January 27, 1945, 80 years ago: The Soviet Union's Red Army discovers the Auschwitz concentration camp, saving the lives of the 8,100 prisoners still alive there. As Auschwitz was the camp with the most deaths in the Holocaust, January 27 has been commemorated as Holocaust Remembrance Day ever since.
I have titled this entry "The End of Auschwitz," not "The Liberation of Auschwitz," because the Soviet Union never "liberated" anything. Most of the survivors returned to a Poland that would be under Communist rule until 1989.
The camp opened in May 1940. Prisoners were beaten, tortured, and executed for the most trivial of reasons. The first gassings took place in August 1941. The freight trains kept on coming in, under the gate with the lettering ARBEIT MACHT FREI -- "Work Makes Free." As far as the outside world knew, such places were slave labor camps, which was true, and was bad enough.
But few outside the Third Reich knew about the genocide. Over 1.3 million people were sent there, and 1.1 million were murdered, 960,000 of those being Jews, and 865,000 of those gassed on arrival. Those not gassed were murdered via starvation, exhaustion, willful ignorance of disease, individual executions, beatings, or during medical experiments that the SS carried out with sadistic glee. There were 802 prisoners known to have tried to escape, 144 successfully. An uprising was launched on October 7, 1944, but it was doomed to failure.
The trains kept coming. Generals begged Chancellor Adolf Hitler to make trains available to send soldiers to the fronts, to stop the Soviets to the East, and the Americans, British, Canadians and French to the West. He told them, "No! I need the trains to kill the Jews!" He seemed to have accepted that the war was lost, but, always determined to exterminate Europe's Jews, he also seemed to have adopted a policy of, "If I'm going down, I'm taking as many of the enemy as I can with me."
As the Red Army approached Auschwitz in January 1945, the SS sent most of the camp's population west on a death march to camps inside Germany and Austria. Those 8,100 remaining prisoners were essentially left to fend for themselves.
Georgii Elisavetskii, a Soviet soldier who entered one of the barracks, said in 1980 that he could hear other soldiers telling the inmates: "You are free, comrades!" But they did not respond, so he tried in Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian. Then he used some Yiddish: "They think that I am provoking them. They begin to hide. And only when I said to them: 'Do not be afraid. I am a Colonel of Soviet Army, and a Jew. We have come to liberate you.'... Finally, as if the barrier collapsed... they rushed toward us, shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs."
The Soviets had first encountered a Nazi concentration camp on August 16, 1944, in Treblinka, Poland. A folk song would later commemorate Treblinka as "the biggest grave in the world."
In Germany itself, on April 11, 1945, American troops under the command of General George S. Patton liberated the Buchenwald camp in Weimar, Thuringia. On April 15, British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen camp in Bergen, Lower Saxony. On April 22, the Red Army reached the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, outside Berlin.
On April 29, American troops under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower liberated the camp at Dachau, outside Munich. When Eisenhower saw the emaciated prisoners, many of them within days of death if they didn't receive medical treatment, he ordered photographers and film crews to come in and document it, because he knew that if no one did, then, one day, people would deny that the Nazis ever did such things. People have denied it, but "Ike" and the other Allied commanders got the proof.
Over 11 million people died in the Holocaust -- about as many as died from combat in all of World War I. Of those 11 million, over 6 million had been imprisoned for the reason that they were Jewish. Others were killed because they were of Slavic descent, and therefore of "an inferior race" to the German "Aryans"; or because they were Communists; or because they belonged to labor unions; or because, despite not fitting any of those other categories, they resisted the Nazis.
Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor from Lippstadt, Westphalia, had supported the Nazis at first. But when the Nazis began enforcing their ideology on Protestant churches, he led a resistance movement, and was imprisoned in 1938, first at Sachsenhausen, then at Dachau.
On January 6, 1946, in a speech in Frankfurt, he gave a speech whose exact wording has varied over the years, possibly losing something in translation. The most common version is this: "First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist. Then, they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then, they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then, they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me." He became an antiwar activist, and lived until 1984.
Auschwitz -- with the changing of national borders after The War, now in Oświęcim, in southern Poland -- is maintained as a museum and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today, January 27, 2025, in commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of the liberation, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum released a statement:
Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. It did not start from gas chambers.
This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder.
Auschwitz took time.
This is true. It also took thought. Careful consideration that should have resulted in the idea of, "There is a group of people that is not doing as well as us, so we should help them, and raise them to our level." Instead, it resulted in the idea of, "There is a group of people that is less than us, and, for that reason, they must be eliminated."
And that kind of evil can never be tolerated.
*
That same day, at another German camp, at Ziegeghain, in Germany's Rhineland, Master Sergeant Roderick W. Edmonds, U.S. Army, a 25-year-old native of South Knoxville, Tennessee, having been captured by the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge, was held at the prisoner-of-war camp at Ziegeghain, in Germany's Rhineland.
A German commander gathered all the American POWs at the camp. Then, he ordered all Jewish soldiers among them to step forward. "Roddie" Edmonds, the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer at the camp, ordered all 1,000 U.S. soldiers to step forward, regardless of their religion.
The German commander demanded that Edmonds identify the Jewish soldiers. Edmonds replied, "We are all Jews here." The commander threatened to shoot him if he did not comply. Edmonds refused, saying, "If you shoot, you'll have to shoot us all."
It was a reverse of the scene in the 1960 film Spartacus, where the Roman commander Crassus, having surrounded Spartacus' army, offers a pardon if the men will identify Spartacus, living or dead. But this would mean a return to slavery, and they would rather die. So every surviving man responds by shouting "I'm Spartacus!"
None of the Jewish soldiers stepped forward -- and none of the Gentile soldiers stepped back in betrayal. All followed Edmonds' order.
The commander backed down.
Edmonds survived the war. He never told his family of the event at the POW camp. He was again recruited to service during the Korean War. After returning from Korea, he worked variously for The Knoxville Journal, and in sales related to mobile homes and cable television. He died in 1985, never having received any official recognition, citation or medal for his defense of the Jewish POWs.
His actions are credited with saving the lives of 200 Jewish soldiers. In 2015, he was posthumously given the title "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. He was the first American soldier to receive the honor.
Edmonds' story is a reminder of the courage and compassion of those who stood up to the Nazis during World War II. He is a true hero, and his legacy should never be forgotten.
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