Shoah, 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz: the end of the nightmare and the discovery of horror

Soviet soldiers had no idea what they would find after weeks of marching. With the black gates of Auschwitz, the secrets of Nazi inhuman cruelty were opened to the world. 

It was freezing cold  on January 27, 1945.  The Soviet soldiers had been marching for weeks, across the winter-frozen plains of Eastern Europe. They had no idea what they would find just outside Oświęcim , the Polish name for Auschwitz . The men of the Red Army's 332nd Infantry Division were the first to arrive at a gate with the words arbeit macht frei , "work sets you free," written above it. Behind that black, frozen iron, stood  the largest extermination camp  built by the Nazis in Poland.

The first thing they found were the warehouses , overflowing with clothes and objects: glasses, pots, shoes, hats. However, seven thousand prisoners remained in the camp , emaciated and destroyed by hardship, but survivors of the hell of the Shoah. By opening the black gates of Auschwitz and freeing the survivors, the Soviets put the "end" stamp on Nazi madness and ideally on the Second World War , and also revealed to the world all the horror that Adolf Hitler's regime had committed. This is why, today more than ever, January 27 is Holocaust Remembrance Day.  This is why, even today, it is necessary to remember.

The arrival of the Soviets in Auschwitz in 1945

 The liberation of the Auschwitz camp, followed in April 1945 by those of Dachau and Buchenwald , showed the entire world the otherwise incredible nightmare of the Nazi genocide and the extermination of the Jewish people. A horror as vivid as in the accounts of surviving witnesses as in the instruments of torture and death used in the concentration camps. From the memories of the soldiers who liberated the Auschwitz camp, a common element emerges: when they entered there was a ghostly silence . It seemed like there wasn't a living soul. Instead, after very long minutes in which the prisoners realized that the arrivals were not their tormentors, thousands of them gathered their little remaining strength to cry and hug each other.

“They rushed toward us screaming, fell to their knees, kissed the hems of our coats and threw their arms around our legs,” said Grigorii Davidovich Elisavetskii, one of the first Red Army soldiers to enter Auschwitz. After five years of hell, the death camp was finally liberated. About two weeks before the liberation, the Nazis had fled in a hurry, pressed by the advancing Red Army.

This rapid and terrible retreat became a “death march ,” in which all the prisoners who were still alive were marched to other facilities. Many of them died along the way, forced into long columns and told to walk west. Those who resisted kept walking, while those who fell were shot and left behind. A path paved with 15,000 dead, abandoned on the frozen earth. Those who remained were forced into open freight cars and sent to camps in inner Germany, still under the control of the Reich.

There are no certainties about the numbers , but according to data from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, in the Auschwitz camp the German SS killed at least  960 thousand Jews , 74 thousand Poles, 21 thousand Roma, 15 thousand Soviet prisoners of war and 10 thousand people of other nationalities. In the small Polish center, more human beings lost their lives than in any other Nazi death camp. Initially, the Germans conceived of Auschwitz as a concentration camp , like those already used by the Americans and British since the end of the nineteenth century, in which to exploit the free labor of the prisoners .

The first inmates arrived there as early as May 1940. In the space of five years, those terrible dormitories counted the deportation of 1.3 million people. One million and one hundred thousand of them would never return home.

The Nazi Plan for Auschwitz

 The Germans had long known they would have to abandon Auschwitz, but they planned to use it for as long as possible. The goal was to make the most of the workers, whose slave labor was rented out to companies that produced chemicals, weapons, and other materials. By late 1944, the Nazis were still unsure whether the Allies would push so far into Poland. While they waited for the inevitable, they proceeded with a preliminary evacuation, even establishing a "subcamp" at a steel mill. As they planned a mass evacuation that would prove spectacular, the Germans began destroying evidence of their crimes. They killed most of the Jews who had worked in the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz. Then they moved on to demolish most of the extermination sites. Including the archives, which held meticulous records of the prisoners' lives.

Anti-Semitism and Discriminatory Laws

 Hitler took power in Germany in 1933. From the beginning of his command, and even before in his rise to the chancellery and in the indoctrination of the Germans, the Führer placed the myth of the Aryan race at the center. In Mein Kampf , written in 1925 in prison, he had carved that all history is nothing but the result of the eternal struggle between races for supremacy, and that war is the natural and necessary expression of this struggle. The winner, that is, the strongest race, will therefore have the right to dominate all the others. According to Hitler, this only superior ethnic group, destined to dominate the world, was the Aryan race . For political and social reasons, to coagulate and incite his people, the dictator elected the Jews as his main enemy.

Exploiting the centuries-old burden of social hatred and ancestral anger, mistrust and historical events reworked in a tendentious way, which especially in Eastern Europe has always flooded public opinion towards the Jewish population. In the implementation of this ideology, since 1933 numerous discriminatory provisions against Jews were passed, the culmination of which is represented by the Nuremberg Laws (1935), which reserved full rights to citizens of German or related blood (Citizenship Law) and prohibited marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood (Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor).