Yes, remember that it no longer exists, just like the USSR. Falling apart is a common property of empires, sooner or later.

The collapse of the USSR did not occur due to the collapse of oil prices. No, this, of course, also played a role, but this is more likely the tenth thing, if not the twentieth. In 1990 there was a referendum in which 70% of the country's population voted for the Union. Yeltsin has repeatedly stated that Russia will never leave the Union, even if it remains alone in it.

So what happened? It is no longer a secret that our American friends have invested a lot of money in the project of dismembering the USSR.
Where did they go? In such cases, the press is hired, which begins to distort the story, drumming into people the desired opinion.
Secondly, their own people in the economy begin to engage in sabotage. Here products are hidden, and goods are no longer shipped to where they need to be shipped. Gorbachev himself once stated that in the fall of 1991. About 20 trains with meat could not get to Moscow.
What about Gorbachev? My uncle worked as a truck driver then. So, he is traveling to Moscow from Belgorod, bringing meat. For 100 km. In front of Moscow, at a traffic police post, strange people stop him and ask him what he is carrying. Having found out, they order to go back. And the police stand nearby and just watch.

So was there a conspiracy? No one will write anywhere at the present time - I am a spy of such and such, I participated in the dismemberment of the USSR. American money didn’t just go into the sand?!
Dostoevsky also described in “The Possessed” how five revolutionaries can create complete chaos in a city. Dostoevsky was in a revolutionary circle and he took all this from life. If there were secret societies then, why couldn’t they reappear in the 80s in the USSR?
However, you deny the conspiracy theory, and it is simply unrealistic to prove anything to you here.

Now about the story. I have already written to you about how historical documents are falsified. In any case, you remained unconvinced - Stalin and everything connected with him is bad and terrible. I see no point in returning to this topic.
I propose to consider how people are being brainwashed by the topic of Afghanistan - today is the day of the withdrawal of troops.

Why did the empire called the USSR send troops there? To stop in the bud the processes that are now taking place throughout the East, from Kyrgyzstan to Tanzania, and from China to Mauritania. The USSR wanted to put Afghanistan on a peaceful path. There weren’t very many of these Mujahets there, but here again the Empire of Good helped. We fought with them, or rather not with them, but with their hirelings - everything is clear here.
The war lasted almost 10 years, although it still cannot be called a real war. In any case, the USSR withdrew its troops.

Have we lost the war? I would not say so, because then Najibula sat firmly there for almost 4 years.

The Kremlin promises to the last minute, drags its feet and then simply abandons its faithful ally. Although, in an amicable way, Najibula would have found the fuel himself. So was there betrayal from Moscow? Definitely! But nowadays the media somehow don’t like to discuss this topic, because here a thinking person will begin to unwind the thread further. Why did the Russian government suddenly decide to saw off one leg of a stool?.... It was after this that we got Chechnya with the Wahhabis and Dagestan?.... There cannot be emptiness in the world. Either you step in and dictate your own rules, or you will live by someone else’s rules. Lara, you live in Israel, I think you understand this better than anyone.

No one will ever say - I’m a fool, I was fooled from TV. At the same time, many people do not know a lot of things, but present their own opinions in an aggressive manner. What should we call them? Only zombies - they honestly and sincerely think that they lived not under Brezhnev, but under Stalin. Zombies think only in a given direction, repeating like a mantra: Stalin, Beria, Gulag.....

Photo album of the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp (Auschwitz)

"Auschwitz Album" - about 200 unique photographs of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, collected into an album by an unknown SS officer, will be exhibited at the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography in Moscow.

Historians rightly consider the Auschwitz album one of the most important evidence of the fate of the millions killed. The Auschwitz album is essentially a one-of-a-kind archive of documentary photographs of the active camp, with the exception of a few photographs of its construction in 1942-1943, and three photographs taken by the prisoners themselves.

Auschwitz concentration camp was the largest Nazi concentration death camp. More than 1.5 million people of different nationalities were tortured here, of which about 1.1 million were European Jews.

What is the Auschwitz concentration camp?

The complex of buildings for holding prisoners of war was built under the auspices of the SS on the directive of Hitler in 1939. The Auschwitz concentration camp is located near Krakow. 90% of those held there were ethnic Jews. The rest are Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies and representatives of other nationalities, who in the total number of those killed and tortured amounted to about 200 thousand.

The full name of the concentration camp is Auschwitz Birkenau. Auschwitz is a Polish name, commonly used mainly in the former Soviet Union.

Almost 200 photographs of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp were taken in the spring of 1944, and methodically collected into an album by an unknown SS officer. This album was subsequently found by a camp survivor, nineteen-year-old Lily Jacob, in one of the barracks of the Mittelbau-Dora camp on the day of its liberation.

Arrival of the train at Auschwitz.

In the photographs from the Auschwitz album we see the arrival, selection, forced labor or killing of Jews who entered Auschwitz in late May - early June 1944. According to some sources, these photographs were taken on one day, according to others - over several weeks .

Why was Auschwitz chosen? This is due to its convenient location. Firstly, it was located on the border where the Third Reich ended and Poland began. Auschwitz was one of the key trading hubs with convenient and well-established transport routes. On the other hand, the closely approaching forest helped to hide the crimes committed there from prying eyes.

The Nazis erected the first buildings on the site of Polish army barracks. For construction, they used the labor of local Jews who were forced into captivity. At first, German criminals and Polish political prisoners were sent there. The main task of the concentration camp was to keep people dangerous to the well-being of Germany in isolation and use their labor. Prisoners worked six days a week, with Sunday being a day off.

In 1940, the local population living near the barracks was forcibly expelled by the German army in order to build additional buildings on the vacated territory, which subsequently housed a crematorium and cells. In 1942, the camp was fenced with a strong reinforced concrete fence and high-voltage wire.

However, such measures did not stop some prisoners, although cases of escape were extremely rare. Those who had such thoughts knew that any attempt would result in all their cellmates being destroyed.

In the same 1942, at the NSDAP conference, the conclusion was made about the need for the mass extermination of Jews and the “final solution to the Jewish question.” At first, German and Polish Jews were exiled to Auschwitz and other German concentration camps during the Second World War. Then Germany agreed with the allies to carry out a “cleansing” in their territories.

It should be mentioned that not everyone agreed to this easily. For example, Denmark was able to save its subjects from imminent death. When the government was informed about the planned “hunt” of the SS, Denmark organized the secret transfer of Jews to a neutral state - Switzerland. Thus, more than 7 thousand lives were saved.

However, in the general statistics of those killed, tortured by hunger, beatings, overwork, disease and inhumane experiences, 7,000 people are a drop in the sea of ​​shed blood. In total, during the existence of the camp, according to various estimates, from 1 to 4 million people were killed.

In mid-1944, when the war unleashed by the Germans took a sharp turn, the SS tried to transport prisoners from Auschwitz to the west, to other camps. Documents and any evidence of the merciless massacre were massively destroyed. The Germans destroyed the crematorium and gas chambers. At the beginning of 1945, the Nazis were forced to release most of the prisoners. They wanted to destroy those who could not escape. Fortunately, thanks to the offensive of the Soviet army, several thousand prisoners were saved, including children who were experimented on.

Camp structure

Auschwitz was divided into 3 large camp complexes: Birkenau-Auschwitz, Monowitz and Auschwitz-1. The first camp and Birkenau were later united and consisted of a complex of 20 buildings, sometimes several floors.

The tenth block was far from last in terms of terrible conditions of detention. Medical experiments were carried out here, mainly on children. As a rule, such “experiments” were not so much of scientific interest as they were another way of sophisticated bullying. The eleventh block especially stood out among the buildings; it caused terror even among the local guards. There was a place for torture and executions; the most careless people were sent here and tortured with merciless cruelty. It was here that attempts were made for the first time at mass and most “effective” extermination using the Zyklon-B poison.

Between these two blocks, an execution wall was constructed, where, according to scientists, about 20 thousand people were killed. Several gallows and incinerators were also installed on the premises. Later, gas chambers were built that could kill up to 6 thousand people a day. Arriving prisoners were divided by German doctors into those who were able to work and those who were immediately sent to death in the gas chamber. Most often, weak women, children and the elderly were classified as disabled. The survivors were kept in cramped conditions, with virtually no food. Some of them dragged the bodies of the dead or cut off hair that went to textile factories. If a prisoner managed to hold out for a couple of weeks in such a service, they got rid of him and took a new one.

Some fell into the “privileged” category and worked for the Nazis as tailors and barbers. Deported Jews were allowed to take no more than 25 kg of weight from home. People took with them the most valuable and important things. All things and money left after their death were sent to Germany. Before this, the belongings had to be sorted out and everything valuable was sorted, which is what the prisoners did on the so-called “Canada”. The place acquired this name due to the fact that previously “Canada” was the name given to valuable gifts and gifts sent from abroad to the Poles. Labor on "Canada" was relatively gentler than in general at Auschwitz. Women worked there. Food could be found among the things, so in “Canada” the prisoners did not suffer so much from hunger. The SS men did not hesitate to pester beautiful girls. Rapes often occurred here.

Living conditions of the SS men in the camp

Auschwitz concentration camp Oswiecim Poland Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz, Poland) was a real town. It had everything for the life of the military: canteens with abundant good food, cinema, theater and all human benefits for the Nazis. While the prisoners did not receive even the minimum amount of food (many died in the first or second week from hunger), the SS men feasted continuously, enjoying life.

Concentration camps, especially Auschwitz, were always a desirable place of service for the German soldier. Life here was much better and safer than that of those who fought in the East.

However, there was no place more destructive of all human nature than Auschwitz. A concentration camp is not only a place with good maintenance, where the military did not face anything for endless killings, but also a complete lack of discipline. Here the soldiers could do whatever they wanted and whatever they could stoop to. Huge flows of money flowed through Auschwitz from property stolen from deportees. Accounting was carried out carelessly. And how was it possible to calculate exactly how much the treasury should be replenished if even the number of arriving prisoners was not taken into account?

The SS men did not hesitate to take precious things and money for themselves. They drank a lot, alcohol was often found among the belongings of the dead. In general, employees in Auschwitz did not limit themselves in anything, leading a rather idle lifestyle.

Doctor Josef Mengele

After Josef Mengele was wounded in 1943, he was deemed unfit to continue serving and was sent as a doctor to Auschwitz, the death camp. Here he had the opportunity to carry out all his ideas and experiments, which were frankly crazy, cruel and senseless.

The authorities ordered Mengele to conduct various experiments, for example, on the effects of cold or altitude on humans. Thus, Joseph conducted an experiment on temperature effects by covering the prisoner on all sides with ice until he died from hypothermia. In this way, it was found out at what body temperature irreversible consequences and death occur.

Mengele loved to experiment on children, especially twins. The results of his experiments were the death of almost 3 thousand minors. He performed forced sex reassignment surgeries, organ transplants, and painful procedures to try to change eye color, which ultimately led to blindness. This, in his opinion, was proof that it was impossible for a “purebred” to become a real Aryan.

In 1945, Josef had to flee. He destroyed all reports about his experiments and, using false documents, fled to Argentina. He lived a quiet life without hardship or oppression, and was never caught or punished.

When Auschwitz collapsed

At the beginning of 1945, the situation in Germany changed. Soviet troops began an active offensive. The SS men had to begin the evacuation, which later became known as the “death march.” 60 thousand prisoners were ordered to go on foot to the West. Thousands of prisoners were killed along the way. Weakened by hunger and unbearable labor, the prisoners had to walk more than 50 kilometers. Anyone who lagged behind and could not go further was immediately shot. In Gliwice, where the prisoners arrived, they were sent in freight cars to concentration camps located in Germany.

The liberation of the concentration camps occurred at the end of January, when only about 7 thousand sick and dying prisoners remained in Auschwitz who could not leave.

Transcarpathian Jews are awaiting sorting.

Many trains came from Beregovo, Mukachevo and Uzhgorod - cities of Carpathian Ruthenia - at that time the part of Czechoslovakia occupied by Hungary. Unlike previous trains with deportees, cars with Hungarian exiles from Auschwitz arrived directly at Birkenau along newly laid tracks, the construction of which was completed in May 1944.

Laying tracks.

The routes were extended to speed up the process of screening prisoners for those still able to work and subject to immediate destruction, as well as to more efficiently sort their personal belongings.

Sorting.

After sorting. Efficient women.

Women fit for work after disinfestation.

Assignment to a labor camp. Lily Jacob is seventh from the right in the front row.

Most of the "able-bodied" prisoners were transferred to forced labor camps in Germany, where they were used in war industry factories that were under air attack. Others - mostly women with children and the elderly - were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival.

Able-bodied men after disinfestation.

More than a million European Jews died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops under the command of Marshal Konev and Major General Petrenko entered Auschwitz, which at that time housed more than 7 thousand prisoners, including 200 children.

Zril and Zeilek, brothers of Lily Jacob.

The exhibition will also include video recordings of Auschwitz survivors who recall the horror they experienced as children. Interviews with Lilya Jakob herself, who found the album, Tibor Beerman, Aranka Segal and other witnesses to one of the most terrible events in human history were provided for the exhibition by the Shoah Foundation - Institute of Visual History and Education of the University of Southern California.

A truck with the belongings of new arrivals at the camp.

Children of Auschwitz

Assignment to a labor camp.



After sorting. Unemployed men.

After sorting. Unemployed men.

Prisoners declared unfit for work.

Jews declared unable to work are awaiting a decision on their fate near Crematorium No. 4.

Selection of Jews on the Birkenau railway platform, known as the "ramp". In the background is a column of prisoners on their way to Crematorium II, the building of which is visible at the top center of the photo.

A truck carrying the belongings of new arrivals to the camp passes a group of women, possibly walking along the road to the gas chambers. Birkenau functioned as a huge enterprise of extermination and plunder during the period of mass deportations of Hungarian Jews. Often the destruction of some, disinfestation and registration of others were carried out simultaneously, so as not to delay the processing of constantly arriving victims.

Usually, after visiting an interesting museum, there are many different thoughts in your head and a feeling of satisfaction. After leaving the territory of this museum complex, you are left with a feeling of deep devastation and depression. I've never seen anything like this before. I never really read into the historical details of this place, I had no idea how large-scale the politics of human cruelty could be.

The entrance to the Auschwitz camp is crowned with the famous inscription “Arbeit macht frei”, which means “Work gives liberation”.

Arbeit macht frei is the title of a novel by German nationalist writer Lorenz Diefenbach. The phrase was posted as a slogan at the entrance of many Nazi concentration camps, either as a mockery or to give false hope. But, as you know, labor did not give anyone the desired freedom in this concentration camp.

Auschwitz 1 served as the administrative center of the entire complex. It was founded on May 20, 1940, on the basis of two- and three-story brick buildings of former Polish and previously Austrian barracks. The first group, consisting of 728 Polish political prisoners, arrived at the camp on June 14 of the same year. Over the course of two years, the number of prisoners varied from 13 to 16 thousand, and by 1942 it reached 20,000. The SS selected some prisoners, mostly Germans, to spy on the rest. Camp prisoners were divided into classes, which was visually reflected by stripes on their clothes. Prisoners were required to work 6 days a week, except Sunday.

In the Auschwitz camp there were separate blocks that served different purposes. In blocks 11 and 13, punishments were carried out for violators of camp rules. People were placed in groups of 4 in so-called “standing cells” measuring 90 cm x 90 cm, where they had to stand all night. More stringent measures involved slow killings: the offenders were either put in a sealed chamber, where they died from lack of oxygen, or simply starved to death. Between blocks 10 and 11 there was a torture yard, where prisoners, at best, were simply shot. The wall where the execution took place was reconstructed after the end of the war.

On September 3, 1941, on the orders of the deputy camp commander, SS-Obersturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the first gas etching test was carried out in Block 11, which resulted in the deaths of about 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 other prisoners, mostly sick. The test was considered successful and one of the bunkers was converted into a gas chamber and crematorium. The cell operated from 1941 to 1942, and then it was rebuilt into an SS bomb shelter.

Auschwitz 2 (also known as Birkenau) is what is usually meant when talking about Auschwitz itself. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles and Gypsies were kept there in one-story wooden barracks. The number of victims of this camp was more than a million people. Construction of this part of the camp began in October 1941. Auschwitz 2 had 4 gas chambers and 4 crematoria. New prisoners arrived daily by train at the Birkenau camp from all over occupied Europe.

This is what the barracks for prisoners look like. 4 people in a narrow wooden cell, there is no toilet in the back, you can’t leave the back at night, no heating.

Those who arrived were divided into four groups.
The first group, which made up approximately ¾ of all those brought, was sent to the gas chambers within several hours. This group included women, children, old people and all those who had not passed a medical examination to determine their full suitability for work. More than 20,000 people could be killed in the camp each day.

The selection procedure was extremely simple - all newly arrived prisoners lined up on the platform, several German officers selected potentially able-bodied prisoners. The rest went to the showers, that's what people were told... No one ever panicked. Everyone undressed, left their things in the sorting room and entered the shower room, which in reality turned out to be a gas chamber. The Birkenau camp housed the largest gas plant and crematorium in Europe; it was blown up by the Nazis during their retreat. Now it is a memorial.

Jews who arrived in Auschwitz were allowed to take up to 25 kg of personal belongings; accordingly, people took the most valuable things. In the sorting rooms for things after mass executions, camp staff confiscated all the most valuable things - jewelry, money, which went to the treasury. Personal belongings were also sorted. Much went into repeated trade turnover to Germany. In the halls of the museum, some stands are impressive, where the same type of things are collected: glasses, dentures, clothes, dishes... THOUSANDS of things piled up in one huge stand... behind each thing there is someone's life.

Another fact was very striking: hair was cut from the corpses, which went to the textile industry in Germany.

The second group of prisoners was sent to slave labor at industrial enterprises of various companies. From 1940 to 1945, about 405 thousand prisoners were assigned to factories in the Auschwitz complex. Of these, more than 340 thousand died from disease and beatings, or were executed.
The third group, mostly twins and dwarfs, were sent to various medical experiments, in particular to Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the “angel of death.”
Below I have provided an article about Mengele - this is an incredible case when a criminal of this magnitude completely escaped punishment.

Josef Mengele, the most famous of the Nazi doctor criminals

After being wounded, SS-Hauptsturmführer Mengele was declared unfit for combat service and in 1943 was appointed chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

In addition to its main function - the destruction of "inferior races", prisoners of war, communists and simply the dissatisfied, concentration camps performed another function in Nazi Germany. With the arrival of Mengele, Auschwitz became a "major scientific research center."

“Research” went on as usual. The Wehrmacht ordered a topic: to find out everything about the effects of cold on a soldier’s body (hypothermia). The experimental methodology was the most simple: a concentration camp prisoner is taken, covered on all sides with ice, “doctors” in SS uniforms constantly measure body temperature... When a test subject dies, a new one is brought from the barracks. Conclusion: after the body has cooled below 30 degrees, it is most likely impossible to save a person.

The Luftwaffe, the German air force, commissioned research on the effect of high altitude on pilot performance. A pressure chamber was built in Auschwitz. Thousands of prisoners suffered a terrible death: with ultra-low pressure, a person was simply torn apart. Conclusion: it is necessary to build aircraft with a pressurized cabin. By the way, not a single one of these aircraft took off in Germany until the very end of the war.

On his own initiative, Joseph Mengele, who became interested in racial theory in his youth, conducted experiments with eye color. For some reason, he needed to prove in practice that the brown eyes of Jews under no circumstances could become the blue eyes of a “true Aryan.” He gives hundreds of Jews injections of blue dye - extremely painful and often leading to blindness. The conclusion is obvious: a Jew cannot be turned into an Aryan.

Tens of thousands of people became victims of Mengele’s monstrous experiments. Just look at the research on the effects of physical and mental exhaustion on the human body! And the “study” of 3 thousand young twins, of which only 200 survived! The twins received blood transfusions and organ transplants from each other. Sisters were forced to bear children from their brothers. Forced gender reassignment operations were carried out. Before starting the experiments, the good Doctor Mengele could pat the child on the head, treat him with chocolate...

Last year, one of the former prisoners of Auschwitz sued the German pharmaceutical company Bayer. The makers of aspirin are accused of using concentration camp prisoners to test their sleeping pill. Judging by the fact that soon after the start of the “approbation” the concern additionally purchased 150 more Auschwitz prisoners, no one was able to wake up after the new sleeping pills. By the way, other representatives of German business also collaborated with the concentration camp system. The largest chemical concern in Germany, IG Farbenindustri, made not only synthetic gasoline for tanks, but also Zyklon-B gas for the gas chambers of the same Auschwitz.

In 1945, Josef Mengele carefully destroyed all the collected “data” and escaped from Auschwitz. Until 1949, Mengele worked quietly in his native Günzburg at his father’s company. Then, using new documents in the name of Helmut Gregor, he emigrated to Argentina. He received his passport quite legally, through... the Red Cross. In those years, this organization provided charity, issued passports and travel documents to tens of thousands of refugees from Germany. Perhaps Mengele's fake ID simply could not be thoroughly checked. Moreover, the art of forging documents in the Third Reich reached unprecedented heights.

Despite the generally negative attitude of the world community towards Mengele's experiments, he made some useful contributions to medicine. In particular, the doctor developed methods for warming victims of hypothermia, used, for example, when rescuing from avalanches; skin grafting (for burns) is also an achievement of the doctor. He also made a significant contribution to the theory and practice of blood transfusion.

One way or another, Mengele ended up in South America. In the early 50s, when Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest (with the right to kill him upon arrest), Iyozef moved to Paraguay. However, all this was rather a sham, a game of catching Nazis. Still with the same passport in the name of Gregor, Joseph Mengele repeatedly visited Europe, where his wife and son remained.

The man responsible for tens of thousands of murders lived in prosperity and contentment until 1979. Mengele drowned in the warm ocean while swimming on a beach in Brazil.

The fourth group, mostly women, were selected into the "Canada" group for personal use by the Germans as servants and personal slaves, as well as for sorting the personal property of prisoners arriving at the camp. The name "Canada" was chosen as a mockery of Polish prisoners - in Poland the word "Canada" was often used as an exclamation when seeing a valuable gift. Previously, Polish emigrants often sent gifts to their homeland from Canada. Auschwitz was partly maintained by prisoners, who were periodically killed and replaced with new ones. About 6,000 SS members watched everything.
By 1943, a resistance group had formed in the camp, which helped some prisoners escape, and in October 1944, the group destroyed one of the crematoria. In connection with the approach of Soviet troops, the Auschwitz administration began evacuating prisoners to camps located in Germany. When Soviet soldiers occupied Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they found about 7,500 survivors there.

Over the entire history of Auschwitz, there were about 700 escape attempts, 300 of which were successful, but if someone escaped, all his relatives were arrested and sent to the camp, and all prisoners from his block were killed. This was a very effective method of preventing escape attempts.
The exact number of deaths in Auschwitz is impossible to establish, since many documents were destroyed, in addition, the Germans did not keep records of victims sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arrival. Modern historians agree that between 1.4 and 1.8 million people were killed at Auschwitz, most of whom were Jews.
On March 1-29, 1947, the trial of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, took place in Warsaw. The Polish Supreme People's Court sentenced him to death by hanging on April 2, 1947. The gallows on which Höss was hanged were installed at the entrance to the main crematorium of Auschwitz.

When Höss was asked why millions of innocent people were being killed, he answered:
First of all, we must listen to the Fuhrer, and not philosophize.

It is very important to have such museums on earth, they change consciousness, they are evidence that a person can go as far as he likes in his actions, where there are no boundaries, where no moral principles exist...

April 27 marked the 75th anniversary of the opening of the notorious fascist concentration camp Auschwitz (Auschwitz), which killed about 1,400,000 people in less than five years of its existence. This post will once again remind us of the crimes committed by the Nazis during the Second World War, which we have no right to forget.

The Auschwitz camp complex was created by the Nazis in Poland in April 1940 and included three camps: Auschwitz 1, Auschwitz 2 (Birkenau) and Auschwitz 3. Over the course of two years, the number of prisoners varied from 13 thousand to 16 thousand, and by 1942 it reached 20 thousand people

Simone Weil, honorary president of the Shoah Memorial Foundation, Paris, France, former prisoner of Auschwitz: “We worked more than 12 hours a day on heavy earthworks, which, as it turned out, were mostly useless. We were hardly fed. But still our fate was not the worst. In the summer of 1944, 435,000 Jews arrived from Hungary. Immediately after they left the train, most of them were sent to the gas chamber." Everyone, without exception, had to work six days a week. About 80% of prisoners died from harsh working conditions in the first three to four months.

Mordechai Tsirulnitsky, former prisoner No. 79414: “On January 2, 1943, I was enlisted in the team for dismantling the belongings of prisoners arriving at the camp. Some of us were engaged in disassembling the arriving items, others were sorting, and the third group was packing for shipment to Germany. The work went on continuously around the clock, day and night, and yet it was impossible to cope with it - there were so many things. Here, in a bundle of children’s coats, I once found the coat of my youngest daughter, Lani.”
All those arriving at the camp had their property taken away, including dental crowns, from which up to 12 kg of gold was smelted per day. A special group of 40 people was created to extract them.

The photo shows women and children on the Birkenau railway platform, known as the "ramp". Deported Jews were selected here: some were immediately sent to death (usually those who were considered unfit for work - children, old people, women), others were sent to a camp.

The camp was created by order of SS Reisführer Heinrich Himmler (pictured). He visited Auschwitz several times, inspecting the camps and also giving orders for their expansion. Thus, it was on his order that the camp was expanded in March 1941, and five months later an order was received to “prepare a camp for the mass extermination of European Jews and develop appropriate methods of killing”: on September 3, 1941, gas was used for the first time to exterminate people. In July 1942, Himler personally demonstrated its use on prisoners of Auschwitz 2. In the spring of 1944, Himmler came to the camp with his last inspection, during which he ordered the killing of all incapacitated gypsies.

Shlomo Venezia, former prisoner of Auschwitz: “The two largest gas chambers were designed for 1,450 people, but the SS forced 1,600–1,700 people there. They followed the prisoners and beat them with sticks. Those behind pushed those in front. As a result, so many prisoners ended up in cells that even after death they remained standing. There was nowhere to fall"

Various punishments were provided for violators of discipline. Some were placed in cells in which they could only stand. The offender had to stand like that all night. There were also sealed chambers - those inside were suffocating from lack of oxygen. Torture and executions were widespread.

All concentration camp prisoners were divided into categories. Each had its own patch on their clothing: political prisoners were designated by red triangles, criminals by green, Jehovah's Witnesses by purple, homosexuals by pink, and Jews, in addition, had to wear a yellow triangle.

Stanislava Leszczynska, Polish midwife, former prisoner of Auschwitz: “Until May 1943, all children born in the Auschwitz camp were brutally killed: they were drowned in a barrel. After the birth, the baby was taken to a room where the child’s cry was cut off and the splash of water could be heard to the women in labor, and then... the woman in labor could see the body of her child thrown out of the barracks and torn apart by rats.”

David Sures, one of the Auschwitz prisoners: “Around July 1943, ten other Greeks and I were put on some list and sent to Birkenau. There we were all stripped and subjected to X-ray sterilization. One month after sterilization, we were called to the central department of the camp, where all those sterilized underwent castration surgery.”

Auschwitz became notorious largely due to the medical experiments that Dr. Josef Mengele conducted within its walls. After monstrous “experiments” in castration, sterilization, and irradiation, the lives of the unfortunates ended in gas chambers. Mengele's victims included tens of thousands of people. He paid special attention to twins and dwarfs. Of the 3 thousand twins who underwent experiments in Auschwitz, only 200 children survived.

By 1943, a resistance group had formed in the camp. She, in particular, helped many escape. Over the entire history of the camp, about 700 escape attempts were made, 300 of which were successful. To prevent new escape attempts, it was decided to arrest and send to camps all the relatives of the escapee, and kill all prisoners from his block.

In the photo: Soviet soldiers communicate with children liberated from a concentration camp

About 1.1 million people were killed on the territory of the complex. At the time of liberation on January 27, 1945, by the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front, 7 thousand prisoners remained in the camps, whom the Germans did not have time to transfer to other camps during the evacuation.

In 1947, the Sejm of the Polish People's Republic declared the territory of the complex a Monument to the Martyrdom of Polish and other peoples, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum was opened on June 14.

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 the tragic events of the 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 argued that Jews were carriers of infectious diseases and that isolating them would help protect the rest of the population from epidemics.

On April 19, 1943, German soldiers escort a group of Jews, including small children, into the Warsaw ghetto. This photograph was included in SS Gruppenführer Stroop's report to his military commander and was used as evidence in the 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 Ukrainian auxiliary units and German police 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. The photo, provided by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 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 medical experiments were carried out on the prisoners, as a result of which most 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 operations to sew capsules with a “male hormone” into the groin area of ​​homosexual men, which 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 the German Dachau concentration camp. 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 that prevented 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 crematorium building has survived to this day, the walls of which have plaques with names in 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 more than 3,000 corpses lying on the ground behind barracks at the Nazi concentration camp at 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 a 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.