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Ella Liebermann-Shiber
1927-1998
Biography Works
Ella Shiber (n�e Liebermann) was born in Berlin in 1927 to a well-off family. Her father, Yehoshua, was a fur merchant, and her mother, Rosa, a native of Poland (Bendin), was a midwife. In addition to Ella there were three more children: Bertha (b. 1919), Alexander (b. 1922) and Leo, the youngest (b. 1929). They received a Jewish-Zionist education at home and Ella was a member of the Betar youth movement.
In 1938 the family was forced to leave Germany because of her mother's Polish origin. They moved to Bendin, where her mother's family lived. During World War II the extended family was moved to the local ghetto. In the last Aktion (roundup) in August 1943, the family (the parents, Ella and her brother Leo) went into hiding in a pit that they had dug beneath the garbage container beside their house. (Bertha and Alexander had previously been sent to labor camps in Germany). Their food was provided by thirteen-year old Leo, who used to sneak into the house at night, and also by a Pole, the janitor of the building, who risked his life and brought additional essential products to their hiding place. One day an SS officer asked the Pole to explain what he was doing beside the hiding place, and when he refused to hand over the family, he was apparently beaten to death. In light of this the father understood that the hiding place was no longer safe, and the family came out and turned themselves in to the Germans. They lived in the ghetto until December 1943, and then the parents, Ella and her brother were deported on the last transport to Auschwitz.
In the concentration camp the women were separated from the men. The latter were immediately sent to the crematoria, while sixteen-year old Ella and her forty-two year old mother were sent to work in the munitions factory, where they worked extremely long days under dreadful conditions, malnourished and without any sanitary conditions. During this time one of the SS officers learned that Ella was an artist, and she was asked to paint the picture of one of his relatives who had been killed on the front, based on his photograph. He provided the drawing materials, as well as food for the mother and daughter. The SS officer asked that she accede to the requests of his comrades and draw the portraits of their relatives. Thanks to these drawings, the mother was not transferred elsewhere, and they remained together the entire time. In January 1945, Ella and her mother took part in the Death March. They were brought to Neustadt camp, which was a satellite camp of Ravensbr�ck.
Ella and her mother were liberated by the Allies on May 2, 1945, and they decided to return to Poland to search for relatives. They arrived in Bydgoszcz-Bromberg, where Ella met the man who would become her husband, Emanuel Shiber, a Jewish officer in the Polish army who was stationed in the area and had heard that there were Jewish survivors of the camps there. Ella and Emanuel were married on February 2, 1946 and on May 23, 1946, together with her mother, they left Poland via the Bricha [1] organization and reached a DP camp near Munich from where they hoped to continue on to Israel.
The ship in which they sailed, the Ben Hecht, was captured on the shores of Israel by the British on 12 March 1947, and its six hundred passengers were taken to a camp in Cyprus on a British warship. During the short trip, Ella Liebermann-Shiber drew a rifle and a hand driving out the British on the sides of the ship's hold. During their detention in Cyprus, Emanuel Shiber, in the framework of the Irgun Zevai Leumi (the National Military Organization), taught a course in military training and prepared an instruction book which contained drawings of weapons, their parts and how to use them, which was illustrated by the artist. Later on (1985), she was awarded the "National Fighter's Medal" by the Defense Ministry "for her part in the fight for the rebirth of Israel". Ella Liebermann-Shiber also took part in the artistic activity organized by the artist Naftali Bezem in Cyprus. The 26 detained artists who participated in this course produced an album called In the Cyprus Expulsion which contains 26 linoleum cuts "from the life of Holocaust survivors in the camps in Cyprus" that were produced by "student painters among the exiles in Cyprus, under the instruction of Naftali Bezem". The following appears on the cover of the album:
Cyprus, one stop on the torturous
Road to Eretz Israel.
The Jewish meaning of this name is
Spiked barbed wire fences; forced inaction
And deterioration to atrophy.
And even in these circumstances there was bustling life,
About which I will relate in this book.
Members of the Israeli camp
In the Cyprus expulsion.
The period of detention in Cyprus ended in May 1948. The family, with Ella Liebermann-Shiber in an advanced state of pregnancy with her daughter Ada, reached Haifa. There they made their home. Ella Liebermann-Shiber studied painting and art at Haifa University and taught painting.
In 1945 the artist began to create a series of drawings, On the Edge of the Abyss, which depicts the daily during the war. The work was begun at the initiative of her husband, who thought that the artistic expression would help her free herself of the traumas she had experienced. The series was completed in Haifa in 1948 and was first exhibited in a Haifa cinema in 1950. Two years later the drawings were exhibited at the Ghetto Fighters' Museum, and afterwards were donated to its permanent collection. Later on the drawings, accompanied by explanations by the artist, were published in several editions in Hebrew, English and German, and a Chinese version is currently being prepared.
Ella Liebermann-Shiber passed away in Haifa in 1998, and her husband and three children continue to work at perpetuating the artist's memory. After her death she received "a certificate of merit and appreciation" from the wife of the President of Israel for her work and for her major contribution to "Holocaust remembrance and assurance of the future".
Dr. Pnina Rosenberg ***** AM RANDE DES ABGRUNDS / Ella Liebermann-ShiberaAA
Ella Liebermann-Shiber wurde Anfang 1945 in der Nähe
von Hamburg, Deutschland,befreit. Sie war 17 Jahre alt,
sehr dünn, und auf ihrem Körper trug sie
Häftlingskleidung. Ihren Aussagen nach bewegte sie
nichts, außer dem Willen zu zeichnen, zu dokumentieren.
Ella Liebermann-Shiber, in Berlin geboren,mußte 1938 mit ihrer
Familie Berlin verlassenund nach Bendzin,Polen, ziehen. Mit der
deutschen Besatzung findetsich
die Familie im Ghetto wieder: "In einem Loch, in dem es
sogar unmöglich war, eine Kerze anzuzünden, da es an
Sauerstoff mangelte." Sie ist Augenzeuge
der Zerstörungen von Seele und Eigentum, die
auch an ihrer Familie nicht vorübergingen.
Im August 1943 wurde Bendzin für "judenrein"
erklärt. Ella Liebermann-Shiber wurde zusammen
mit ihrer Familie nach Auschwitz-Birkenau geschickt.
Ihr Vater und ihre Geschwister wurden getötet.
Ihr Leben und das ihrer Mutter wurden dank ihrer
zeichnerischen Begabung gerettet. Die Deutschen
beauftragten sie mit Porträtmalerei. Als sich im
Januar 1945 die russischen Streitkräfte Auschwitz
näherten, wurden Ella Liebermann-Shiber und ihre
Mutter mit dem Todesmarsch Richtung Westen nach
Deutschland geschickt. Sie überlebten und wurden
im Mai 1945 befreit. Unmittelbar nach der
Befreiung begann Ella-Liebermann-Shiber,
die Geschehnisse durch Zeichnungen zu
dokumentieren. *****
Visual Testimony exhibition in the “Yizkor” Hall: Ella Liebermann-Shiber
Ella Liebermann-Shiber was born in Berlin in 1927. In 1938 her family relocated to Bedzin, Poland. Upon the outbreak of the war, they were interned in the ghetto. In August 1943, Bedzin was declared “Judenrein” [German: cleansed of Jews] and the family was sent on a transport to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Her father and brother were taken to their deaths, while her life was spared along with her mother’s, due to Ella’s artistic talent. She was put to work by the Nazis as a portrait artist.
In January 1945, as Soviet forces approached the Auschwitz camp, Ella and her mother were sent on a death march to Germany, where they were interned in the Neustadt camp, a subcamp of Ravensbrueck. They were liberated there in May 1945.
Ella Liebermann married Emanuel Shiber in Poland in 1946, and the couple moved westward assisted by Ha-Bricha, the organization aiding Jews emigrating from Eastern Europe on their way to Mandatory Palestine. They sailed on the illegal immigration ship “Ben Hecht” that was turned back from the shores of Palestine to Cyprus in March 1947. In a detention camp there, Ella was among the many artists taking part in the art courses organized by Naftali Bezem of Jerusalem’s “Bezalel” Academy. The participants published an album, “In the Cyprus Exile” [Hebrew title: Be-Gerush Kafrisin], with 26 linocut prints depicting daily life in the camp.
After 13 months of internment, the Shibers were released; in April 1948 they arrived in Haifa.
During the years 1979 – 1983, Liebermann-Shiber studied art at the University of Haifa, in workshops in painting, graphics, and sculpture.
Several years after her liberation from the camps in Poland and Germany, she had begun to produce sketches and descriptions depicting life and death in the camps. These recollections formed a series of 93 artworks she titled “On the Edge of the Abyss” [Hebrew title: Chayyim ‘al Kav ha-Ketz], exhibited in the Ghetto Fighters’ House museum and donated to its art collection. Ella Liebermann-Shiber regarded her dealing with these subjects in her artworks not only a documentation of harsh experiences and events, but also the beginning of a rehabilitative process.
Ella Liebermann-Shiber died in 1998 following a severe illness. *****Auschwitz concentration camp (German: Konzentrationslager Auschwitz, pronounced [kɔntsɛntʁaˈtsi̯oːnsˌlaːɡɐ ˈʔaʊʃvɪts] ( listen), also KZ Auschwitz or KL Auschwitz) was a network of German Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps built and operated by Nazi Germany in annexed Polish areas during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I (the original camp), Auschwitz II–Birkenau (a combination concentration/extermination camp), Auschwitz III–Monowitz (a labor camp to staff an IG Farben factory), and 45 satellite camps.
Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of prisoners took place in September 1941, and Auschwitz II–Birkenau went on to become a major site of the Nazi Final Solution to the Jewish Question. From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed en masse with the pesticide Zyklon B. An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, of whom at least 1.1 million died. Around 90 percent of those killed were Jewish; approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp.[1][2] Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romani and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 400 Jehovah's Witnesses, and tens of thousands of others of diverse nationalities, including an unknown number of homosexuals.[3]Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.
In the course of the war, the camp was staffed by 7,000 members of the German Schutzstaffel (SS), approximately 12 percent of whom were later convicted of war crimes. Some, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss, were executed. The Allied Powers refused to believe early reports of the at the camp, and their failure to bomb the camp or its railways remains controversial. One hundred forty-four prisoners are known to have escaped from Auschwitz successfully, and on 7 October 1944, two Sonderkommando units—prisoners assigned to staff the gas chambers—launched a brief, unsuccessful uprising.
As Soviet troops approached Auschwitz in January 1945, most of its population was sent west on a death march. The prisoners remaining at the camp were liberated on 27 January 1945, a day now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the following decades, survivors, such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, and Elie Wiesel, wrote memoirs of their experiences in Auschwitz, and the camp became a dominant symbol of the Holocaust. In 1947, Poland founded the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, and in 1979, it was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Contents [hide]
1 History
1.1 Background
1.2 Auschwitz I
1.3 Auschwitz II-Birkenau
1.3.1 The Gypsy camp
1.4 Auschwitz III
1.5 Subcamps
1.6 Evacuation, death marches, and Soviet liberation
1.7 After the war
1.8 Trials of war criminals
2 Command and control
3 Life in the camps
4 Selection and extermination process
4.1 Medical experiments
4.2 Death toll
5 Escapes, resistance, and the Allies' knowledge of the camps
5.1 Individual escape attempts
5.2 Birkenau revolt
6 Legacy
6.1 Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
7 See also
8 Notes
9 Citations
10 References
11 Further reading
12 External links
History
Background
The ideology of Nazism brought together elements of anti-Semitism, racial hygiene, and eugenics, and combined them with pan-Germanism and territorial expansionism with the goal of obtaining more Lebensraum (living space) for the Germanic people.[4] Immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, acts of violence perpetrated against Jews became ubiquitous.[5] The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933 excluded most Jews from the legal profession and the civil service. Similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of the right to practise.[6] Harassment and economic pressure were used by the regime to encourage Jews to leave the country voluntarily.[7] Their businesses were denied access to markets, forbidden to advertise in newspapers, and deprived of government contracts. German Jews were subjected to violent attacks and boycotts.[8]
In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. These laws prohibited marriages between Jews and people of Germanic extraction, extramarital relations between Jews and Germans, and the employment of German women under the age of 45 as domestic servants in Jewish households.[9] The Reich Citizenship Law stated that only those of Germanic or related blood were defined as citizens. Thus Jews and other minority groups were stripped of their German citizenship.[10] The laws were expanded on 26 November 1935 to include Romani people and Afro-Germans. This supplementary decree defined Gypsies as "enemies of the race-based state", the same category as Jews.[11] By the start of World War II in 1939, around 250,000 of Germany's 437,000 Jews had emigrated to the United States, Palestine, the United Kingdom, and other countries.[12][13]
Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered that the Polish leadership and intelligentsia be destroyed.[14] Approximately 65,000 civilians, who were viewed as being inferior to the Aryan master race, were killed by the end of 1939. In addition to leaders of Polish society, the Nazis killed Jews, prostitutes, Romani, and the mentally ill.[15][16] SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, then head of the Gestapo, ordered on 21 September that Polish Jewsshould be rounded up and concentrated into cities with good rail links. Initially the intention was to deport the Jews to points further east, or possibly to Madagascar.[17]Two years later, in an attempt to obtain new territory, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union,[4] intending to deport or kill the Jews and Slavs living there.[18]
Auschwitz I
Auschwitz I entrance
50.027606°N 19.203088°E
Map showing the location of the three main camps (1944). Prisoners: yellow; facilities: blue-gray
After this part of Poland was annexed by Nazi Germany, Oświęcim (Auschwitz) was located administratively in Germany, Province of Upper Silesia, Regierungsbezirk Kattowitz, Landkreis Bielitz. It was first suggested as a site for a concentration camp for Polish prisoners by SS-Oberführer Arpad Wigand, an aide to Higher SS and Police Leader for Silesia, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. Bach-Zelewski had been searching for a site to house prisoners in the Silesia region, as the local prisons were filled to capacity. Richard Glücks, head of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, sent former Sachsenhausen concentration camp commandant Walter Eisfeldto inspect the site, which already held sixteen dilapidated one-story buildings that had once served as an Austrian and later Polish Army barracks and a camp for transient workers.[19] Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS), approved the site in April 1940, intending to use the facility to house political prisoners. SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) Rudolf Höss oversaw the development of the camp and served as the first commandant. SS-Obersturmführer (senior lieutenant) Josef Kramer was appointed Höss's deputy. Auschwitz I, the original camp, became the administrative center for the whole complex.[20][21]
Local residents were evicted, including 1,200 people who lived in shacks around the barracks. Around 300 Jewish residents of Oświęcim were brought in to lay foundations. From 1940 to 1941, 17,000 Polish and Jewish residents of the western districts of Oświęcim were expelled from places adjacent to the camp. The Germans also ordered expulsions of Poles from the villages of Broszkowice, Babice, Brzezinka, Rajsko, Pławy, Harmęże, Bór, and Budy to the General Government.[22] German citizens were offered tax concessions and other benefits if they would relocate to the area.[23] By October 1943, more than 6,000 Reich Germans had arrived.[24] The Nazis planned to build a model modern residential area for incoming Germans, including schools, playing fields, and other amenities. Some of the plans went forward, including the construction of several hundred apartments, but many were never fully implemented.[25] Basic amenities such as water and sewage disposal were inadequate, and water-borne illnesses were commonplace.[26]
The first prisoners (30 German criminal prisoners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp) arrived in May 1940, intended to act as functionaries within the prison system. The first mass transport to Auschwitz concentration camp, which included Catholic prisoners, suspected members of the resistance, and 20 Jews, arrived from the prison in Tarnów, Poland, on 14 June 1940. They were interned in the former building of the Polish Tobacco Monopoly, adjacent to the site, until the camp was ready.[20][27]
The inmate population grew quickly as the camp absorbed Poland's intelligentsia and dissidents, including the Polish underground resistance. By March 1941, 10,900 were imprisoned there, most of them Poles.[20] By the end of 1940, the SS had confiscated land in the surrounding area to create a 40-square-kilometre (15 sq mi) "zone of interest" surrounded by a double ring of electrified barbed wire fences and watchtowers.[28] Like other Nazi concentration camps, the gates to Auschwitz I displayed the motto Arbeit macht frei ("Work brings freedom").[29]
Auschwitz II-Birkenau
American surveillance photo of Birkenau (1944). South is at the top in this photo.
Eyeglasses of victims
The victories of Operation Barbarossa in the summer and fall of 1941 against Hitler's new enemy, the Soviet Union, led to dramatic changes in Nazi anti-Jewish ideology and the profile of prisoners brought to Auschwitz.[30] Construction on Auschwitz II-Birkenau began in October 1941 to ease congestion at the main camp. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS), intended the camp to house 50,000 prisoners of war, who would be interned as forced laborers. Plans called for the expansion of the camp first to house 150,000 and eventually as many as 200,000 inmates.[31] An initial contingent of 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived at Auschwitz I in October 1941, but by March 1942 only 945 were still alive, and these were transferred to Birkenau, where most of them died from disease or starvation by May.[32] By this time Hitler had decided to annihilate the Jewish people, so Birkenau was repurposed as a combination labor camp/extermination camp.[32][33] The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum estimates that 1.3 million people, 1.1 million of them Jewish, were sent to the camp during its existence.[34]
The chief of construction of Auschwitz II-Birkenau was Karl Bischoff. Unlike his predecessor, he was a competent and dynamic bureaucrat who, in spite of the ongoing war, carried out the construction deemed necessary. The Birkenau camp, the four crematoria, a new reception building, and hundreds of other buildings were planned and constructed. Bischoff's plans called for each barrack to have an occupancy of 550 prisoners (one-third of the space allotted in other Nazi concentration camps). He later changed this to 744 prisoners per barrack. The SS designed the barracks not so much to house people as to destroy them.[35]
The first gas chamber at Birkenau was the "red house" (called Bunker 1 by SS staff), a brick cottage converted into a gassing facility by tearing out the inside and bricking up the windows. It was operational by March 1942.[36] A second brick cottage, the "white house" or Bunker 2, was converted some weeks later.[37][38] These structures were in use for mass killings until early 1943.[39] Himmler visited the camp in person on 17 and 18 July 1942. He was given a demonstration of a mass killing using the gas chamber in Bunker 2 and toured the building site of the new IG Farben plant being constructed at the nearby town of Monowitz.[40]
In early 1943, the Nazis decided to increase greatly the gassing capacity of Birkenau. Crematorium II, which had been designed as a mortuary with morgues in the basement and ground-level incinerators, was converted into a killing factory by installing gas-tight doors, vents for the Zyklon B (a highly lethal cyanide-based pesticide) to be dropped into the chamber, and ventilation equipment to remove the gas thereafter.[41] It went into operation in March. Crematorium III was built using the same design. Crematoria IV and V, designed from the start as gassing centers, were also constructed that spring. By June 1943, all four crematoria were operational. Most of the victims were killed using these four structures.[42]
The Gypsy camp
See also: Porajmos
Zigeunermischlinge (Gypsy half-breeds) used in an anthropological study by German psychologist Eva Justin. Housed in the Gypsy camp, all but two of Justin's subjects were murdered when the camp was liquidated.[43]
On 10 December 1942, Himmler issued an order to send all Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) to concentration camps, including Auschwitz.[44] A separate camp for Roma was set up at Auschwitz II-Birkenau known as the Zigeunerfamilienlager (Gypsy Family Camp). The first transport of German Gypsies arrived on 26 February 1943, and was housed in Section B-IIe of Auschwitz II. Approximately 23,000 Gypsies had been brought to Auschwitz by 1944, 20,000 of whom died there.[45] One transport of 1,700 Polish Sinti and Roma were killed in the gas chambers upon arrival, as they were suspected to be ill with spotted fever.[46]
Gypsy prisoners were used primarily for construction work.[46] Thousands died of typhus and noma due to overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, and malnutrition.[45] Anywhere from 1,400 to 3,000 prisoners were transferred to other concentration camps before the murder of the remaining population.[a]
On 2 August 1944, the SS cleared the Gypsy camp. A witness in another part of the camp later told of the Gypsies unsuccessfully battling the SS with improvised weapons before being loaded into trucks. The surviving population (estimated at 2,897 to 5,600) was then killed en masse in the gas chambers.[48][49] The murder of the Romani people by the Nazis during World War II is known in the Romani language as the Porajmos (devouring).[50]
Auschwitz III
Main article: Monowitz concentration camp
Detailed map of Buna Werke, Monowitz, and nearby subcamps
After examining several sites for a new plant to manufacture buna, a type of synthetic rubber essential to the war effort, chemicals manufacturer IG Farben chose a site near the towns of Dwory and Monowice (Monowitz in German), about 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) east of Auschwitz I and 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) east of the town of Oświęcim.[51] Financial support in the form of tax exemptions was available to corporations prepared to develop industries in the frontier regions under the Eastern Fiscal Assistance Law, passed in December 1940. In addition to its proximity to the concentration camp, which could be used as a source of cheap labor, the site had good railway connections and access to raw materials.[52] In February 1941, Himmler ordered that the Jewish population of Oświęcim should be expelled to make way for skilled laborers that would be brought in to work at the plant. All Poles able to work were to remain in the town and were forced to work building the factory.[53] Himmler visited in person in March and decreed an immediate expansion of the parent camp to house 30,000 persons. Development of the camp at Birkenau began about six months later.[54] Construction of IG Auschwitz began in April, with an initial force of 1,000 workers from Auschwitz I assigned to work on the construction. This number increased to 7,000 in 1943 and 11,000 in 1944.[55]Over the course of its history, about 35,000 inmates in total worked at the plant; 25,000 died as a result of malnutrition, disease, and the physically impossible workload.[56] In addition to the concentration camp inmates, who comprised a third of the work force, IG Auschwitz employed slave laborers from all over Europe.[57]
At first, the laborers walked the seven kilometers from Auschwitz I to the plant each day, but as this meant they had to rise at 03:00, many arrived exhausted and unable to work. The camp at Monowitz (also called Monowitz-Buna or Auschwitz III) was constructed and began housing inmates on 30 October 1942, the first concentration camp to be financed and built by private industry.[58] In January 1943 the ArbeitsausbildungLager (labor education camp) was moved from the parent camp to Monowitz. These prisoners were also forced to work on the building site.[58] The SS charged IG Farben three Reichsmarks per hour for unskilled workers, four for skilled workers.[59] Although the camp administrators expected the prisoners to work at 75 percent of the capacity of a free worker, the inmates were only able to perform 20 to 50 percent as well.[58] Site managers constantly threatened inmates with transportation to Birkenau for death in the gas chambers as a way to try to increase productivity.[60] Deaths and transfers to the gas chambers at Birkenau reduced the prisoner population of Monowitz by nearly a fifth each month; numbers were made up with new arrivals.[61] Life expectancy of inmates at Monowitz averaged about three months. Though the factory had been expected to begin production in 1943, shortages of labor and raw materials meant start-up had to be postponed repeatedly.[62] The plant was almost ready to commence production when it was overrun by Soviet troops in 1945.[63]
Subcamps
Further information: List of subcamps of Auschwitz
Various other German industrial enterprises, such as Krupp and Siemens-Schuckert, built factories with their own subcamps.[59] There were 45 such satellite camps, 28 of which served corporations involved in the armaments industry. Prisoner populations ranged from several dozen to several thousand.[64] Subcamps were built at Blechhammer, Jawiszowice, Jaworzno, Lagisze, Mysłowice, Trzebinia, and other centers as far afield as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.[65][66][67] Satellite camps were designated as Aussenlager (external camp), Nebenlager (extension or subcamp), or Arbeitslager (labor camp).[68] Industries with satellite camps included coal mines, foundries and other metal works, chemical plants, and other industries. Prisoners were also made to work in forestry and farming.[65]
Evacuation, death marches, and Soviet liberation
Young survivors at the camp, liberated by the Red Army in January 1945
In mid-1944, about 130,000 prisoners were present in Auschwitz when the SS started to move about half of them to other concentration camps.[69] In November 1944, with the Soviet Red Army approaching through Poland, Himmler ordered gassing operations to cease across the Reich. The crematorium IV building was dismantled,[70] and the Sonderkommando were ordered to begin removing evidence of the killings, including the mass graves.[71] The SS destroyed written records, and in the final week before the camp's liberation, burned or demolished many of its buildings.[72] The plundered goods from the 'Canada' barracks at Birkenau together with building supplies were transported to the German interior.[70] On 20 January, the overflowing warehouses were set ablaze. On the same day, the gas chambers as well as crematoria II and III at Birkenau were blown up.[70] The raging fires lasted for several days. On 26 January 1945, the last crematorium V at Birkenau was demolished with explosives just one day ahead of the Soviet attack.[70]
Himmler ordered the evacuation of all camps in January 1945, charging camp commanders with "making sure that not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy."[73] On 17 January, 56,000–58,000 Auschwitz detainees, of whom two-thirds were Jews, were evacuated under guard, largely on foot, in severe winter conditions.[74] Thousands of them died in the subsequent death march west towards Wodzisław Śląski.[75] The guards shot all prisoners who were unable to march at the imposed pace. Peter Longerich estimates that a quarter of the detainees were thus killed.[69] A column of inmates reached Gross-Rosen concentration camp complex. Throughout February, the terribly overcrowded main camp at Gross-Rosen was cleared, and all 44,000 inmates were moved further west. An unknown number died in this last journey.[76] In March 1945, Himmler ordered that no more prisoners should be killed, as he hoped to use them as hostages in negotiations with the Allies.[77] Approximately 20,000 Auschwitz prisoners made it to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where they were liberated by the British in April 1945.[78]
When Auschwitz was liberated on 26 and 27 January by the 322nd Rifle Division of the Red Army, the soldiers found 7,500 prisoners alive and over 600 corpses. Among items found by the Soviet soldiers were 370,000 men's suits, 837,000 women's garments, and 7.7 tonnes (8.5 short tons) of human hair.[79][80] The camp's liberation received little press attention at the time. In historian Laurence Rees' opinion, this was due to three factors: the previous discovery of similar crimes at Majdanek concentration camp, competing news from the Allied summit at Yalta, and the Soviet Union's interest, for propaganda purposes, in minimizing attention to Jewish suffering.[81] Due to the vast extent of the camp area, at least four divisions took part in liberating the camp: 100th Rifle Division (established in Vologda, Russia), 322nd Rifle Division (Gorky, Russia), 286th Rifle Division (Leningrad), and 107th Motor Rifle Division (Tambov, Russia).[82] ebay4262/140