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First Transport of Soviet POWs Reached Auschwitz 64 Years Ago
July marks 64 years since the deportation of the first Soviet POWs to the German Auschwitz camp. Several hundred POWs arrived in the first contingent. A total of more than 15,000 were sent to the camp over the course of World War II. Fewer than 100 of them survived. The Nazis treated the POWs with exceptional barbarity.
The exact date of the first deportation is not known. It probably took place after July 17, when Gruppenfuehrer SS Reinhard Heydrich, boss of the Central Reich Security Bureau (RSHA), ordered the killing of all Soviet POWs who constituted a threat to National Socialism. This included government and communist party officials, Red Army commissars, members of the intelligentsia, and Jews.
The first transport arrived in Auschwitz within weeks of the June 22, 1941 German attack on the Soviet Union. According to prisoner reports, these first deportees were commissars [POWs who had been responsible for the enforcement of communist ideology and discipline within the ranks of the Red Army]. Without being given camp numbers or entered into the Auschwitz records, they were placed in Block no. 11. Within several days, they were all murdered while laboring or at the hands of the SS.
The next transport consisted of about 600 POWs. Together with a group of 250 sick Poles, they perished on September 3, 1941, during the first large scale use of Zyklon-B, when the deputy camp commandant, Hauptsturmfuehrer SS Karl Fritsch, “tested” the gas that was later utilized in the mass extermination of the Jews. In this initial trial, the victims’ death agonies lasted for two days. In mid-September 1941, the Germans fenced off ten buildings in the Auschwitz camp. They placed a sign above the gate reading "Russische Kriegsgefagenen Arbeitslager" (Russian POW Labor Camp). In October, this sector was filled with about 10,000 POWs, in a desperate state of physical and psychological exhaustion, who arrived from the Lamsdorf and Neuhammer am Quais POW camps (in present-day Łambinowice near Opole, Poland, and Świętoszów on the Kwisa, respectively).
At the same time as the arrival of the Soviet POWs, the Auschwitz camp authorities began building the Birkenau camp. The POWs labored at demolishing and clearing away the houses from which the local Polish civilian residents had been expelled, and draining and leveling the site designated for Birkenau.
The late Jerzy Brandhuber, an Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum historian, wrote that the POWs were worked to death during the worst period over the winter of 1941-1942. They were commonly dressed only in fatigues, without underclothes. The temperature plunged as low as –35 Celsius. If they refused to perform this killing labor, as was their right under international law, they were stripped naked and had water poured over them until they were frozen stiff. The POWs died off en masse. Sickness and starvation decimated them. Barely alive, they were battered to death with rifle butts. The one-day peak of mortality came on November 4, 1941, when 352 of them died. The POW camp quickly emptied.
At the beginning of March 1942, the POWs were transferred to Birkenau. Only 945 of them remained alive. 96 Soviet POWS were present at the last Auschwitz roll call on January 17, 1945.
