovskoye cemeteries, as well as in the forest near the Salaspils camp."
In the ditch
The bodies of two child prisoners before the funeral. Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. 04/17/1945
Children behind the wire
Soviet child prisoners of the 6th Finnish concentration camp in Petrozavodsk
“The girl who is second from the post on the right in the photo - Klavdia Nyuppieva - published her memoirs many years later.
“I remember how people fainted from the heat in the so-called bathhouse, and then they were doused cold water. I remember the disinfection of the barracks, after which there was a noise in the ears and many had nosebleeds, and that steam room where all our rags were processed with great “diligence.” One day the steam room burned down, depriving many people of their last clothes.”
The Finns shot prisoners in front of children and administered corporal punishment to women, children and the elderly, regardless of age. She also said that the Finns shot young guys before leaving Petrozavodsk and that her sister was saved simply by a miracle. According to available Finnish documents, only seven men were shot for attempting to escape or other crimes. During the conversation, it turned out that the Sobolev family was one of those who were taken from Zaonezhye. It was difficult for Soboleva’s mother and her six children. Claudia said that their cow was taken away from them, they were deprived of the right to receive food for a month, then, in the summer of 1942, they were transported on a barge to Petrozavodsk and assigned to concentration camp number 6, in the 125th barrack. The mother was immediately taken to the hospital. Claudia recalled with horror the disinfection carried out by the Finns. People burned out in the so-called bathhouse, and then they were doused with cold water. The food was bad, the food was spoiled, the clothes were unusable.
Only at the end of June 1944 were they able to leave the barbed wire of the camp. There were six Sobolev sisters: 16-year-old Maria, 14-year-old Antonina, 12-year-old Raisa, nine-year-old Claudia, six-year-old Evgenia and very little Zoya, she was not yet three years old.
Worker Ivan Morekhodov spoke about the attitude of the Finns towards the prisoners: “There was little food, and it was bad. The baths were terrible. The Finns showed no pity.”
In a Finnish concentration camp
Auschwitz (Auschwitz)
Photos of 14-year-old Czeslava Kvoka
The photographs of 14-year-old Czeslawa Kwoka, on loan from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, were taken by Wilhelm Brasse, who worked as a photographer at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where about 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, died from repression during World War II. In December 1942, Polish Catholic Czeslawa, originally from the town of Wolka Zlojecka, was sent to Auschwitz along with her mother. Three months later they both died. In 2005, photographer (and fellow prisoner) Brasse described how he photographed Czeslava: “She was so young and so scared. The girl did not understand why she was here and did not understand what was being said to her. And then the kapo (prison guard) took a stick and hit her in the face. This German woman simply took out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful, young and innocent creature. She cried, but could not do anything. Before being photographed, the girl wiped tears and blood from her broken lip. Frankly, I felt as if I had been beaten, but I could not intervene. It would have ended fatally for me."