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22.06.2021

Lest we forget the crimes against Russian soldiers

 
 
The place where the first mass extermination experiments were staged with Zyklon B poison gas in the cellar of Block 11 in Auschwitz 1 concentration camp. In the background at floor level the small hatch through which the prisoners entered the ‘standing cell’. There was no room to sit because up to four prisoners were crammed together in each standing cell. Picture credits: Diether, Auschwitz I Block 11, CC BY-SA 3.0

The place where the first mass extermination experiments were staged with Zyklon B poison gas in the cellar of Block 11 in Auschwitz 1 concentration camp. In the background at floor level the small hatch through which the prisoners entered the ‘standing cell’. There was no room to sit because up to four prisoners were crammed together in each standing cell. Picture credits: Diether, Auschwitz I Block 11, CC BY-SA 3.0

 

 

 

Today, Auschwitz survivors around the globe are remembering that day in June 1941, when the German Wehrmacht invaded the die Soviet Union.

After just a few weeks, and in violation of the Geneva Convention of 1929, the first Soviet soldiers were taken as prisoners of war to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp in July 1941. Here they were subjected to inhuman conditions and treatment. Their hunger was indescribable, and the SS were free to abuse them at will, fired by a hatred that fed on racism and the ideology of extermination.

During the first days of September 1941, 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 Polish prisoners were murdered in the first mass extermination experiments using Zyklon B poison gas in the cellar of Block 11 in Auschwitz I camp. A total of more than 10,000 soviet prisoners of war were murdered in Auschwitz by deliberate starvation, gassing or other forms of violent death. Of the few who survived Auschwitz and were able to return home, most vanished in Stalinist Gulags, because they were branded as traitors. Their suffering continued in the post-war years. Many of them lived, severely traumatized, in poverty and marginalized conditions.

In Berlin Christoph Heubner, the Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee, said in a statement: “Many prisoners in Auschwitz repeatedly tried to alleviate the misery and hunger of their fellow prisoners from the Red Army and provide them with some kind of consolation. In the years immediately following their liberation, Polish survivors and their colleagues at the newly established Auschwitz Memorial, such as Jerzy Adam Brandhuber and Kazimierz Smolen, were determined to ensure that the crimes committed against the Soviet prisoners of war and the sufferings of these people in Auschwitz should never be forgotten.

To this day the memories of all Auschwitz survivors are inextricably interlinked: they remember the images of starving Soviet prisoners of war fighting for their lives, and they remember the images of the Soviet liberators mowing down the murderous camp fences with their tanks and giving them back their lives.”