Death march of Auschwitz prisoners: "Right and left, everything was full of corpses"

Only six days were missing for the rescue by the Red Army. Six days that decided on liberation or procrastination, about life and death.

On January 21, 1945, inmates from the Auschwitz concentration camp marched by thousands along an icy country road. Their bodies were emaciated, their blue and gray striped coats hardly protecting them from the cold winter air. Many wore simple wooden shoes, their feet wrapped in newspaper. Almost nobody had socks.

SS men followed and drove the prisoners miles and miles west without breaks or provisions. Those who fell or fell behind were shot by firing squads. Werner Bab, 20, walked in the back of the death train. After the war, the Jewish Berliner told a documentary filmmaker: "Right and left, everything was full of corpses: women, children, men, it was just corpses."

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The memory of this crime is important. Because often end the accounts of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. On this historic day, the Red Army was finally able to liberate the camp - since 2005, it is the International Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust victims.

Auschwitz is the epitome of the death factories of the National Socialists. However, on January 27, freedom gained only a fraction of the 67,000 people who had been imprisoned there a few days earlier. Five-sixths of the Auschwitz prisoners, men like Werner Bab, remained in the hands of the SS. They were tortured for months and thousands were murdered.

The largest extermination camp

In the spring of 1940, the history of today's most famous concentration camp began; There, at least 1.1 million people were gassed, shot and tortured to death. Barely half a year after the Wehrmacht attack on Poland, SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler determined the location of a new concentration camp in the occupied territories: an old barracks area in southern Poland near a railway line and several gravel pits. The concentration camp was named after the German name of the neighboring town Oswiecim - Auschwitz.

In May 1940, SS members forced the first inmates to increase the barracks of the barracks, to fortify a hospital and to erect watchtowers. Thereafter, further camps were built in the immediate vicinity, including the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest extermination camp of the Nazis, and the concentration camp Monowitz, adjacent to a huge factory premises of the chemical company IG Farben.

In the first months after the construction, mainly Polish prisoners of war and political prisoners performed forced labor in the main camp of Auschwitz. From the beginning, many died of malnutrition, illnesses, exhaustion and ill-treatment, were shot or killed. With these terrible circumstances, Auschwitz was initially one of many forced labor camps in Nazi power.

Farmhouses became gas chambers

This changed in March 1942: Auschwitz-Birkenau became an extermination camp; before that the Nazis had carried out the first gassings in the main camp Auschwitz. From then on, they drove millions of Jews from Europe to Poland and Belarus to kill them there. Thus, they systematized the genocide that had previously begun with poison gas experiments and massacres. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, the SS converted two old farmhouses into gas chambers and then built more crematoria.

In 1942, Werner Bab was deported to Auschwitz, at the age of 17, as a prisoner number 136857. Unlike hundreds of thousands of other Jews, the SS did not immediately send him to the gas chamber, but ordered him to do forced labor. In gravel pits, mines and factories, prisoners like Bab were to be "destroyed" by work over the medium term.

While the Nazis continued to expand Auschwitz and perfect the killing, the Third Reich came under military defensive measures at the latest after the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942/43. The Red Army advanced, crossed the Vistula River in the summer of 1944, and was soon less than 250 kilometers from Auschwitz.

The SS shifted now about half of the then about 140,000 prisoners with cattle cars to the west, especially in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Flossenbürg in the Upper Palatinate and Mittelbau-Dora in the Harz.

200 kilometers on foot

When the Red Army launched its winter offensive on January 12, 1945, there were still around 67,000 prisoners in Auschwitz. She also wanted to deport the SS, but for such a mass transport, the single-rail train connection to the camp was not enough.

Therefore, the SS divided the approximately 58,000 marchable prisoners into groups to drive them on foot to railway junction in Gliwice 50 kilometers away and 60 kilometers away Loslau. 15,000 prisoners had to march 200 kilometers from there to Gross-Rosen concentration camp. On the route they met German civilians who fled from the Red Army - the death marches were visible to the population.

At the same time, the SS destroyed incriminating documents and burned down buildings to cover traces of the mass murder. Three of the four crematoria in Birkenau had been dismantled by the Nazis in November 1944; they were to be rebuilt in the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen. The last one they blew up on the night of January 26, 1945. Actually, the plan was to murder the inmates unable to march and to remove their bodies, but that did not happen.

"The most terrible days of my life"

One day after the blast the Red Army reached Auschwitz and took care of the approximately 8,600 inmates who had remained in the camp complex and had survived until then. Hundreds of them were so weak that they died anyway in the following days.

The death marches meanwhile continued. Those who reached the stations were loaded into open cattle cars, the trains drove for hours through the cold. Many of the already overcooled inmates froze to death on the track.

"These days have been the most terrible in my life," a mid-Dora inmate later reported, lifting the dead out of the wagons. "If we touched the dead, we often had arms, legs, or heads in our hands because the bodies were frozen." The SS burned their bodies on a pyre of roofing felt and railway sleepers. How many people died on these death marches from Auschwitz can hardly be reconstructed; Estimates range from 9,000 to 15,000 dead.

Afterwards, Auschwitz prisoners, who had survived all this, were threatened with "extermination through labor" in other camps. In Mittelbau-Dora, for example, they had to produce rocket parts for the supposed Wunderwaffe V2 in subterranean tunnels.

The cold hell

With the prisoner trains also SS men from Auschwitz came to the camp and tightened the terror there: On some days, dozens of prisoners were simultaneously hanged on a crane, as the former head of the local memorial reported. "If Auschwitz had been the hot hell, then Dora was the cold hell," a former prisoner later wrote.

In April 1945 US associations advanced to Mittelbau-Dora. The SS sent many concentration camp forced laborers on further death marches north. Again and again SS men, Hitler Youth and Volkssturm units attacked the prisoners. At Gardelegen, they drove the prisoners to a barn and set fire to them. Those who wanted to flee were shot dead. US soldiers later found 1016 bodies there.

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Time periods of Werner Bab

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This mass murder was not an invisible work in remote killing factories in the eastern territories, but was visible in the middle of the Nazi Reich. Many Germans became witnesses or perpetrators during these weeks.

Of the approximately 58,000 prisoners who marched in Auschwitz in January, many did not experience the end of the war. Werner Bab had managed to survive first Auschwitz, then the death marches and other concentration camps. On May 6, 1945, two days before the unconditional surrender of the German Reich, he was freed by US soldiers.

And yet he remained a prisoner of his experiences until his death in July 2010. He once described his memories of the Nazi period as follows: "I died in Auschwitz."