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The 64th Anniversary of the Opening of the Auschwitz Camp for Soviet POWs
September 15 was the 64th anniversary of the establishment of the Russisches Kriegsgefagenen Arbeitslager, or labor camp for Soviet prisoners of war, in Auschwitz. The Nazis treated the captured Soviet soldiers with exceptional harshness. Only a handful survived out of a total of around 15,000 held at Auschwitz.
The Germans created the labor camp for Soviet POWs by fencing off nine blocks in the Auschwitz I-Main Camp with electrified barbed wire. Obersturmfuehrer SS Seidler and SS man Stiewitz were in charge of running the POW camp.
The late Jerzy Brandhuber, an Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum historian, wrote in Zeszyty Oświęcimskie that the first transport of several hundred prisoners arrived in Auschwitz in July 1941, a few weeks after the German attack on the Soviet Union. Witnesses stated that these first prisoners were political commissars. They were placed in Block no. 11. Within a few days, they had all been murdered by the SS or died of mistreatment while laboring.
The next transport carried about 600 POWs. The Germans placed them in the cellars of block no. 11. On September 3, 1941, they were murdered—along with 250 ill Poles—in the first large-scale use of Zyklon-B as a killing agent. The deputy camp commandant, Hauptsturmfuehrer SS Karl Fritsch, was “testing” the gas that would later be used on a mass scale to murder Jews.
On October 7, 1941, 2,014 soldiers from the Lamsdorf POW camp (Łambinowice near present-day Opole, Poland) were the first to be placed in the separate Auschwitz POW camp. They were in a state of extreme physical and mental exhaustion.
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum historian Franciszek Piper states that a total of about 10,000 POWs arrived in Auschwitz in October 1941. Aside from Lamsdorf, POWs also arrived from the Neuhammer am Quais POW camp (present-day Świętoszów nad Kwisą, Poland).
The Auschwitz authorities were starting to build the Birkenau camp at the time of the Soviet POWs’ arrival. The POWs were made to demolish or dismantle houses from which Polish civilians had been expelled, and also to level and drain the land at the Birkenau site.
Jerzy Brandhuber writes that the POWs were worked at an inhuman pace during the worst period, the winter of 1941-1942. In temperatures as low as –35 Celsius, they were at times dressed only in denim overalls, without underwear. They went hungry. The Germans beat them frequently without cause, and used phenol injections to kill those who fell ill. Half-dead men perished under blows from rifle butts. 1,255 POWs died in October 1941, 3,726 in November, and 1,912 in December. On the worst single day—November 4, 1941—352 perished.
The POW camp quickly emptied. The POWs were transferred to Auschwitz II-Birkenau at the beginning of March, when only 945 remained alive. They were not held separately from other prisoners in Birkenau.
The number of POWs continued to dwindle. There were only 352 of them left on April 1, 1942, and no more than 186 on May 1. Brandhuber writes that new POW transports arrived in Auschwitz, but they were small, consisting of only 15 and 3 POWs, respectively. 75 POWs were deported to Auschwitz in November 1943. The last of them was tattooed with the number 10706.
At the last roll call on January 17, 1945, there were 96 Soviet POWs in the ranks. A total of about 15,000 had arrived in the camp.
