History
January 27, 1945: the Red Army discovers Auschwitz
In October 2002, at the invitation of Simone Veil, honorary president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah and former President of the European Parliament, the ministers of the member states of the Council of Europe decided to establish an international day in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. France and Germany chose January 27, giving the discovery of the Auschwitz killing center on January 27, 1945 an unparalleled symbolic significance.
Soviet soldiers support survivors. The most famous image of one of the seven female photojournalists of the Red Army taken at the end of January 1945 at the entrance to the Auschwitz camp. © Olga Vsevolodovna Ignatovitsj, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By: Olivier Favier Follow
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In Germany, since 1996, this date has been commemorated as
Der Tag des Gedenkens an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus
(the day of memory of the victims of National Socialism). Italy also chose it in 2000, after having examined other options: that of October 16, 1943, the great roundup in Rome, which recalled the involvement of the fascists in the deportation of the Jews, and that of May 5, discovery of the
Mauthausen
camp
, which placed more emphasis on political deportees.
In November 2005, the United Nations General Assembly also committed to commemorating this day, giving the event a global reach. Some countries have placed a national day on another date, such as Romania, which on October 9 commemorates the start of the deportation of Jews to Transnistria, in 1942. Today, however, the one which is now called in France the Day of there is broad consensus on the memory of genocides and the prevention of crimes against humanity.
Why Auschwitz?
Auschwitz was one of six Nazi killing centers, all located on present-day Polish territory, the only one, along with Chelmno, which, at that time, was located on land annexed by Germany. Most were razed between 1943 and 1944. However, the
Majdanek
camp , near Lublin, showed the mechanisms of assassination, notably the gas chambers. Discovered by the Soviets in the summer of 1944, it was the subject of a film.
The fact remains that one in six Jews killed during the Shoah was killed at Auschwitz, one in three of those who died in the camps. The Soviets were so impressed by the scale of the complex – 3 camps planned to
“accommodate”
200,000 people – that they initially put forward the figure of 4 million victims; in fact 1.1 million, 90% of whom are Jews.
In no other place has the industrialization of genocide taken on such magnitude: the number of people murdered on the day of their arrival is estimated at 900,000. The root camp, Auschwitz I, was created in June 1940, it was completed in October 1941 by Auschwitz II-Birkenau, by far the most important, first designed for Soviet prisoners, but very quickly dedicated to the killing of Jews.
It was here that Zyklon B, originally intended to eliminate vermin, was diverted for mass murder in the gas chambers. When the camp was discovered, some had just been put in place without having been used: they became one with the crematorium ovens intended to make the bodies disappear. The Nazis had been interrupted just as the industrialization of genocide was reaching its peak.
The testimony of Primo Levi
There are still forty-five annex camps, but especially Auschwitz III (Monowitz) opened in May 1942, a work camp for the IG Farben company. This is where
the future writer Primo Levi
arrived in February 1944. He recounts the period of liberation in the last chapter of
If It's a Man
(1947) and especially at the very beginning of
The Truce
(1963).
“
At the Buna-Monowitz camp infirmary,”
he remembers, “
eight hundred of us remained. About five hundred died of disease, cold and hunger before the Russians arrived and another two hundred, despite relief, in the days immediately following.
» Suffering from scarlet fever, Primo Levi had not been taken for the last “
death march
”, ten days earlier, where many of his comrades disappeared.
“
The first Russian patrol arrived in sight of the camp around noon
,” he continues, emphasizing among them what he perceives as “
a confused feeling of embarrassment
” and which was undoubtedly only the extreme weariness of men who , after crossing a number of territories in the East occupied by the Nazis, had already been more often than not confronted with the reality of mass massacres. "
There was not a village that had not experienced this horror, this tragedy, this suffering
,” one officer recalled.
Moreover, the survivors themselves are too dazed to show the slightest jubilation: “
Few of us ran to meet our saviors, few fell to their knees. […] Faced with freedom, we felt lost, emptied, atrophied, unfit to play our role.
» Primo Levi's biggest surprise was to discover that the Monowitz camp, which had some 12,000 inhabitants before its evacuation, was only a “
village
” compared to Birkenau, where he entered for the first time. The place, which only has 6,000 survivors left, seems all the more immense.
Immediate but partial awareness
Immediately, however, the soldiers of the first Ukrainian front who arrived there by chance understood that they were dealing with extraordinary structures. Cinema operators were dispatched a few days later. Many of the survivors are questioned, but also treated, the facilities are the subject of meticulous investigations.
If the Soviets greatly overestimate the number of victims, the Jewishness of the overwhelming majority of them is erased in the editing of the film presented to the public. In the article published in
Pravda
on February 2, and reprinted a few days later in a newspaper intended for the Jewish community in Great Britain, reporter Boris Polevoi speaks of workers “
victims of fascism
”.
In France, this discovery did not make the headlines. It is the camps in the West, from which many French deportees return, which attract attention. However, the reality of the killing centers was known to the secret services in the West from the beginning of 1942. In April 1944, two Slovak Jews who had managed to escape had even provided a detailed report on Auschwitz, which an Allied plane was to photograph a month later.
In 1947, when a museum was opened by the Polish state, it was still nationals of Eastern European countries who were highlighted. It was not until 2015 and the 70th anniversary of the discovery of the camp that a Greek pavilion was set up. However,
almost the entire Jewish population of Thessaloniki
was murdered in 1943, a large part of them at Auschwitz.
Our selection on the subject
To read:
Auschwitz: camp symbol of the Nazi abomination
The history and memory of the Shoah in Europe: 80 years later
Primo Levi, Auschwitz survivor, great witness and born writer
To listen:
Living in the shadow of Auschwitz
Auschwitz: how to explain the inexplicable to younger generations?
Marcelline Loridan-Ivens: “We never really come back from Auscwitz”
(On France 24)
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