Soviet prisoners of war at Auschwitz

Transcript of the podcast

Soviet prisoners of war are the fourth largest group of victims of the German Auschwitz camp, after Jews, Poles and Roma people. A total of 11,964 prisoners of war were registered in the camp. And there were more over an estimate of 3,000 soldiers of the Red Army who were brought to the camp and murdered without being entered into registers. Dr. Jacek Lachendro of the Museum's Research Center talks about the history and fate of Soviet POWs at Auschwitz.

One of the largest groups of victims sent to Auschwitz were Soviet prisoners of war. Who were they, and for what reasons were they deported to Auschwitz?

At least 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war were transported to Auschwitz, roughly from the summer of 1941 to the summer of 1944. We can distinguish two groups among the prisoners of war: one, numbering at least 3,000, consisted of prisoners of war who had been selected in the POW camps and deported to Auschwitz for almost immediate extermination. The group consisted of prisoners of war, selected in POW camps by special groups of officers Sicherheitspolizei und Sicherheitsdienst. This group acted under operational orders 8 and 9 issued by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office). Their task was to isolate those among the German masses suspected of propagating communism. They were primarily political commissars in the ranks of the Red Army and those who were members of the Bolshevik party, Komsomol members. After being vetted in POW camps, they were transported in groups to Auschwitz and murdered. The first such group arrived at the end of July 1941 and within a few days were murdered at work by executioners, the SS men. They were murdered with clubs and sticks. SS men beat those who were no longer able to work. Subsequent groups were brought in, and from Rudolf Höss’s account, we know that it was probably in August of 1941. Hoss recalls that groups of prisoners were brought in trucks at night. We can surmise that they were transported in connection with Reinhard Heydrich's operational orders and executed in the courtyard of Block 11 and at the gravel pit, located then, roughly southwest of the camp.

The third group was brought in at the beginning of September 1941 and referred to the underground of block 11. This group numbered around 600 POW’s. In the underground of block 11, they were literally packed and crowded into cells. Polish sick prisoners were placed in some of the cells too. The Polish prisoners numbered between 250. Over 800 people were murdered, and for the first time in the camp's history, a preparation called “Zyklon B”, used previously in the camp to disinfect clothing and rooms was used on a mass scale to murder people. We assume that this murder in the basement of block 11 took place on the night of 3 to 4 September.
The following evening the prisoners began to empty the cells of block 11, and the bodies gradually taken to the camp crematorium. We also know that other groups of prisoners of war were brought to Auschwitz. They include the political commissars who were also murdered with Zyklon B in an improvised morgue in the camp crematorium building. The first group murdered there totalled about 900 Red Army men, and the killing took place in the first room of the crematorium I building. Subsequent groups were brought in and murdered there, too, with Zyklon B, that is, in the crematorium building, in Auschwitz I at the end of September. We cannot provide specific figures here, but according to the estimates by the former head of the Research Department, today the Research Centre, dr Franciszek Piper, the number of those sent here for immediate extermination, without entry into the camp records, was approximately 3,000 prisoners of war. The second group that ended up here were prisoners of war whose task in the initial period was to build the second section of the Auschwitz camp, planned and carried out on the fields of the Brzezinka village. Six months earlier, the Polish population had been expelled from the town and construction works on the new section of the camp began in the village's fields in October.
Some 10,000 prisoners of war were brought in and incarcerated in the main camp in October. Their task was to build the camp at Brzezinka (in German “Birkenau”). These prisoners of war were deported to the camp and registered here, which is why many documents have survived concerning prisoners of war who were sent to work. However, the mortality rate among them was tremendous, over 90% of the prisoners of war deported in October 1941 died within five months. In March, when the prisoners were being transferred to the partially built Birkenau camp, there were already about 700 Red Army soldiers in captivity. Later, however, in much smaller groups, transports of a few, up to a few dozen, less frequently over 100, or a few hundred prisoners of war were brought in. About 12,000 prisoners of war were deported to Auschwitz and registered as part of the second group. So the total number of prisoners who were transferred to be murdered and whose transported to work amounted to at least 15 000.

You have already mentioned the first use of Zyklon B gas to murder people. Can you shed more light on this matter?

On the evening of 3 September, some 600 prisoners of war were brought to the camp in trucks. They formed columns after leaving the vehicles and were led to block 11, through a side entrance, into the underground. The main entrance and windows, cracks and crevices were secured with adhesive tape. The prisoners confined to particular cells were murdered using Zyklon B. It is a preparation where the granules are impregnated with hydrogen cyanide, which volatilises and attacks the respiratory tract, causing death by suffocation. Zyklon B pellets were thrown into individual cells through the cellar windows. Before that, the window frames were removed, and the openings boarded up, leaving a hole in the middle of the boards through which the granules were introduced into the cells. Then, the opening was secured with another board, and the whole thing was covered with earth and sand, thus sealing the window openings tightly. On the morning of 3 September, Polish prisoners, picked during selection in the hospital blocks, were also placed in the cells with the prisoners of war. The following evening, a group of several dozen prisoners, mainly orderlies from the hospital blocks, were selected by the SS, given gas masks and sent to the underground. The task of one sub-group was to pull out corpses from particular cells, as described by those who survived the camp. The scenes after the opening of the doors were horrifying; the bodies were tangled and twisted so that great effort was exerted to drag the corpses out into the courtyard of block 11. A second sub-group stripped the bodies of their uniforms, rifled through the contents of their pockets, and a third sub-group loaded these bodies onto carts and transported them to the crematorium. Given that there were about 850 of these bodies, including the prisoners, they were heavily entangled and intertwined, and their transport took a total of two nights. The burning of the corpses in the crematorium took another couple of days. It was the first mass murder in the camp using Zyklon B. Later, the same preparation was used to murder other groups of prisoners of war in the crematorium building. Afterwards, as we know, it was used on a mass scale somewhere around the spring of 1942 for the instant extermination of Jews brought to the camp.

Testimonies of the POWs in Auschwitz are dominated by horrifying descriptions of their brutal treatment and extreme conditions in which they had to live in the camp. What were the living conditions of the POWs in Auschwitz like?

The war Germany started in June 1941 was meant to be an ideological war. One of several objectives was to destroy communist ideology and those who propagated it, but overall it was intended to be a devastating war. During a meeting with senior Wehrmacht commanders in preparation for the war, Hitler emphasised that it was to be a war of attrition. He stressed that it was not enough to defeat the enemy but also to destroy it because, in 30 years, it would be able to fight again. With these assumptions in mind, it became a total war, where the lives of the POWs taken prisoner by the Germans were of very little value from the German point of view. Consequently, in the first period of this war, POWs captured in just 3.5 months up to the end of September 1941 were about 2.5 million soldiers. So these were vast masses of people who were herded tens or even hundreds of kilometres to the assembly points and then from the assembly points to the POW camps. Others were transported on open rail platforms. They received meagre food rations and small quantities of water to drink. Once they reached the POW camps, usually in areas surrounded by barbed wire, they dug holes and hiding spots for themselves. They were still given small rations of low-calorie food, so they coped by eating grass. As a consequence, there was great hunger in the camps during the early months of the German-Soviet war. In autumn, mass transports of Soviet prisoners of war, were already in terrible physical condition, were brought here.

In his post-war account, Rudolf Hoess the commandant of Auschwitz states that he was surprised to see the prisoners of war. He even asked the transport managers why they were sent to work in such a state. They explained that they had selected the prisoners in the best physical condition. Nevertheless, only some of them were fit to work here in the camp, only some were sent to do the work, but many of them, because of their weakness and terrible physical condition, were not able to work effectively. Again, Rudolf Hoess recalls that he once sent 5,000 prisoners of war to unload vegetables, which were brought in by train, and to dump and heap up these swedes, beetsand potatoes. Many of them were simply unable to the simplest of tasks. They through themselves at this vegetables tried to bite them but some of them were already in such estate that they were unable to swallow these bites bitten off. And with such pieces of swede or potato they died in their mouths. Here in Auschwitz the horrible nightmarege conditions that prevailed in the prisoners of war camps had a kind of extension. When these large transports of POW arrived in October 1941, the prisoners disembarked in the reception point o which more or less improvised build about a kilometre from the camp to which they were later leds. There, they had to strip naked, undergo a disinfection process, immerse themselves entirely in vats full of disinfectant, and then, in groups of a hundred, were herded naked to the camp and quartered naked as their uniforms were taken from them. Then they were sent for disinfection and only returned a few days later. Consequently, they had to move around and stay in the blocks naked. In October, the mornings were very cold, so the Polish prisoners who witnessed the March were horrified by the sight of the prisoners, whose skins were already blue and beetroot-coloured. It was evident that they were exhausted and freezing. In the main camp, they were placed in ten blocks. Most were still on the ground floor. There were between 1,200 and even 1300 prisoners in such single-storey blocks in October. They slept on bunks or the floor. Naturally, such overcrowding and the high number of weakened organisms encouraged the spread of disease. The camp did not provide them with any effective medical care. Although a hospital was set up in Block 1, the POWs could not count on it, so overcrowding and illnesses became one of the primary causes of mortality among the POWs. The second cause of mortality was hunger; the POWs received negligible quantities of food compared to ordinary prisoners. Moreover, and according to accounts, the most common meal was soup, a liquid cooked from swede and perhaps with some potatoes and little margarine, and that was it. Furthermore, the portions of bread were smaller than the rations for other prisoners.

Another reason for the high mortality rate was the backbreaking work they were subjected to. They were tasked with demolishing houses in the displaced village of Brzezinka. They performed the work in defiance of all work safety rules - this applied to the POWs and other prisoners, who demolished the houses using battering-rams. They were made of beams with iron clamps nailed into them. The clamps served as handles, and several prisoners, would grab such a beam and simply hammer on the wall. After a while, the walls simply collapsed, crushing the POWs and prisoners. Many died because they were crushed by the walls or buried under the beams. Those who were lucky were wounded, but this also resulted in infection, and if left untreated, these wounds led to illness and later death. Some of the prisoners of war were sent to transport units, where they carried the materials obtained from the demolition of the Brzezinka buildings to the Birkenau camp construction site. There, successive groups of POWs were tasked with clearing trees, pulling up roots, draining the land, building access roads, and digging pits for the foundations of the barracks. However, it is worth remembering that these works were carried out in the late autumn through winter of 1941 and 1942, in terrible weather conditions, with severe frost. It was followed by a thaw in December. The prisoners trudge in the mud, often sinking to their knees, particularly when carrying heavy concrete poles for building fences or other materials. We must remember that the work was hard and the food constantly insufficient, which meant that they lost a great deal of strength, and as accounts show, many of the prisoners were simply no longer able to work. They looked for any secluded place between the planks to sit down and die. On the other hand, those who, from the point of view of, e.g., the German functionary prisoners supervising their work, were sluggish or worked too slowly, were mercilessly beaten, which also precipitated their death. The accounts and artwork of Polish prisoners who witnessed these events often showed the motif of horse carts filled to the brim with the corpses of POWs. These carts followed the columns of POWs from Brzezinka, here to the camps, in the evening, after the work. Often those who were unable to work would lie down on these carts to die. The bodies of POWs who lost consciousness were often thrown onto these carts, and they regained consciousness on the cart. A motif that appears in the accounts is that the kapos would approach them and strike them hard on the head with sticks or truncheons to hasten the death of these unfortunates.

What was the Zeppelin group to which the Soviet prisoners of war were chosen?

The German authorities, on the one hand, sought to destroy the enemy but also quickly realised that the Soviet Union is a large state made up of many republics, not a monolith. From the instructions in the operational orders I mentioned above, or the instructions on the treatment of POWs, issued by the Wermacht high command in September 1941, it was evident that these POWs included not only the most ardent communists, who had to be murdered but also those who could be recruited and used for the benefits of the German authorities. Over time, in the spring or winter of 1941, they decided that some of the POWs enlisted during interrogations in the POW camps were, as they said, trustworthy and would be willing to cooperate with the Germans. They could be used to prepare diversion operations. The head of the RSH had already issued such guidelines for an operation called Zeppelin on 10 March 1942. It aimed to undermine the morale of Soviet society at the rear of the front through the activities of sabotage groups. As part of operation Zeppelin, they were to prepare diversion units made up of former Soviet POWs, who were to be sent to the rear of the front somewhere in the depths of the Soviet Union, to carry out acts of sabotage and diversion. Within a few days, a training camp was quickly set up in Auschwitz, most certainly in March, for the selected former Soviet POWs who were to prepare for sabotage activities as part of Operation Unternehmen Zeppelin. Block 12 in the camp was surrounded by barbed wire, and a group of former POWs, referred to in documents as activists, was placed on the first floor. Later, two other groups were being prepared, albeit not here, in the main camp but in a former school building that was not demolished in the village of Brzezinka. Their training lasted for about a year, up to March 1943, and depending on the period, a dozen to a hundred and fifty so-called activists were trained in each of these groups. They were then transferred to the front line and then to a secret camp to complete their training, from where they were further transferred beyond the front line. The entire operation did not produce the results envisaged by the German authorities. After being moved beyond the front line, some of these activists headed for the nearest militia or internal security service posts and disclosed their identity. They explained that they had agreed to the training to be transferred to the Soviet Union and continue the fight against the Germans. We can only assume that they were punished for betraying their homeland with death. Some of the saboteurs, diversionists, who did not reveal themselves, were apprehended by the Soviet security authorities. Others were identified by the local population and reported to the militia services for security reasons. The activities of these activists were not successful. We also know that activists from other camps who, in the opinion of the German authorities, were unsuitable for sabotage activities due to illnesses because they were secret carriers, they were brought here to Auschwitz. A good account is given by a former prisoner, later museum director, Kazimierz Smoleń, employed in the camp reception office for new prisoners. He recalls that sometimes activists were brought in SS uniforms, ordered to undress and change into POW uniforms, registered again and taken to block 11, and executed. According to Kazimierz Smoleń, there were 200-300 such prisoners.

Were there any escapes from the camp among the Soviet POWs?

Yes, and it was a substantial number. We already know that the POWs from the first mass transports of October 1941 tried to escape, and we do have any detailed data in this respect. There are only mentions that they escaped, so we cannot say how large the number was. We must remember that they were in terrible physical condition, so those who still had some strength may have attempted to escape. We know a little more about this mass escape of Soviet POWs in late October 1942. After their transfer to Birkenau in March 1942, the POWs continued to receive terrible treatment during their stay in Birkenau. They were brutally beaten by SS men and functionary prisoners, but a change in their treatment occurred about mid-year. It reflected a shift in attitude towards Soviet POWs by the Third Reich authorities. Given the protracted war, it was decided that the POWs could be used for work as a valuable physical workforce or converted into collaborators. Consequently, their food rations were increased in the POW camps and all places they were incarcerated, including Auschwitz. They also stopped hitting the POWs, particularly in Auschwitz. The number of POWs stabilised at about 150 from June onwards, rising a little later to 160. The group was highly diverse, so they felt a sense of community and mutual trust. While their brutal treatment stopped, they were still afraid that at some point they might be murdered, so they made plans to escape, preferably en masse. And this is what happened precisely in the autumn of 1942. Two factors played in their favour: the first was that they were employed in constructing the second section of the Birkenau camp, called BII. They noticed that the entire section was already fenced off, except for the northwest corner, the easiest shortcut to transport building materials for crematoriums IV and V, under construction near this corner. It was also the shortcut used by the Sonderkommando prisoners employed in the so-called little red house, the makeshift gas chamber, located a few hundred metres from the corner. They noticed that this corner, this space, was guarded by SS men but concluded it was the best escape route. Another such favourable circumstance was that the SS men only discovered the absence of a prisoner at the evening roll call. Occasionally, prisoners were simply found to be missing, usually because they had escaped or died while working, and their bodies lay in a secluded spot somewhere. To make life easier for themselves, the SS men formed search parties made up of prisoners, later prisoners of war. These groups searched for prisoners who were missing at roll-calls. In preparation for the escape, the prisoners hid the body of a prisoner who had died while working and hoped it would be discovered at roll call that a prisoner was missing. It was indeed what happened. The SS men leading the roll-call assembled a search party. According to some reports, the group numbered about 70; others claim about 100 prisoners. They were sent from this section of the BIb to the neighbouring section BII under construction, and conducted the search at the opposite end of this section. Part of this large group headed in the opposite direction to the empty space, but some kept approaching the corner unprotected by the barbed-wire fence. At that point, they were very close, and at the agreed sign, they threw themselves at the SS men guarding them, who, taken by surprise, could not stop the escaping prisoners. The POWs lunged toward the fence, past the guard line. The escapees tried to hide between the trees in a small forest nearby. A few hundred metres further on lies the Vistula River, and they were able to reach the river under cover of the night and fog, cross to the other side and look for somewhere to escape further. After these first brief moments of surprise, the SS men raised the alarm. The alarm unit was quickly summoned, and the SS pursuit squad managed to apprehend some of the prisoners. They encircled them in the forest before they reached the Vistula River. Some SS men drove to the other end of the Vistula and created observation points. They used light flares and succeeded in capturing some of the prisoners. Unfortunately, there is no surviving documentation on how many of these prisoners escaped or were captured or shot during the escape. We can estimate that about a few dozen POWs fled the camp. We also know that after the Second World War, four POWs who made it alive were found in the Soviet Union between the late 1950s and 1960s.

In subsequent years, POWs made attempts to escape in smaller groups. Besides the fact that the POWs escaped and that the escapes were usually well-organised and planned, we do not know much about them. Those who were lucky enough to escape managed to reach territories under the control of the Soviet Union or the Red Army. Their reception varied, and after the war, they also shared their experiences, with perhaps a few exceptions. We know from German documents that at least 55 POWs escaped between the summer of 1943 and the summer of 1944. We do not know much about 37 of them. No information had been survive in German documents. We can therefore assume that they were successful in their escape, while one was shot during the escape and 17 were
captured. Some were sent to a penal company, and others were hanged here, in the camp.

Only a few per cent of the vast amount of camp documentation survived the liberation of Auschwitz. Where, then, does the data on Soviet POWs come from?

As far as Soviet POWs are concerned, a lot of surviving documents is a relative term; however, compared to other groups of prisoners, we can say that it is indeed a lot. A little over 10,000 prisoners of war were deported to Auschwitz during the early stages, that is, in October, November 1941, and February 1942. They were registered in the camp, and personal cards were created for them. About 7660 of these cards were recorded, containing the date, place of birth, and, in some cases, the last place of residence, and so on. The most important thing was when they were brought to the camp; many cards contained entries of when they died. Another important document is the book of deaths in the hospital for Soviet POWs. It contains entries of over 8300 prisoners of war, and in most cases, with their names, surnames and numbers. Therefore we can learn a lot about POW’s using those documents, the book of deaths and the registration cards. We can learn a lot about POW’s who were brought in at a later date, as their information, numbers, names and surnames appear in the Premiescheine group - a list of prisoners who were issued bonus vouchers from 1943. It was intended to incentivise prisoners and POWs to work effectively in the camp and contain many new names. Many of these names appear in hygiene institutes and telegrams about escapes sent by the RSHA to police stations in occupied Poland. It is quite a large base of documents on which we can reconstruct the fate of the POW's in the camp. There is also an extensive database of statements, accounts by survivors and memoirs because the arrival of these prisoners, especially the way they were treated, was a shock to the Polish prisoners. Thus, many of these accounts and recollections contain plenty of information about Soviet prisoners of war.

Can we estimate how many Soviet prisoners of war survived Auschwitz and what their post-war fates looked like?

Several hundred prisoners may have survived their stay in Auschwitz. They included prisoners brought to the camp and later deported in late autumn 1944 to other German concentration camps, such as Flossenburg and Buchenwald. It must be pointed out that they stayed in Auschwitz and survived Auschwitz, but we do not know what happened to them after their transfer to other camps. The survivors also included those who escaped. According to reports from the Polish resistance movement, there were 96 Soviet POWs at the last roll-call on 19 January 1945. The vast majority of them were sent to other concentration camps as part of the liquidation and evacuation of the camp in January. Presumably, some of them survived, while a few remained in Auschwitz and were executed a few days before the arrival of the Red Army. Only one of them survived; he was wounded, and the SS men did not notice that he had been injured and left his body behind. The fate of these people after the war is difficult to describe in detail as we do not know much about it due to the Soviet Union's policy towards the POWs. On 16 August 1941, order no. 270 was issued, and its most important provisions were that a Red Army soldier is to fight to the last, if surrounded, to break through enemy positions and protect his troops. To surrender was seen as treason and, under wartime conditions, was punishable by death. Those who surrendered and went into captivity were subjected to repression. The members of these families were also subjected to repression. These POWs were branded as traitors to their homeland. It was also a stigma they had to live with even after the war that they had managed to survive in the concentration camps. Although they were not sentenced to death after the war, they were still treated as traitors in the Soviet Union under Article 38 of the Criminal Code. A few thousand who appeared before the tribunal were sentenced straight to the camps, usually for 10 years, sometimes shorter, but mostly for 10 years. These people worked hard in the camps, but even after completing their sentences, the traitor stigma still accompanied them because they could not settle in Moscow, Kiev or Leningrad. They were also not allowed to pursue higher education. The brutal treatment of these people eased a bit in the mid-1950s, and then, for example, these escapees from the mass escape I mentioned would come to evening meetings and tell their escape story. They also came to Poland in the 1960s, and here, too, they recounted the escape story. Their situation in the Soviet Union was indeed very difficult until the 1990s. It explains why there are very few memoirs or accounts of Soviet POWs who managed to survive, or even non-POWs imprisoned here in Auschwitz, and why our knowledge about these Soviet POWs is not very detailed.