Auschwitz: Place of Horrors

Nagging questions about Allied knowledge of Auschwitz have always troubled people. From camp survivors to the curious public, a key issue remains: Did the Allies know about extermination at Auschwitz before the camp was liberated? If so, why wasn't it bombed?

Had the sprawling complex been destroyed by Allied air raids, the Nazis would have lost their ability to continue murdering innocent people. Scholars have argued such action would have been preferable, even though prisoners would have died in the raid, because it would have ended the Nazi's biggest killing machine.

Did these aerial photographs sufficiently reveal what was happening at Auschwitz-Birkenau? Not according to the CIA report. It was only later, with the use of sophisticated photo-interpretation equipment and survivor testimony, that the various pieces of the Auschwitz terror could be fit together.

When Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, on 27 January 1945, only a fraction of the camps' total prisoners had survived.  Some of those survivors were Sonderkommandos - male prisoners who were forced to participate in the dreadful goings-on in the death camp. 

Six of those Sonderkommandos later agreed to answer questions about what they did - and why they did it.  Their responses  and stories - including details of a Sonderkommando uprising (in October of 1944) which took the Nazis by complete surprise and resulted in burning the camp's crematoria -  are included in a book entitled We Wept Without Tears.  It is a difficult read.

Millions of people died at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Evidence of what remained, at liberation, chills the spine:

• Bales of hair, ready for shipment to Germany;

 

• Confiscated prayer shawls, dumped in an Auschwitz warehouse;

 

• Heaps of eyeglasses, no longer needed by murdered people;

 

• Piles of shoes, removed by those who thought they were just taking showers; and

 

• Stacks of clothing, carelessly tossed away by Nazis who thought they had the right to kill (or maim) people they considered inferior.

And what of all the children who passed through Auschwitz? Only 180 survived what happened at this place of horrors.