Auschwitz-Birkenau

History of a man-made Hell

The photograph above shows some of the 5,800 Birkenau survivors, most of whom look like well-fed Polish peasants, walking out of the camp shortly after Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945. In the background you can see the wooden barracks buildings, with windows under the roof, and the posts of the barbed wire fence. These survivors are walking along the interior camp road that bisects the Birkenau camp from north to south, connecting the women's camp with the new section of Birkenau, known as "Mexico." This is a still picture taken from the Soviet movie which is shown at the beginning of the tour at the Auschwitz Museum.

The tall, skinny guy wearing an arm band is Dr. Otto Wolken, a medical doctor in the Birkenau Quarantine camp, who stayed behind to help his fellow prisoners when the Birkenau camp was evacuated. He was the first witness to testify at the Auschwitz Trial, held by the German government in Frankfurt between 1963 and 1965.

The young woman in the center of the photo above is a Communist political prisoner named Olga. This is a still shot from the Soviet movie shown at the Auschwitz Museum. Note the badge worn by the elderly woman, which indicates that she is a political prisoner.

The photo below shows some of the small children walking out of the Birkenau camp after they were liberated.

Note the little girl on the far right in the front row in the photo above. She is on the left in the front row of the photo below, which is also a still shot taken from the documentary film made by the Soviet Union in February, after they had liberated the camp. It shows a few of the 611 children at Birkenau who greeted the liberators. They are holding out their arms to show their tattoos. Notice that the boy in the front is wearing a prison uniform which looks as though it would fit an adult. This same film clip is included in a film entitled "The Nazis: Nazi War Crimes," produced by the Soviet Union in which it was claimed that this same film clip was shot by the Nazis just before these children were killed at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev in the Ukraine.

Shown in the photo above are some of the 611 Jewish children in the Birkenau camp when it was liberated. The girl on the far right is Eva Mozes Kor, one of the twins who were forced to be the subjects of medical experiments done by Dr. Josef Mengele. Eva and her sister Miriam both survived; Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated four days before their 11th birthday. As of January 2008, Eva Kor was still alive and very active in Holocaust education in American schools.

There is one sequence in the Soviet liberation film, shown in the still photo above, which captures a parade of twins walking out of the camp; these were the children who were selected to be the subjects of the medical experiments done by Dr. Josef Mengele. In the front row in the photo above are Miriam Mozes on the left and Eva Mozes on the right. In the photo below, the child on the far right looks like Miriam Mozes.

The Soviet liberation film also shows Gypsy children who had been subjected to Nazi medical experiments, and some of the men who had been sterilized. Only a few dead bodies, including some that were lying in the snow, are shown in the film, and there are no prisoners shown who were dying of typhus, as in the Dachau or Bergen-Belsen camps.

The Soviet movie about the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau shows that few of the recently liberated prisoners were cheering or smiling; some of them looked angry, especially the woman in the photograph below, who is shown in the movie standing perfectly still with a hostile expression on her face. The film shows a whole crowd of survivors, wrapped in heavy blankets, who appear to be angry or unhappy, maybe because they had been dragged out of their beds to pose for the cameras.

The woman on the right in the front row, the one wearing a black coat, might be the same woman who is shown in the previous photo, standing at the barbed wire fence after the liberation of Birkenau. If it is the same woman, she has aged 10 years after being in the camp for only eight months.

Death Statistics

History of Auschwitz

Auschwitz II - aka Birkenau

Selections for gas chamber or labor

Auschwitz III - aka Monowitz

Monowitz gas chamber?

Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau

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This page was last updated on January 25, 2008