Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele. Josef Mengele - “Doctor Death”, who exterminated hundreds of thousands of people in Auschwitz in the name of science

German doctor Joseph Mengele is known in world history as the most brutal Nazi criminal, who subjected tens of thousands of prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp to inhumane experiments.
For his crimes against humanity, Mengele forever earned the nickname “Doctor Death.”

Origin

Josef Mengele was born in 1911 in Bavaria, in Günzburg. The ancestors of the future fascist executioner were ordinary German farmers. Father Karl founded the agricultural equipment company Karl Mengele and Sons. The mother was raising three children. When Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power, the wealthy Mengele family began to actively support him. Hitler defended the interests of the very farmers on whom the well-being of this family depended.

Joseph did not intend to continue his father’s work and went to study to become a doctor. He studied at the universities of Vienna and Munich. In 1932, he joined the ranks of the Nazi Steel Helmet stormtroopers, but soon left this organization due to health problems. After graduating from university, Mengele received a doctorate. He wrote his dissertation on the topic of racial differences in the structure of the jaw.

Military service and professional activities

In 1938, Mengele joined the ranks of the SS and at the same time the Nazi Party. At the beginning of the war, he joined the reserve forces of the SS Panzer Division, rose to the rank of SS Hauptsturmführer and received the Iron Cross for saving 2 soldiers from a burning tank. After being wounded in 1942, he was declared unfit for further service in the active forces and went to “work” in Auschwitz.

In the concentration camp, he decided to realize his long-time dream of becoming an outstanding doctor and research scientist. Mengele calmly justified Hitler's sadistic views with scientific expediency: he believed that if inhuman cruelty is needed for the development of science and the breeding of a “pure race,” then it can be forgiven. This point of view translated into thousands of damaged lives and even more deaths.

In Auschwitz, Mengele found the most fertile ground for his experiments. The SS not only did not control, but even encouraged the most extreme forms of sadism. In addition, the killing of thousands of Gypsies, Jews and other people of the “wrong” nationality was the primary task of the concentration camp. Thus, Mengele found himself in the hands of a huge amount of “human material” that was supposed to be used up. "Doctor Death" could do whatever he wanted. And he created.

"Doctor Death" experiments

Josef Mengele conducted thousands of monstrous experiments over the years of his activity. He amputated body parts and internal organs without anesthesia, sewed twins together, and injected toxic chemicals into children's eyes to see if the color of the iris would change after that. Prisoners were deliberately infected with smallpox, tuberculosis and other diseases. All new and untested medications, chemicals, poisons and poisonous gases were tested on them.

Mengele was most interested in various developmental anomalies. A huge number of experiments were carried out on dwarfs and twins. Of the latter, about 1,500 couples were subjected to his brutal experiments. About 200 people survived.

All operations on fusion of people, removal and transplantation of organs were performed without anesthesia. The Nazis did not consider it advisable to spend expensive medicines on “subhumans.” Even if the patient survived the experience, he was expected to be destroyed. In many cases, the autopsy was performed at a time when the person was still alive and felt everything.

After the war

After Hitler’s defeat, “Doctor Death,” realizing that execution awaited him, tried with all his might to escape persecution. In 1945, in the uniform of a private, he was detained near Nuremberg, but then released because he could not establish his identity. After this, Mengele hid for 35 years in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. All this time, the Israeli intelligence service MOSSAD was looking for him and was close to capturing him several times.

It was never possible to arrest the cunning Nazi. His grave was discovered in Brazil in 1985. In 1992, the body was exhumed and proved that it belonged to Josef Mengele. Now the remains of the sadistic doctor are at the Medical University of Sao Paulo.

Sylvia and her mother, like most Jews from that region, were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, on the main gate of which only three words promising suffering and death are inscribed in clear letters - Edem Das Seine.. (Abandon hope, all who enter here..).
Despite the severity of her stay in the camp, Sylvia was childishly happy - after all, her own mother was nearby. But they didn't have to be together for long. One day a dapper German officer appeared in the family block. His name was Joseph Mengele, also known by the nickname Angel of Death. Looking carefully at the faces, he walked in front of the lined up prisoners. Sylvia's mother realized that this was the beginning of the end. Her face was distorted by a desperate grimace, filled with suffering and grief. But her face was destined to reflect an even more terrible grimace, not even a grimace, but a mask of Death, when in a few days she would suffer on the operating table of the inquisitive Joseph Mengele. So, a few days later Sylvia, along with other children, was transferred to children's block 15. So she parted forever with her mother, who soon, as already noted, found death under the knife of the Angel of Death.

The first concentration camp in Germany was opened in 1933. The last one working was captured by Soviet troops in 1945. Between these two dates there are millions of tortured prisoners who died from backbreaking work, strangled in gas chambers, shot by the SS. And those who died from “medical experiments.” >>> Nobody knows for sure how many of these last ones there were. Hundreds of thousands. Why are we writing about this many years after the end of the war? Because inhumane experiments on people in Nazi concentration camps are also History, the history of medicine. Its darkest, but no less interesting page...

Medical experiments were carried out in almost all of the largest concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Among the doctors who led these experiments there were many completely different people.

Dr. Wirtz was involved in lung cancer research and studied surgical options. Professor Clauberg and Dr. Schumann, as well as Dr. Glauberg, conducted experiments on sterilization of people in the concentration camp of the Konighütte Institute.

Dr. Dohmenom in Sachsenhausen worked on research into infectious jaundice and the search for a vaccine against it. Professor Hagen in Natzweiler studied typhus and also looked for a vaccine. The Germans also researched malaria. Many camps conducted research into the effects of various chemicals on humans.

There were people like Rasher. His experiments in studying methods of warming frostbitten people brought him fame, many awards in Nazi Germany and, as it later turned out, real results. But he fell into the trap of his own theories. In addition to his main medical activities, he carried out orders from the authorities. And by exploring the possibilities of infertility treatment, he deceived the regime. His children, whom he passed off as his own, turned out to be adopted, and his wife was infertile. When the Reich found out about this, the doctor and his wife were sent to a concentration camp, and at the end of the war they were executed.

There were mediocrities, such as Arnold Dohmen, who infected people with hepatitis and tried to treat them by puncturing the liver. This heinous act had no scientific value, which was clear to Reich specialists from the very beginning.

Or people like Hermann Voss, who did not personally participate in the experiments, but studied the materials of other people’s experiments with blood, obtaining information through the Gestapo. Every German medical student knows his anatomy textbook today.

Or such fanatics as Professor August Hirt, who studied the corpses of those who were exterminated at Auschwitz. A doctor who experimented on animals, on people, and on himself.

But our story is not about them. Our story tells of Josef Mengele, remembered in History as the Angel of Death or Doctor Death, a cold-blooded man who killed his victims by injecting chloroform into their hearts so he could personally perform autopsies and observe their internal organs.

Josef Mengele, the most famous of the Nazi doctor-criminals, was born in Bavaria in 1911. He studied philosophy at the University of Munich and medicine at the University of Frankfurt. In 1934 he joined the SA and became a member of the National Socialist Party, and in 1937 he joined the SS. He worked at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. Thesis topic: "Morphological studies of the structure of the lower jaw of representatives of four races."

After the outbreak of World War II, he served as a military doctor in the SS Viking division in France, Poland and Russia. In 1942, he received the Iron Cross for saving two tank crews from a burning tank. After being wounded, SS-Hauptsturmführer Mengele was declared unfit for combat service and in 1943 was appointed chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The prisoners soon nicknamed him "the angel of death."

In addition to its main function - the destruction of "inferior races", prisoners of war, communists and simply the dissatisfied, concentration camps performed another function in Nazi Germany. With the arrival of Mengele, Auschwitz became a "major scientific research center." Unfortunately for the prisoners, the range of Joseph Mengele’s “scientific” interests was unusually wide. He began with work on “increasing the fertility of Aryan women.” It is clear that the material for research was non-Aryan women. Then the Fatherland set a new, directly opposite task: to find the cheapest and most effective methods of limiting the birth rate of “subhumans” - Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. Having mutilated tens of thousands of men and women, Mengele came to the conclusion: the most reliable way to avoid conception is castration.

“Research” went on as usual. The Wehrmacht ordered a topic: to find out everything about the effects of cold on a soldier’s body (hypothermia). The experimental methodology was the most simple: a concentration camp prisoner is taken, covered on all sides with ice, “doctors” in SS uniforms constantly measure body temperature... When a test subject dies, a new one is brought from the barracks. Conclusion: after the body has cooled below 30 degrees, it is most likely impossible to save a person. The best way to warm up is a hot bath and the “natural warmth of the female body.”

The Luftwaffe, the German air force, commissioned research on the effect of high altitude on pilot performance. A pressure chamber was built in Auschwitz. Thousands of prisoners suffered a terrible death: with ultra-low pressure, a person was simply torn apart. Conclusion: it is necessary to build aircraft with a pressurized cabin. By the way, not a single one of these aircraft took off in Germany until the very end of the war.

On his own initiative, Joseph Mengele, who became interested in racial theory in his youth, conducted experiments with eye color. For some reason, he needed to prove in practice that the brown eyes of Jews under no circumstances could become the blue eyes of a “true Aryan.” He gives hundreds of Jews injections of blue dye - extremely painful and often leading to blindness. The conclusion is obvious: a Jew cannot be turned into an Aryan.

Tens of thousands of people became victims of Mengele’s monstrous experiments. What is the value of research alone on the effects of physical and mental exhaustion on the human body! And the “study” of 3 thousand young twins, of which only 200 survived! The twins received blood transfusions and organ transplants from each other. Sisters were forced to bear children from their brothers. Forced gender reassignment operations were carried out. Before starting the experiments, the good doctor Mengele could pat the child on the head, treat him with chocolate... the goal was to establish how twins are born. The results of these studies were supposed to help strengthen the Aryan race. Among his experiments were attempts to change eye color by injecting various chemicals into the eyes, amputations of organs, attempts to sew twins together, and other macabre operations. The people who survived these experiments were killed.

From block 15, the girl was taken to hell - hell number 10. In that block, Joseph Mengele conducted medical experiments. Several times she underwent spinal puncture, and then surgical operations during savage experiments on merging dog meat with the human body...

However, the chief doctor of Auschwitz was engaged not only in applied research. He was not averse to “pure science.” Concentration camp prisoners were deliberately infected with various diseases in order to test the effectiveness of new drugs on them. Last year, one of the former prisoners of Auschwitz sued the German pharmaceutical company Bayer. The makers of aspirin are accused of using concentration camp prisoners to test their sleeping pill. Judging by the fact that soon after the start of the “approbation” the concern additionally purchased 150 more Auschwitz prisoners, no one was able to wake up after the new sleeping pills. By the way, other representatives of German business also collaborated with the concentration camp system. The largest chemical concern in Germany, IG Farbenindustri, made not only synthetic gasoline for tanks, but also Zyklon-B gas for the gas chambers of the same Auschwitz. After the war, the giant company was “disintegrated.” Some of the fragments of IG Farbenindustry are well known in our country. Including as drug manufacturers.

In 1945, Josef Mengele carefully destroyed all the collected “data” and escaped from Auschwitz. Until 1949, Mengele worked quietly in his native Günzburg at his father’s company. Then, using new documents in the name of Helmut Gregor, he emigrated to Argentina. He received his passport quite legally, through... the Red Cross. In those years, this organization provided charity, issued passports and travel documents to tens of thousands of refugees from Germany. Perhaps Mengele's fake ID simply could not be thoroughly checked. Moreover, the art of forging documents in the Third Reich reached unprecedented heights.

One way or another, Mengele ended up in South America. In the early 50s, when Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest (with the right to kill him upon arrest), Iyozef moved to Paraguay. However, all this was rather a sham, a game of catching Nazis. Still with the same passport in the name of Gregor, Joseph Mengele repeatedly visited Europe, where his wife and son remained. The Swiss police watched his every move - and did nothing!

The man responsible for tens of thousands of murders lived in prosperity and contentment until 1979. The victims did not appear to him in his dreams. His soul, if there was one, remained pure. Justice was not served. Mengele drowned in the warm ocean while swimming on a beach in Brazil. And the fact that the valiant agents of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad helped him drown is just a beautiful legend.

Josef Mengele managed a lot during his life: lived a happy childhood, received an excellent education at the university, made a happy family, raised children, experienced the taste of war and front-line life, engaged in “scientific research”, many of which were important for modern medicine, since Vaccines against various diseases were developed, and many other useful experiments were carried out that would not have been possible in a democratic state (in fact, the crimes of Mengele, like many of his colleagues, made a huge contribution to medicine), finally, being already in his old age, Joseph received a peaceful rest on the sandy shores of Latin America. Already on this well-deserved rest, Mengele was more than once forced to remember his past deeds - he more than once read articles in newspapers about his search, about the fee of 50,000 American dollars assigned for providing information about his whereabouts, about his atrocities against prisoners. Reading these articles, Joseph Mengele could not hide his sarcastic, sad smile, for which he was remembered by many of his victims - after all, he was in plain sight, swimming on public beaches, conducting active correspondence, visiting entertainment venues. And he could not understand the accusations of committing atrocities - he always looked at his experimental subjects only as material for experiments. He saw no difference between the experiments he carried out on beetles at school and those he carried out in Auschwitz. What regret can there be when an ordinary creature dies?!

In January 1945, Soviet soldiers carried Sylvia out of the block in their arms - her legs barely moved after the operations, and she weighed about 19 kilograms. The girl spent six long months in a hospital in Leningrad, where doctors did everything possible and impossible to restore her health. After being discharged from the hospital, she was sent to the Perm region to work on a state farm, and then transferred to the construction of a thermal power plant in Perm. It seemed that the tragic days were in the past. Although the work was not easy, Sylvia did not lose heart: the main thing was that peace came and she remained alive. She was 17 years old then.. /

Joseph Mengele, a German doctor who conducted medical experiments on prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, was born on March 6, 1911. Mengele was personally involved in the selection of prisoners arriving at the camp, and conducted criminal experiments on prisoners, including men, children and women. Tens of thousands of people became its victims.

The terrible experiments of Dr. Mengele - the Nazi "Doctor Death"

"Death Factory" Auschwitz (Auschwitz) gained more and more terrible fame. If in the remaining concentration camps there was at least some hope of survival, then most of the Jews, Gypsies and Slavs staying in Auschwitz were destined to die either in gas chambers, or from backbreaking labor and serious illnesses, or from the experiments of a sinister doctor who was one one of the first persons meeting new arrivals at the train.

Auschwitz was known as a place where human experiments were carried out

Participation in the selection was one of his favorite “entertainment”. He always came to the train, even when it was not required of him. Looking perfect, smiling, happy, he decided who would die now and who would go on experiments. It was difficult to deceive his keen eye: Mengele always accurately saw the age and state of health of people. Many women, children under 15 and old people were immediately sent to the gas chambers. Only 30 percent of prisoners managed to avoid this fate and temporarily delay the date of their death.

Dr. Mengele always accurately saw the age and state of health of people

Joseph Mengele thirsted for power over people's destinies. It is not surprising that Auschwitz became a real paradise for the Angel of Death, who was capable of exterminating hundreds of thousands of defenseless people at a time, which he demonstrated in the very first days of work at the new place, when he ordered the extermination of 200 thousand Gypsies.

Chief physician of Birkenau (one of the inner camps of Auschwitz) and head of the research laboratory, Dr. Josef Mengele.

“On the night of July 31, 1944, a terrible scene of the destruction of a gypsy camp took place. Kneeling before Mengele and Boger, women and children begged for their life. But it didn't help. They were brutally beaten and forced into trucks. It was a terrible, nightmarish sight,” say surviving eyewitnesses.

Human life meant nothing to the “Angel of Death.” Mengele was cruel and merciless. Is there a typhus epidemic in the barracks? This means we will send the entire barracks to the gas chambers. This is the best way to stop the disease.

Joseph Mengele chose who to live and who to die, who to sterilize, who to operate on.

All experiments of the Angel of Death boiled down to two main tasks: to find an effective way that could influence the reduction in the birth rate of races disliked by the Nazis, and by all means to increase the birth rate of the Aryans.

Mengele had his own associates and followers. One of them was Irma Grese, a sadist who worked as a guard in the women's block. She took pleasure in tormenting the prisoners; she could take the lives of prisoners only because she was in a bad mood.

The head of the labor service of the women's block of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp - Irma Grese and his commandant SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Joseph Kramer under British escort in the courtyard of the prison in Celle, Germany.

Josef Mengele had followers. For example, Irma Grese, who is capable of taking the lives of prisoners due to a bad attitude

Josef Mengele's first task in reducing the birth rate was to develop the most effective method of sterilization for men and women. So he operated on boys and men without anesthesia and exposed women to X-rays.

To reduce the birth rate of Jews, Slavs and Gypsies, Mengele proposed the development of an effective method for sterilizing men and women

1945 Poland. Auschwitz concentration camp. Children, prisoners of the camp, are waiting for their release.

Eugenics, if you look at encyclopedias, is the study of human selection, that is, a science that seeks to improve the properties of heredity. Scientists making discoveries in eugenics argue that the human gene pool is degenerating and this must be fought.

Joseph Mengele believed that in order to breed a pure race, it is necessary to understand the reasons for the appearance of people with genetic “anomalies”

Joseph Mengele, as a representative of eugenics, faced an important task: in order to breed a pure race, it is necessary to understand the reasons for the appearance of people with genetic “anomalies”. That is why the Angel of Death was of great interest in dwarfs, giants and other people with genetic abnormalities.

Seven brothers and sisters, originally from the Romanian town of Rosvel, lived in a labor camp for almost a year.

When it came to experiments, people had their teeth and hair pulled out, extracts of cerebrospinal fluid were taken, unbearably hot and unbearably cold substances were poured into their ears, and terrible gynecological experiments were performed.

“The most terrible experiments of all were gynecological ones. Only those of us who were married went through them. We were tied to a table and systematic torture began. They inserted some objects into the uterus, pumped out blood from there, picked out the insides, pierced us with something and took pieces of samples. The pain was unbearable."

The results of the experiments were sent to Germany. Many scientific minds came to Auschwitz to listen to Joseph Mengele's reports on eugenics and experiments on Lilliputians.

Many scientific minds came to Auschwitz to listen to the reports of Josef Mengele

"Twins!" - this cry echoed over the crowd of prisoners, when suddenly the next twins or triplets timidly huddled together were discovered. They were kept alive and taken to a separate barracks, where the children were well fed and even given toys. A sweet, smiling doctor with a steely gaze often came to see them: he treated them to sweets and gave them rides around the camp in his car. However, Mengele did all this not out of sympathy or out of love for the children, but only with the cold calculation that they would not be afraid of his appearance when the time came for the next twins to go to the operating table. “My guinea pigs” was what the merciless Doctor Death called the twin children.

The interest in twins was not accidental. Mengele was worried about the main idea: if every German woman, instead of one child, gave birth to two or three healthy ones at once, the Aryan race could finally be reborn. That is why it was very important for the Angel of Death to study in the smallest detail all the structural features of identical twins. He hoped to understand how to artificially increase the birth rate of twins.

The twin experiments involved 1,500 pairs of twins, of which only 200 survived.

The first part of the experiments on twins was harmless enough. The doctor needed to carefully examine each pair of twins and compare all their body parts. Arms, legs, fingers, hands, ears and noses were measured centimeter by centimeter.

The Angel of Death meticulously recorded all measurements in tables. Everything is as it should be: on the shelves, neatly, precisely. As soon as the measurements were completed, the experiments on the twins moved into another phase. It was very important to check the body’s reactions to certain stimuli. To do this, they took one of the twins: he was injected with some dangerous virus, and the doctor observed: what will happen next? All results were again recorded and compared with the results of the other twin. If a child became very ill and was on the verge of death, then he was no longer interesting: he, while still alive, was either opened up or sent to a gas chamber.

Joseph Menge used 1,500 pairs in his experiments on twins, of which only 200 survived

The twins received blood transfusions, internal organ transplants (often from a pair of other twins), and dye segments injected into their eyes (to test whether brown Jewish eyes could become blue Aryan eyes). Many experiments were carried out without anesthesia. The children screamed and begged for mercy, but nothing could stop Mengele.

The idea is primary, the life of the “little people” is secondary. Dr. Mengele dreamed of revolutionizing the world (in particular the world of genetics) with his discoveries.

So the Angel of Death decided to create Siamese twins by stitching together gypsy twins. The children suffered terrible torment and blood poisoning began.

Josef Mengele with a colleague at the Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics. Kaiser Wilhelm. Late 1930s.

While doing terrible things and conducting inhuman experiments on people, Joseph Mengele everywhere hides behind science and his idea. At the same time, many of his experiments were not only inhumane, but also meaningless, not bringing any discovery to science. Experiments for the sake of experiments, torture, infliction of pain.

The Ovitz and Shlomowitz families and 168 twins enjoyed their long-awaited freedom. The children ran towards their saviors, crying and hugging. Is the nightmare over? No, he will now haunt the survivors for the rest of his life. When they feel bad or when they are sick, the ominous shadow of the mad Doctor Death and the horrors of Auschwitz will appear to them again. It was as if time had turned back and they were back in their 10th barracks.

Auschwitz, children in a camp liberated by the Red Army, 1945.

Origin

Military service and professional activities

"Doctor Death" experiments

After the war

The word Auschwitz (or Auschwitz) in the minds of many people is a symbol or even the quintessence of evil, horror, death, a concentration of the most unimaginable inhuman cruelties and torture. Many today dispute what former prisoners and historians say happened here. This is their personal right and opinion. But having visited Auschwitz and seen with your own eyes huge rooms filled with glasses, tens of thousands of pairs of shoes, tons of cut hair and children's things, you understand how serious everything is...

The young student Tadeusz Uzynski arrived in the first echelon with prisoners.

As was said in yesterday's article "Nazi barracks of hell", the Auschwitz concentration camp began to function in 1940, as a camp for Polish political prisoners. The first prisoners of Auschwitz were 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnow. At the time of its foundation, the camp had 20 buildings - former Polish military barracks . Some of them were converted for mass housing of people, and 6 more buildings were additionally built. The average number of prisoners fluctuated between 13-16 thousand people, and in 1942 reached 20 thousand. The Auschwitz camp became the base camp for a whole network of new camps - in 1941, the Auschwitz II - Birkenau camp was built 3 km away, and in 1943 - Auschwitz III - Monowitz. In addition, in 1942-1944, about 40 branches of the Auschwitz camp were built, built near metallurgical plants, factories and mines, which were subordinate to the Auschwitz III concentration camp. And the camps Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II - Birkenau completely turned into a plant for the extermination of people.

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, prisoners were screened and those found fit for work by SS doctors were sent for registration. Rudolf Höss, the head of the camp, told them on the very first day that they “... arrived at a concentration camp, from which there is only one way out - through the crematorium pipe.” Arriving prisoners were confiscated of clothes and all personal items, had their hair cut, and were registered and assigned personal numbers. Initially, each prisoner was photographed in three positions

In 1943, a tattoo of the prisoner's number on the arm was introduced. For babies and young children, the number was most often tattooed on the thigh. According to the Auschwitz State Museum, this concentration camp was the only Nazi camp in which prisoners had numbers tattooed.

Depending on the reasons for their arrest, prisoners received triangles of different colors, which, along with their numbers, were sewn onto their camp clothes. Political prisoners were given a red triangle, criminals were given a green triangle. Gypsies and antisocial elements received black triangles, Jehovah's Witnesses received purple ones, and homosexuals received pink ones. Jews wore a six-pointed star consisting of a yellow triangle and a triangle of the color that corresponded to the reason for the arrest. Soviet prisoners of war had a patch in the form of the letters SU. Camp clothing was quite thin and provided almost no protection from the cold. Linen was changed at intervals of several weeks, and sometimes even once a month, and the prisoners did not have the opportunity to wash it, which led to epidemics of typhus and typhoid fever, as well as scabies

Prisoners in the Auschwitz I camp lived in brick blocks, in Auschwitz II-Birkenau - mainly in wooden barracks. Brick blocks were only in the female part of the Auschwitz II camp. During the entire existence of the Auschwitz I camp, about 400 thousand prisoners of different nationalities, Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners of building No. 11 awaiting conclusion of the Gestapo police tribunal were registered here. One of the disasters of camp life there were inspections where the number of prisoners was checked. They lasted several, and sometimes over 10 hours (for example, 19 hours on July 6, 1940). Camp authorities very often announced penalty checks, during which prisoners had to squat or kneel. There were tests when they had to hold their hands up for several hours.

Housing conditions varied greatly in different periods, but they were always catastrophic. The prisoners, who were brought in at the very beginning in the first trains, slept on straw scattered on the concrete floor.

Later, hay bedding was introduced. These were thin mattresses filled with a small amount of it. About 200 prisoners slept in a room that barely accommodated 40-50 people.

With the increase in the number of prisoners in the camp, the need arose to densify their accommodation. Three-tier bunks appeared. There were 2 people lying on one tier. The bedding was usually rotted straw. The prisoners covered themselves with rags and what they had. In the Auschwitz camp the bunks were wooden, in Auschwitz-Birkenau they were both wooden and brick with wooden flooring.

Compared to the conditions in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the toilet of the Auschwitz I camp looked like a real miracle of civilization

Toilet barracks in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp

Washroom. The water was only cold and the prisoner only had access to it for a few minutes a day. Prisoners were allowed to wash extremely rarely, and for them it was a real holiday

Sign with the number of the residential unit on the wall

Until 1944, when Auschwitz became an extermination factory, most prisoners were sent to grueling labor every day. At first they worked to expand the camp, and then they were used as slaves at the industrial facilities of the Third Reich. Every day, columns of exhausted slaves went out and entered through the gate with the cynical inscription “Arbeit macht Frei” (Work makes you free). The prisoner had to do the work running, without seconds of rest. The pace of work, meager portions of food and constant beatings increased the mortality rate. During the return of prisoners to the camp, those killed or exhausted, who could not move on their own, were dragged or carried in wheelbarrows. And at this time, a brass band consisting of prisoners played for them near the gates of the camp.

For every inhabitant of Auschwitz, block No. 11 was one of the most terrible places. Unlike other blocks, its doors were always closed. The windows were completely walled up. Only on the first floor there were two windows - in the room where the SS men were on duty. In the halls on the right and left sides of the corridor, prisoners were placed awaiting the verdict of the emergency police court, which came to the Auschwitz camp from Katowice once or twice a month. During 2-3 hours of his work, he imposed from several dozen to over a hundred death sentences.

The cramped cells, which sometimes housed a huge number of people awaiting sentencing, had only a tiny barred window near the ceiling. And on the street side near these windows there were tin boxes that blocked these windows from the influx of fresh air

Those sentenced to death were forced to undress in this room before execution. If there were few of them that day, then the sentence was carried out right here.

If there were many condemned, they were taken to the “Wall of Death,” which was located behind a high fence with a blank gate between buildings 10 and 11. Large numbers of their camp number were written on the chests of undressed people with an ink pencil (until 1943, when tattoos appeared on the arm), so that later it would be easy to identify the corpse.

Under the stone fence in the courtyard of block 11, a large wall of black insulating slabs, lined with absorbent material, was built. This wall became the last facet of life for thousands of people sentenced to death by the Gestapo court for unwillingness to betray their homeland, attempted escape and political “crimes.”

Fibers of death. The condemned were shot by the reportfuehrer or members of the political department. For this, they used a small-caliber rifle so as not to attract too much attention with the sounds of shots. After all, very close there was a stone wall, behind which there was a highway.

The Auschwitz camp had a whole system of punishments for prisoners. It can also be called one of the fragments of their deliberate destruction. A prisoner was punished for picking an apple or finding a potato in a field, relieving himself while working, or for working too slowly. One of the most terrible places of punishment, often leading to the death of a prisoner, was one of the basements of building 11. Here in the back room there were four narrow vertical sealed punishment cells measuring 90x90 centimeters in perimeter. Each of them had a door with a metal bolt at the bottom.

The person being punished was forced to squeeze inside through this door and it was bolted. A person could only be standing in this cage. So he stood without food and water for as long as the SS men wanted. Often this was the last punishment in a prisoner's life.

"Referrals" of punished prisoners to standing cells

In September 1941, the first attempt was made to mass exterminate people using gas. About 600 Soviet prisoners of war and about 250 sick prisoners from the camp hospital were placed in small batches in sealed cells in the basement of the 11th building.

Copper pipelines with valves were already installed along the walls of the chambers. Gas flowed through them into the chambers...

The names of the exterminated people were entered into the "Day Status Book" of the Auschwitz camp

Lists of people sentenced to death by the extraordinary police court

Found notes left by those sentenced to death on scraps of paper

In Auschwitz, in addition to adults, there were also children who were sent to the camp along with their parents. These were the children of Jews, Gypsies, as well as Poles and Russians. Most Jewish children died in gas chambers immediately after arriving at the camp. The rest, after a strict selection, were sent to a camp where they were subject to the same strict rules as adults.

Children were registered and photographed in the same way as adults and designated as political prisoners.

One of the most terrible pages in the history of Auschwitz were medical experiments by SS doctors. Including children. For example, Professor Karl Clauberg, in order to develop a quick method of biological destruction of the Slavs, conducted sterilization experiments on Jewish women in building No. 10. Dr. Josef Mengele conducted experiments on twin children and children with physical disabilities as part of genetic and anthropological experiments. In addition, various kinds of experiments were carried out at Auschwitz using new drugs and preparations, toxic substances were rubbed into the epithelium of prisoners, skin transplants were carried out, etc.

Conclusion on the results of X-rays carried out during the experiments with the twins by Dr. Mengele.

Letter from Heinrich Himmler in which he orders a series of sterilization experiments to begin

Maps of recording anthropometric data of experimental prisoners as part of Dr. Mengele's experiments.

Pages of the register of the dead, which contain the names of 80 boys who died after injections of phenol as part of medical experiments

List of released prisoners placed in a Soviet hospital for treatment

In the autumn of 1941, a gas chamber using Zyklon B gas began operating in the Auschwitz camp. It was produced by the Degesch company, which during the period 1941-1944 received about 300 thousand marks of profit from the sale of this gas. To kill 1,500 people, according to the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, about 5-7 kg of gas was needed.

After the liberation of Auschwitz, a huge number of used Zyklon B cans and cans with unused contents were found in the camp warehouses. During the period 1942-1943, according to documents, about 20 thousand kg of Zyklon B crystals were delivered to Auschwitz alone.

Most of the Jews doomed to death arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with the conviction that they were being taken “for settlement” to eastern Europe. This was especially true for Jews from Greece and Hungary, to whom the Germans even sold non-existent building plots and lands or offered work in fictitious factories. That is why people sent to the camp for extermination often brought with them the most valuable things, jewelry and money.

Upon arrival at the unloading platform, all things and valuables were taken from people, SS doctors selected the deported people. Those who were declared unable to work were sent to gas chambers. According to the testimony of Rudolf Hoess, there were about 70-75% of those who arrived.

Items found in Auschwitz warehouses after the liberation of the camp

Model of the gas chamber and crematorium II of Auschwitz-Birkenau. People were convinced that they were being sent to a bathhouse, so they looked relatively calm.

Here, prisoners are forced to take off their clothes and are moved to the next room, which simulates a bathhouse. There were shower holes under the ceiling through which no water ever flowed. About 2,000 people were brought into a room of about 210 square meters, after which the doors were closed and gas was supplied to the room. People died within 15-20 minutes. The gold teeth of the dead were pulled out, rings and earrings were removed, and women's hair was cut off.

After this, the corpses were transported to the crematorium ovens, where the fire roared continuously. If the ovens were overfilled or pipes were damaged by overload, the bodies were destroyed in the burning areas behind the crematoria. All these actions were carried out by prisoners belonging to the so-called Sonderkommando group. At the peak of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, its number was about 1,000 people.

A photograph taken by one of the Sonderkommando members, which shows the process of burning those dead people.

In the Auschwitz camp, the crematorium was located outside the camp fence. Its largest room was the morgue, which was converted into a temporary gas chamber.