top of page
CLICK ON A PHOTO, IT WILL ENLARGE IT AND SHOW THE DESCRIPTION.
LIBERATION
A BLANKET FOR YOUR HEAD
A BLANKET FOR YOUR HEAD, two concentration camp prisoners, one kneeling and one lying on the ground and crying. An inmate of the Wobbelin Camp bursts into tears when he learns that he cannot be included in the first group of liberated prisoners leaving for hospital treatment. He is to be sent as soon as the worst cases have been cared for.
A Day in the Life of a Concentration Camp Prisoner
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A CONCENTRATION CAMP PRISONER, Besides the death camps such as Auschwitz, generally referred to as extermination camps, the Nazis operated concentration camps throughout the Third Reich starting in the spring of 1933. Initially, the camps were used to imprison what the Nazis considered undesirables, such as political dissidents, homosexuals, Roma, and basically anyone else the Nazis didn’t like. At the time the Second World War started there were roughly 21,000 held in the camps. By the end of the war, there were more than seven hundred thousand.
A DYING PRISONER, too weak to sit up amid his rags and filth, victim of starvation and incredible brutality, at the Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany on April 18, 1945.
A YOUNG BOY from Belsen Concentration Camp, 1945, 1945, Eric Taylor ‘I drew the dead and scarcely living people when Belsen concentration camp was overrun, and I witnessed at first hand all the other appalling horrors of war. To me, any attempt to explain in words the overall influence of this experience on my work appears to weaken what I endeavor to say in my painting or sculpture. It means so very much.’
A YOUNG GIRL RECEIVED A FOOD PACKAGE from a JDC representative. The contents of bundled supplies were written on the blackboard, Vienna, Austria, c.1946. JDC Archives
AFTER THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR the British government granted asylum to 1000 child survivors of the Holocaust. Only 732 survivors were located and of these the vast majority were male. As a result, upon arrival in the Lake District in August 1945, the group became collectively known as ‘The Boys’, despite the presence of around 200 girls. The teen holding the young child in this photograph is Sidney Finkel, who survived the ghetto in Piotrkow, a forced labor camp in Poland, Buchenwald and a death march to Theresienstadt. More information about the picture and Sidney’s story can be found by consulting his memoir. The man Sidney is handing the baby over to is his older brother Isaac Finkel who survived experiences in the ghetto, forced labor camps and Buchenwald. The boy right next to Sidney (with suitcase in hand) has been identified as Moniek Shannon. He too survived a ghetto, forced labour camp, Buchenwald and a death march to Theresienstadt.
AMERICAN GIS hand-carry paintings down the steps of the Neuschwanstein castle under the supervision of Capt. James Rorimer. NARA photo: 239-RC-14-5
AMERICAN TROOPS ARRIVED at the moment a train carrying people to the camp broke open. You can see a mother and her daughter running from the train, during the Holocaust. In the photo is a Jewish woman from the Hungarian town of Makó, who was 35 at the time of the photo. Her daughter was holding her hand.
AN EMACIATED FEMALE survivor who has just been disinfected lies on a stretcher in Bergen-Belsen.
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION 1, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the last extermination center still functioning under the Nazis. They found 7,650 survivors. Some one-and-a-half million people were murdered there, including 960,000 Jews. Auschwitz-Birkenau has become the symbol of the Holocaust and of willful radical evil in our time. What the liberators found in these camps astounded them. They came as soldiers and left as liberators. They had been trained for combat, and most of them had barely even heard of these camps. Upon entering the camps, the soldiers encountered thousands of starving people who had witnessed murder, torture, starvation, and had been dehumanized.
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION 2, on 27 January 1945, Auschwitz concentration camp—a Nazi concentration camp where more than a million people were murdered—was liberated by the Red Army.
BERGEN BELSEN AT THE LIBERATION: Members of at least one German Sinti family recognized themselves in this photo. Courtesy of the German Federal Archives.
BERGEN-BELSEN, MAY 1945, surviving prisoners after the liberation.
BERGEN-BELSEN, one of the victims at Bergen-Belsen was this young woman, her face still bearing the scars of a terrible beating by the SS guards.
BIELSKI PARTISAN GROUP, photo provided Bielski-Partisan-Group Members of the Bielski Partisan Unit in Nalibocka forest, 1943. Aron Bieski is front row, center.
BORYSLAV, Soviet Extraordinary State Commission at the site of mass graves adjoining camp Janowska,1944.
BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP. A Jewish survivor showing U.S. Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George S. Patton a pyre where the SS attempted to cremate corpses before evacuating the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, 1945.
BUCHENWALD WEDDING RINGS, Wedding rings of the victims found in Buchenwald after camp liberation. Photo taken by US Troop 5. May of 1945.
CHARLES MARTIN KING PARSONS took this photo as he was a chaplain with the British Army, and he entered Bergen-Belsen prison camp in April 1945. The camp was rife with typhus, and once the large wooden huts had been cleared of the surviving prisoners, they were burnt to the ground in May 1945.
CHILD REFUGEES FROM GERMANY and Austria at the Amsterdam Burgerweeshuis orphanage. Truus Wijsmuller stands at far left, looking at the children she helped save. Overwijsmuller via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0
CHILD SURVIVORS of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
CHILDREN AT AUSCHWITZ, in a still from the Soviet film of the liberation of Auschwitz, January 1945.
CHILDREN LOOKED AFTER by the Oeuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE), a charity that saved thousands of JEWISH CHILDREN DURING THE WAR. © Courtesy of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC) and the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris
CHILDREN SURVIVORS OF AUSCHWITZ, this still is from a movie taken by the Russians after they liberated Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland on Jan. 27, 1945.
DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP SURVIVORS outside the barracks in the newly liberated camp, 1945. Collections of The National WWII Museum.
DACHAU INMATE AFTER LIBERATION. After American soldiers liberated Dachau in 1945, an inmate of the camp attacks a German soldier. Credit: Yad Vashem
DACHAU LIBERATION, April 29, 1945, was a cold, sunny Sunday afternoon as Soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 42nd Infantry Division came face to face with the worst of Nazi Germany at the notorious Dachau concentration camp.
DEATH CAMP PLUNDER, Suitcases of Auschwitz inmates (that were never shipped to Germany) found after liberation.
EBENSEE, this man looks like a living skeleton, one of the many prisoners of the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria.
EMACIATED JEWISH SURVIVORS, pose in a barracks in the newly liberated Ampfing concentration camp, a sub-camp of Dachau.
EMACIATED SURVIVORS IN THE EBENSEE subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp suck on sugar cubes provided by US soldiers upon the liberation of the camp. Photograph taken by Signal Corps photographer J Malan Heslop. Ebensee, Austria, May 8, 1945.
ESTHER STAROBIN was born in Adelsheim, Germany, in 1937. When she was just two years old, Esther’s parents sent her and her three older sisters to England on Kindertransports. Esther spent the next eight years with a foster family, largely unaware of what was happening to her parents and brother, who had remained behind in Germany.
FOUR EMACIATED SURVIVORS sit outside in the newly liberated Ebensee concentration camp. Photograph taken by Signal Corps photographer J Malan Heslop. Ebensee, Austria, May 8, 1945.
FREE AT LAST, a body that had been starved to death.
GEORGE PICK was born in 1934 in Budapest, Hungary. After Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, George and his family were required to move into designated housing for Jews. Threats of deportation from Hungarian fascists, who were collaborating with the Nazis, forced the family into hiding. George was sent to an orphanage run by the Swiss Red Cross when their hiding spot was discovered, but he soon escaped and returned to his family. The family was then forced into the Budapest ghetto, where they were held under appalling conditions until their liberation.
GERMAN RESIDENTS OF NORDHAUSEN, Germany, digging mass graves for prisoners that were murdered in a concentration camp. The photo was taken April 1945 by a member of the U.S. Army, which liberated the camp.
GHOSTS OF THE PAST: Nazi-Looted Art and Its Legacies” convenes an international group of art historians, historians, curators, and scholars in provenance research and the history of German art dealership to explore an unexamined chapter of the legacies of the Third Reich.
HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS SALUTE, Prisoners line up: Welcoming freedom. Photo: Special Arrangement. On April 29, 1945, two divisions of US Seventh Army, the 42nd Rainbow Division and the 45th Thunderbird Division, marched into the Dachau concentration camp and liberated the inmates. In another week, World War II would come to an end in Europe.
HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR VERA KERTESZ. Vera was born in 1933 in Kosice, Czechoslovakia.
She was the only child in a happy family. She had many cousins to play with, lived in a beautiful house, and encountered no antisemitism. Vera was 6 years old when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. From then on, she had to wear the yellow Star of David, and was mocked by other schoolchildren. It was all particularly traumatic for her, because they had been her daily playmates before the war.
As a safety measure, Vera’s parents converted to Greek Orthodox and put her in a Greek Orthodox orphanage. Though safe, she feared that she would never see her parents again. Many of her family members were deported to concentration camps. When she was ten, Vera’s mother took her to Budapest. Still hiding from the Nazis, they moved frequently to avoid the gaze of suspicious neighbours.
Vera’s mother put a patch on Vera’s eye and pretended that her child could not speak. She kept up this ruse until Vera had learned Hungarian sufficiently to begin communicating. Vera explained, “My name and ‘relationship’ to my parents changed often, depending on what papers we could obtain. Once, my father walked in the door and I said, ‘Father, father, you’re back!’ and my mother interjected loudly, saying, ‘No! It’s uncle, uncle!'” After liberation, Vera and her parents went back to Slovakia in search of surviving relatives. They soon learned that there were none remaining. Many Slovaks were still pro-Fascist and antisemitic, and Vera remembered a ‘mini-pogrom’ organised by the locals. The year 1948 witnessed the closing of borders — no one was allowed to leave. Vera attended a Russian high school, and afterwards studied medicine at the university in Prague. In 1957, she married. Vera moved to Australia with her husband and two children in 1969. It was only in Australia that she started talking about her experiences during the war. She said, “I want my children, and their children, to know what we went through, and how fragile freedom is.”
HORRIBLE EXAMPLES OF NAZI BRUTALITY 1 found by American 3rd Armd [sic] Div., FUSA when it captured the German slave labor camp at Nordhausen ... Bodies of German slaves lie where they died of starvation on prison floors / Roberts.
HORRIBLE EXAMPLES OF NAZI BRUTALITY 2, found by the American 3rd Armd [sic] Div., FUSA when it captured the German slave labor camp at Nordhausen ... Starved, almost blind Russian hobbles to an American ambulance / Roberts.
HUMAN LAUNDRY, Belsen: April 1945, 1945, Doris Zinkeisen. Nurses bathing survivors after liberation. A line of wooden tables the front three with an emaciated figure sitting or lying on top. Each of the figures is being washed by a man or woman dressed in a white uniform. A metal bucket stands at the foot of every table; a woman is seen walking out of the room carrying a bucket in either hand.
IN THE FIRST MONTHS OF 1945, the Allied armies liberated the Nazi camps one by one and discovered the scope of the massacres. In April, pictures of the horror were transmitted around the world and the survivors' repatriation was organized. Yet it took years to understand the reality of the concentration camp system and uniqueness of the genocide.
IN THIS PHOTOGRAPH taken in April 1945, survivors of the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp sit on a latrine, after the liberation of the camp by Allied troops. (Eric Schwab/AFP)
INMATES WAVING, a home-made American flag greet U.S. Seventh Army troops upon their arrival at the Allach concentration camp. Three survivors pictured in the photo are: Martin Kaufman (b. in Krashnik, Poland); Leizer Fajerman (b. Sulejow, Poland, standing on right in a full-length coat holding a cigarette); and Irving Miesing (Yitzhak Misengiser). The man in the long coat has alternatively been identified as Eli Okon from Bialystock. Original caption reads, "After American troops arrived, homemade American flag was raised by the prisoners of Dachau prison camp. As it waved in the breeze, it seemed to reflect the joy of inmates who realize freedom for the first time in many years."
ISRAEL ALFRED GLÜCK (1921 – 2007) Liberation, from the album My Holocaust. Bergen-Belsen DP Camp, 1945. Gift of Dr. Bohuslav Kratochvíl, courtesy of Dr. Kurt Passer, London
JADWIGA DENEKO saved Jewish children; caught, tortured, and executed, she did not break.
JEWISH POLICE DETAINING A FORMER KAPO who was recognized by former concentration camp
inmates in the Zeilsheim Displaced Persons camp, Germany, ca. 1945. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Alice Lev)
JEWISH SURVIVORS at the infirmary of Ebensee.
KOMSKI DRAWING – Evacuation
LIBERATED PRISONERS AT THE EBENSEE CAMP. Too weak to eat solid food, they drink a thin soup prepared for them by the US Army. Photograph taken by US Army Signal Corps photographer J Malan Heslop. Austria, May 8, 1945.
LIBERATED PRISONERS IN BUCHENWALD. Seven liberated male prisoners posing next to a transportation truck. "21. Group of inmates. Kind of hard up for clothes but plenty happy to be liberated." Buchenwald, Weimar, Germany. 1945.
LIBERATING THE CHILDREN, the Soviet army entered Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz and liberated around 7,000 prisoners, most of whom were ill and dying. In mid-January 1945, as Soviet forces approached the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its sub-camps. SS units forced nearly 60,000 prisoners to march west from the Auschwitz camp system. It is estimated that the SS and police deported at a minimum 1.3 million people to the Auschwitz complex between 1940 and 1945. Of these, the camp authorities murdered 1.1 million. Red Army soldiers arrived at Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. About 7,000 prisoners had been left behind, most of whom were seriously ill due to the effects of their imprisonment. Most of those left behind were middle-aged adults or children younger than 15.
LIBERATION FROM WOBBELIN, Half-starved prisoners awaiting transport from the Wöbbelin concentration camp. Official Caption: "Tortured, half-starved prisoners anxiously await transportation from the Wobbelin camp to a hospital shortly after liberation. 6531-0." Wöbbelin, Germany. May 1945
LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ 1, death camp AUSCHWITZ. As 1944 came to a close and the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allied forces seemed certain, the Auschwitz commandants began destroying evidence of the horror that had taken place there. Buildings were torn down, blown up or set on fire, and records were destroyed. In January 1945, as the Soviet army entered Krakow, the Germans ordered that Auschwitz be abandoned. Before the end of the month, in what came to be known as the Auschwitz death marches, an estimated 60,000 detainees, accompanied by Nazi guards, departed the camp and were forced to march to the Polish towns of Gliwice or Wodzislaw, some 30 miles away. Countless prisoners died during this process; those who made it to the sites were sent on trains to concentration camps in Germany. When the Soviet army entered Auschwitz on January 27, they found approximately 7,600 sick or emaciated detainees who had been left behind barbed wire. The liberators also discovered mounds of corpses, hundreds of thousands of pieces of clothing and pairs of shoes and seven tons of human hair that had been shaved from detainees before their liquidation. According to some estimates, between 1.1 million to 1.5 million people, the vast majority of them Jews, died at Auschwitz during its years of operation. An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 Poles perished at the camp, along with 19,000 to 20,000 Romas and smaller numbers of Soviet prisoners of war and other individuals.
LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ 2-Sweet-Bitter, a mixed media work from Gotesman’s Holocaust collection. Image by Toby Gotesman
LIBERATION OF KL AUSCHWITZ, Angela Orosz became one of only two babies known to have survived their birth inside the concentration camp. Pictured are prisoners inside the camp following its liberation in January 1945.
LIBERATION OF NORDHAUSEN: Civilians Covering Corpse” by Marvin Harle. Gift of Aline K. Hayle.
LIBERATION OF RAVENSBRÜCK. In January 1945, Ravensbrück and its subcamps held over 45,000 female prisoners and over 5,000 male prisoners. In early March, the SS began “evacuating” Ravensbrück when they transported 2,100 male prisoners to Sachsenhausen. In late March 1945, the SS transported about 5,600 female prisoners to the Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. In late April, SS guards forced about 20,000 female prisoners, as well as most of the remaining male prisoners, on a brutal and forced evacuation on foot toward northern Mecklenberg. Advancing Soviet forces intersected the route of the march and liberated the prisoners. On April 29 remaining SS guards at the camp fled, and on April 30 the vanguard of the Soviet Army arrived at Ravensbrück; on May 1 its regular units appeared and liberated the last prisoners. Between 1939 and 1945, over 130,000 female and 20,000 male prisoners passed through the Ravensbrück camp system; between 20,000 to 30,000 of these prisoners perished in Ravensbrück.
LIBERATION, “The American soldiers didn’t know what to do and they showered us with chocolates and cigarettes.”
MAJDANEK THE END OF THE ROAD FOR JEWS, victims’ shoes at Majdanek, Majdanek, Poland, August 1944. A Soviet soldier walks through a mound of victims’ shoes piled outside a warehouse in Majdanek soon after the liberation.
MAJESTIC PAINTING called Liberated made by Russian artist Vladimir Davidenko. CREDITS: Eduardo Villarreal
MAUTHAUSEN LIBERATION DEAD LEFT UNBURIED, a pile of corpses at the Russian Camp (Hospital Camp) section of the Mauthausen concentration camp after liberation. Mauthausen, Austria, May 5-15, 1945.
MAUTHAUSEN SURVIVORS, cheer the soldiers of the Eleventh Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army one day after their actual liberation. The banner reads: "The Spanish Anti-Fascists Salute the Liberating Forces." According to Pierre Serge Choumoff, a survivor of Mauthausen and Gusen, this event was recreated at the request of a senior American officer. The photographer Francisco Boix can be seen with his camera standing on top of the entrance. According to the 11th Armored Division website the solders are John Slatton (back left), Jerome Rosenthal (back right), William Picket (left) and Edward Czarnowski (driver). Alternatively Robert Mordis, a Jewish soldier from Natick Massachusetts, may be on the upper left side of the tank, and another soldier may be Alfred Paliani.
MEMORIES OF THE HOLOCAUST, Roman Halter.
MORE THAN 1,000 BODIES discovered in Belarus mass grave a dark reminder of Holocaust. Belarus' servicemen excavate a mass grave for the prisoners of a Jewish ghetto set up by th...Show More
Sergei Gapon/AFP/Getty Images.
MORITZ CHOINOWSKI, was a survivor. Before the Third Reich, he was a middle-aged man in robust health. His tailoring business was flourishing; his political affiliation with the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands was fulfilling. On 28 September 1939, however, the Gestapo dragged him from his home and deposited him in the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was stripped naked, given a convict uniform with a red-and-yellow triangle (signaling that he was both a political prisoner and a Jew) and forced to work as a slave in a quarry. He was routinely beaten. Three times he was subjected to the sadistic punishment known as “25 blows”. On 19 October 1942 he was thrown into a freight car and taken to Auschwitz, where he barely avoided being selected for the gas chambers. Just over two years later he was moved again, this time to Dachau. When this camp was liberated on 29 April 1945, Choinowski was starving and suffering from typhus. Many of the inmates were so emaciated that they could barely acknowledge the American soldiers who came to free them. A teenage survivor recalled how he “watched the people sing and dance with joy, and they seemed to me as if they’d lost their minds. I looked at myself and couldn’t recognize who I was.” Choin¬owski was one of those celebrating. He had endured more than 2,000 days in concentration camps. As he cried with relief, he asked a fellow inmate: “Is this possible?”
MUSELMANN DRAWING (detail) Anonymous 1940s.
NEWLY LIBERATED, prisoners of the Allach concentration camp celebrate their liberation near Dachau, Germany, April 30, 1945. American Soldiers of the U.S. 7th Army, including members of the 42nd Infantry and 45th Infantry and 20th Armored Divisions participated in the subcamp’s liberation. The main concentration camp at Dachau had more than 120 subcamps in the area. U.S. Army photo courtesy of the New York State Military Museum. 1945.Credit...Eric Schwab/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
ON THE 16TH OF APRIL 1947, Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, was executed by hanging for war crimes. The sentence was carried out next to the crematorium of the former Auschwitz I concentration camp.
ONE OF THE HUGE MASS GRAVES at Bergen-Belsen prison camp. From: album entitled "Nazi War Atrocities." Date April 1945
POLISH JEWS TRAVELING to the American zone of Germany, with hopes of emigrating to Palestine.
Poland, 1946.
PRISONERS AFTER THE LIBERATION, prisoners look at the photographer in block 61 of Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945.
PRISONERS AT THE NAZI concentration camp of Dachau, near Munich, on the day it was liberated by allied troops. Eric Schwab/Getty images.
PRISONERS OF AUSCHWITZ greet their liberators. The man holding up his hat has been identified as Irving Meist.
PRISONERS WAVED, to their liberators as U.S. troops arrived at Dachau in April 1945.
RUTH COHEN was born in Mukačevo, Czechoslovakia, in 1930. The territory was annexed by Hungary, a Nazi ally, in 1938. After Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, Ruth and her family were forced into a ghetto and later deported to Auschwitz. Ruth and her sister, Teresa, were then sent to another camp. They were liberated in early 1945.
SAINT GEORGES, FRANCE - a photograph from a children's home where Jewish children were hidden during the Holocaust.
SELF PORTRAIT OF A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR..."After hiding for days under a pile of dead bodies, I was liberated from Buchenwald Concentration Camp by American soldiers on April 11, 1945.
Weighing only 62 lbs., I took my first bite of bread and sip of water as a free man." original medium - acrylic size - 16"x 20" copyright 1999
SICK AND HALF-STARVED, prisoners helping each other to trucks to be transported from the Wobbelin concentration camp to a hospital for medical treatment after their liberation, early May 1945.
SIXTEEN OF NINETEEN DEFENDANTS on trial for war crimes committed during the war at Dora-Mittelbau. The group included four kapos. September 17, 1947, Dachau, Germany (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park)
SOVIET ARMY PHOTO of prisoner barracks at KL Lublin as they appeared shortly after liberation. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Courtesy of Panstwowe Muzeum na Majdanku.
SPECOU at Remagen and the Dora concentration camp / Inventory title: Duben-Dachau-Brenner STARVED PRISONERS, this photo shows starved prisoners, nearly dead from hunger, posing in a concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria. Ebensee was a sub-camp of the main camp 'Mauthausen' near the town of the same name. The camp was reputedly used for "scientific" experiments. It was liberated by the 80th Division of the U.S. Army.
STARVED PRISONERS nearly dead from hunger, pose in concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria. Source: Media Drum Images/Tom Marshall (PhotograFix)
STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND: Romani Survivors in Europe 1945. When the war in Europe ended in the spring of 1945, Romani survivors were scattered, exhausted, and traumatized. Bergen Belsen at the liberation: Members of at least one German Sinti family recognized themselves in this photo. Courtesy of the German Federal Archives.
STUTTHOF LIBERATION, Klintholm Harbour. The freedom fighters made the local residents come down to the barge with food. In late April 1945, the remaining prisoners were removed from Stutthof by sea, since Stutthof was completely encircled by Soviet forces. Again, hundreds of prisoners were forced into the sea and shot. Over 4,000 were sent by small boat to Germany, some to the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, and some to camps along the Baltic coast. Many drowned along the way. Shortly before the German surrender, some prisoners were transferred to Malmo, Sweden, and released to the care of that neutral country. It has been estimated that over 25,000 prisoners, one in two, died during the evacuation from Stutthof and its subcamps. Soviet forces liberated Stutthof on May 9, 1945, and liberated about 100 prisoners who had managed to hide during the final evacuation of the camp.
SURVIVORS AT DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP
SURVIVORS OF AUSCHWITZ, during the first hours of the concentration camps liberation by soldiers of the Soviet army.
SURVIVORS OF DACHAU LIBERATED BY US SEVENTH ARMY, May 1945: Some of the thousands of prisoners at Dachau concentration camp cheer as they see the Americans of the 7th Army arriving to liberate the camp. These men were all due to be cremated.
SURVIVORS OF THE EBENSEE subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Ebensee, Austria, May 8, 1945.
TEETERING ON THE BRINK BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH. A study on the concentration camp Muselmann, The term Muselmann denotes a concentration camp prisoner in the state of utmost physical inanition and psychological exhaustion and is inseparably connected with the problems of concentration camps, particularly of camp prisoners. Paradoxically, this strange-sounding word derived from German became a general label for very many of the prisoners of Nazi German concentration camps, and entered into everyday use in the camps. With the crematorium chimneys smoking on the horizon, every prisoner knew very well what the term meant, regardless of the language they spoke. Its meaning was clear and absolutely unequivocal: it stood for the most wretched of the wretched, a prisoner described by linguist Stanisław Jagielski (1968) as “one who was teetering on the brink of death whilst still alive.”
A DYING PRISONER, too weak to sit up amid his rags and filth, victim of starvation and incredible brutality, at the Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany on April 18, 1945.
A YOUNG BOY from Belsen Concentration Camp, 1945, 1945, Eric Taylor ‘I drew the dead and scarcely living people when Belsen concentration camp was overrun, and I witnessed at first hand all the other appalling horrors of war. To me, any attempt to explain in words the overall influence of this experience on my work appears to weaken what I endeavor to say in my painting or sculpture. It means so very much.’
A YOUNG GIRL RECEIVED A FOOD PACKAGE from a JDC representative. The contents of bundled supplies were written on the blackboard, Vienna, Austria, c.1946. JDC Archives
AFTER THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR the British government granted asylum to 1000 child survivors of the Holocaust. Only 732 survivors were located and of these the vast majority were male. As a result, upon arrival in the Lake District in August 1945, the group became collectively known as ‘The Boys’, despite the presence of around 200 girls. The teen holding the young child in this photograph is Sidney Finkel, who survived the ghetto in Piotrkow, a forced labor camp in Poland, Buchenwald and a death march to Theresienstadt. More information about the picture and Sidney’s story can be found by consulting his memoir. The man Sidney is handing the baby over to is his older brother Isaac Finkel who survived experiences in the ghetto, forced labor camps and Buchenwald. The boy right next to Sidney (with suitcase in hand) has been identified as Moniek Shannon. He too survived a ghetto, forced labour camp, Buchenwald and a death march to Theresienstadt.
AMERICAN GIS hand-carry paintings down the steps of the Neuschwanstein castle under the supervision of Capt. James Rorimer. NARA photo: 239-RC-14-5
AMERICAN TROOPS ARRIVED at the moment a train carrying people to the camp broke open. You can see a mother and her daughter running from the train, during the Holocaust. In the photo is a Jewish woman from the Hungarian town of Makó, who was 35 at the time of the photo. Her daughter was holding her hand.
AN EMACIATED FEMALE survivor who has just been disinfected lies on a stretcher in Bergen-Belsen.
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION 1, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the last extermination center still functioning under the Nazis. They found 7,650 survivors. Some one-and-a-half million people were murdered there, including 960,000 Jews. Auschwitz-Birkenau has become the symbol of the Holocaust and of willful radical evil in our time. What the liberators found in these camps astounded them. They came as soldiers and left as liberators. They had been trained for combat, and most of them had barely even heard of these camps. Upon entering the camps, the soldiers encountered thousands of starving people who had witnessed murder, torture, starvation, and had been dehumanized.
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION 2, on 27 January 1945, Auschwitz concentration camp—a Nazi concentration camp where more than a million people were murdered—was liberated by the Red Army.
BERGEN BELSEN AT THE LIBERATION: Members of at least one German Sinti family recognized themselves in this photo. Courtesy of the German Federal Archives.
BERGEN-BELSEN, MAY 1945, surviving prisoners after the liberation.
BERGEN-BELSEN, one of the victims at Bergen-Belsen was this young woman, her face still bearing the scars of a terrible beating by the SS guards.
BIELSKI PARTISAN GROUP, photo provided Bielski-Partisan-Group Members of the Bielski Partisan Unit in Nalibocka forest, 1943. Aron Bieski is front row, center.
BORYSLAV, Soviet Extraordinary State Commission at the site of mass graves adjoining camp Janowska,1944.
BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP. A Jewish survivor showing U.S. Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George S. Patton a pyre where the SS attempted to cremate corpses before evacuating the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, 1945.
BUCHENWALD WEDDING RINGS, Wedding rings of the victims found in Buchenwald after camp liberation. Photo taken by US Troop 5. May of 1945.
CHARLES MARTIN KING PARSONS took this photo as he was a chaplain with the British Army, and he entered Bergen-Belsen prison camp in April 1945. The camp was rife with typhus, and once the large wooden huts had been cleared of the surviving prisoners, they were burnt to the ground in May 1945.
CHILD REFUGEES FROM GERMANY and Austria at the Amsterdam Burgerweeshuis orphanage. Truus Wijsmuller stands at far left, looking at the children she helped save. Overwijsmuller via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0
CHILD SURVIVORS of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
CHILDREN AT AUSCHWITZ, in a still from the Soviet film of the liberation of Auschwitz, January 1945.
CHILDREN LOOKED AFTER by the Oeuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE), a charity that saved thousands of JEWISH CHILDREN DURING THE WAR. © Courtesy of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC) and the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris
CHILDREN SURVIVORS OF AUSCHWITZ, this still is from a movie taken by the Russians after they liberated Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland on Jan. 27, 1945.
DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP SURVIVORS outside the barracks in the newly liberated camp, 1945. Collections of The National WWII Museum.
DACHAU INMATE AFTER LIBERATION. After American soldiers liberated Dachau in 1945, an inmate of the camp attacks a German soldier. Credit: Yad Vashem
DACHAU LIBERATION, April 29, 1945, was a cold, sunny Sunday afternoon as Soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 42nd Infantry Division came face to face with the worst of Nazi Germany at the notorious Dachau concentration camp.
DEATH CAMP PLUNDER, Suitcases of Auschwitz inmates (that were never shipped to Germany) found after liberation.
EBENSEE, this man looks like a living skeleton, one of the many prisoners of the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria.
EMACIATED JEWISH SURVIVORS, pose in a barracks in the newly liberated Ampfing concentration camp, a sub-camp of Dachau.
EMACIATED SURVIVORS IN THE EBENSEE subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp suck on sugar cubes provided by US soldiers upon the liberation of the camp. Photograph taken by Signal Corps photographer J Malan Heslop. Ebensee, Austria, May 8, 1945.
ESTHER STAROBIN was born in Adelsheim, Germany, in 1937. When she was just two years old, Esther’s parents sent her and her three older sisters to England on Kindertransports. Esther spent the next eight years with a foster family, largely unaware of what was happening to her parents and brother, who had remained behind in Germany.
FOUR EMACIATED SURVIVORS sit outside in the newly liberated Ebensee concentration camp. Photograph taken by Signal Corps photographer J Malan Heslop. Ebensee, Austria, May 8, 1945.
FREE AT LAST, a body that had been starved to death.
GEORGE PICK was born in 1934 in Budapest, Hungary. After Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, George and his family were required to move into designated housing for Jews. Threats of deportation from Hungarian fascists, who were collaborating with the Nazis, forced the family into hiding. George was sent to an orphanage run by the Swiss Red Cross when their hiding spot was discovered, but he soon escaped and returned to his family. The family was then forced into the Budapest ghetto, where they were held under appalling conditions until their liberation.
GERMAN RESIDENTS OF NORDHAUSEN, Germany, digging mass graves for prisoners that were murdered in a concentration camp. The photo was taken April 1945 by a member of the U.S. Army, which liberated the camp.
GHOSTS OF THE PAST: Nazi-Looted Art and Its Legacies” convenes an international group of art historians, historians, curators, and scholars in provenance research and the history of German art dealership to explore an unexamined chapter of the legacies of the Third Reich.
HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS SALUTE, Prisoners line up: Welcoming freedom. Photo: Special Arrangement. On April 29, 1945, two divisions of US Seventh Army, the 42nd Rainbow Division and the 45th Thunderbird Division, marched into the Dachau concentration camp and liberated the inmates. In another week, World War II would come to an end in Europe.
HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR VERA KERTESZ. Vera was born in 1933 in Kosice, Czechoslovakia.
She was the only child in a happy family. She had many cousins to play with, lived in a beautiful house, and encountered no antisemitism. Vera was 6 years old when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. From then on, she had to wear the yellow Star of David, and was mocked by other schoolchildren. It was all particularly traumatic for her, because they had been her daily playmates before the war.
As a safety measure, Vera’s parents converted to Greek Orthodox and put her in a Greek Orthodox orphanage. Though safe, she feared that she would never see her parents again. Many of her family members were deported to concentration camps. When she was ten, Vera’s mother took her to Budapest. Still hiding from the Nazis, they moved frequently to avoid the gaze of suspicious neighbours.
Vera’s mother put a patch on Vera’s eye and pretended that her child could not speak. She kept up this ruse until Vera had learned Hungarian sufficiently to begin communicating. Vera explained, “My name and ‘relationship’ to my parents changed often, depending on what papers we could obtain. Once, my father walked in the door and I said, ‘Father, father, you’re back!’ and my mother interjected loudly, saying, ‘No! It’s uncle, uncle!'” After liberation, Vera and her parents went back to Slovakia in search of surviving relatives. They soon learned that there were none remaining. Many Slovaks were still pro-Fascist and antisemitic, and Vera remembered a ‘mini-pogrom’ organised by the locals. The year 1948 witnessed the closing of borders — no one was allowed to leave. Vera attended a Russian high school, and afterwards studied medicine at the university in Prague. In 1957, she married. Vera moved to Australia with her husband and two children in 1969. It was only in Australia that she started talking about her experiences during the war. She said, “I want my children, and their children, to know what we went through, and how fragile freedom is.”
HORRIBLE EXAMPLES OF NAZI BRUTALITY 1 found by American 3rd Armd [sic] Div., FUSA when it captured the German slave labor camp at Nordhausen ... Bodies of German slaves lie where they died of starvation on prison floors / Roberts.
HORRIBLE EXAMPLES OF NAZI BRUTALITY 2, found by the American 3rd Armd [sic] Div., FUSA when it captured the German slave labor camp at Nordhausen ... Starved, almost blind Russian hobbles to an American ambulance / Roberts.
HUMAN LAUNDRY, Belsen: April 1945, 1945, Doris Zinkeisen. Nurses bathing survivors after liberation. A line of wooden tables the front three with an emaciated figure sitting or lying on top. Each of the figures is being washed by a man or woman dressed in a white uniform. A metal bucket stands at the foot of every table; a woman is seen walking out of the room carrying a bucket in either hand.
IN THE FIRST MONTHS OF 1945, the Allied armies liberated the Nazi camps one by one and discovered the scope of the massacres. In April, pictures of the horror were transmitted around the world and the survivors' repatriation was organized. Yet it took years to understand the reality of the concentration camp system and uniqueness of the genocide.
IN THIS PHOTOGRAPH taken in April 1945, survivors of the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp sit on a latrine, after the liberation of the camp by Allied troops. (Eric Schwab/AFP)
INMATES WAVING, a home-made American flag greet U.S. Seventh Army troops upon their arrival at the Allach concentration camp. Three survivors pictured in the photo are: Martin Kaufman (b. in Krashnik, Poland); Leizer Fajerman (b. Sulejow, Poland, standing on right in a full-length coat holding a cigarette); and Irving Miesing (Yitzhak Misengiser). The man in the long coat has alternatively been identified as Eli Okon from Bialystock. Original caption reads, "After American troops arrived, homemade American flag was raised by the prisoners of Dachau prison camp. As it waved in the breeze, it seemed to reflect the joy of inmates who realize freedom for the first time in many years."
ISRAEL ALFRED GLÜCK (1921 – 2007) Liberation, from the album My Holocaust. Bergen-Belsen DP Camp, 1945. Gift of Dr. Bohuslav Kratochvíl, courtesy of Dr. Kurt Passer, London
JADWIGA DENEKO saved Jewish children; caught, tortured, and executed, she did not break.
JEWISH POLICE DETAINING A FORMER KAPO who was recognized by former concentration camp
inmates in the Zeilsheim Displaced Persons camp, Germany, ca. 1945. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Alice Lev)
JEWISH SURVIVORS at the infirmary of Ebensee.
KOMSKI DRAWING – Evacuation
LIBERATED PRISONERS AT THE EBENSEE CAMP. Too weak to eat solid food, they drink a thin soup prepared for them by the US Army. Photograph taken by US Army Signal Corps photographer J Malan Heslop. Austria, May 8, 1945.
LIBERATED PRISONERS IN BUCHENWALD. Seven liberated male prisoners posing next to a transportation truck. "21. Group of inmates. Kind of hard up for clothes but plenty happy to be liberated." Buchenwald, Weimar, Germany. 1945.
LIBERATING THE CHILDREN, the Soviet army entered Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz and liberated around 7,000 prisoners, most of whom were ill and dying. In mid-January 1945, as Soviet forces approached the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its sub-camps. SS units forced nearly 60,000 prisoners to march west from the Auschwitz camp system. It is estimated that the SS and police deported at a minimum 1.3 million people to the Auschwitz complex between 1940 and 1945. Of these, the camp authorities murdered 1.1 million. Red Army soldiers arrived at Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. About 7,000 prisoners had been left behind, most of whom were seriously ill due to the effects of their imprisonment. Most of those left behind were middle-aged adults or children younger than 15.
LIBERATION FROM WOBBELIN, Half-starved prisoners awaiting transport from the Wöbbelin concentration camp. Official Caption: "Tortured, half-starved prisoners anxiously await transportation from the Wobbelin camp to a hospital shortly after liberation. 6531-0." Wöbbelin, Germany. May 1945
LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ 1, death camp AUSCHWITZ. As 1944 came to a close and the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allied forces seemed certain, the Auschwitz commandants began destroying evidence of the horror that had taken place there. Buildings were torn down, blown up or set on fire, and records were destroyed. In January 1945, as the Soviet army entered Krakow, the Germans ordered that Auschwitz be abandoned. Before the end of the month, in what came to be known as the Auschwitz death marches, an estimated 60,000 detainees, accompanied by Nazi guards, departed the camp and were forced to march to the Polish towns of Gliwice or Wodzislaw, some 30 miles away. Countless prisoners died during this process; those who made it to the sites were sent on trains to concentration camps in Germany. When the Soviet army entered Auschwitz on January 27, they found approximately 7,600 sick or emaciated detainees who had been left behind barbed wire. The liberators also discovered mounds of corpses, hundreds of thousands of pieces of clothing and pairs of shoes and seven tons of human hair that had been shaved from detainees before their liquidation. According to some estimates, between 1.1 million to 1.5 million people, the vast majority of them Jews, died at Auschwitz during its years of operation. An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 Poles perished at the camp, along with 19,000 to 20,000 Romas and smaller numbers of Soviet prisoners of war and other individuals.
LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ 2-Sweet-Bitter, a mixed media work from Gotesman’s Holocaust collection. Image by Toby Gotesman
LIBERATION OF KL AUSCHWITZ, Angela Orosz became one of only two babies known to have survived their birth inside the concentration camp. Pictured are prisoners inside the camp following its liberation in January 1945.
LIBERATION OF NORDHAUSEN: Civilians Covering Corpse” by Marvin Harle. Gift of Aline K. Hayle.
LIBERATION OF RAVENSBRÜCK. In January 1945, Ravensbrück and its subcamps held over 45,000 female prisoners and over 5,000 male prisoners. In early March, the SS began “evacuating” Ravensbrück when they transported 2,100 male prisoners to Sachsenhausen. In late March 1945, the SS transported about 5,600 female prisoners to the Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. In late April, SS guards forced about 20,000 female prisoners, as well as most of the remaining male prisoners, on a brutal and forced evacuation on foot toward northern Mecklenberg. Advancing Soviet forces intersected the route of the march and liberated the prisoners. On April 29 remaining SS guards at the camp fled, and on April 30 the vanguard of the Soviet Army arrived at Ravensbrück; on May 1 its regular units appeared and liberated the last prisoners. Between 1939 and 1945, over 130,000 female and 20,000 male prisoners passed through the Ravensbrück camp system; between 20,000 to 30,000 of these prisoners perished in Ravensbrück.
LIBERATION, “The American soldiers didn’t know what to do and they showered us with chocolates and cigarettes.”
MAJDANEK THE END OF THE ROAD FOR JEWS, victims’ shoes at Majdanek, Majdanek, Poland, August 1944. A Soviet soldier walks through a mound of victims’ shoes piled outside a warehouse in Majdanek soon after the liberation.
MAJESTIC PAINTING called Liberated made by Russian artist Vladimir Davidenko. CREDITS: Eduardo Villarreal
MAUTHAUSEN LIBERATION DEAD LEFT UNBURIED, a pile of corpses at the Russian Camp (Hospital Camp) section of the Mauthausen concentration camp after liberation. Mauthausen, Austria, May 5-15, 1945.
MAUTHAUSEN SURVIVORS, cheer the soldiers of the Eleventh Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army one day after their actual liberation. The banner reads: "The Spanish Anti-Fascists Salute the Liberating Forces." According to Pierre Serge Choumoff, a survivor of Mauthausen and Gusen, this event was recreated at the request of a senior American officer. The photographer Francisco Boix can be seen with his camera standing on top of the entrance. According to the 11th Armored Division website the solders are John Slatton (back left), Jerome Rosenthal (back right), William Picket (left) and Edward Czarnowski (driver). Alternatively Robert Mordis, a Jewish soldier from Natick Massachusetts, may be on the upper left side of the tank, and another soldier may be Alfred Paliani.
MEMORIES OF THE HOLOCAUST, Roman Halter.
MORE THAN 1,000 BODIES discovered in Belarus mass grave a dark reminder of Holocaust. Belarus' servicemen excavate a mass grave for the prisoners of a Jewish ghetto set up by th...Show More
Sergei Gapon/AFP/Getty Images.
MORITZ CHOINOWSKI, was a survivor. Before the Third Reich, he was a middle-aged man in robust health. His tailoring business was flourishing; his political affiliation with the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands was fulfilling. On 28 September 1939, however, the Gestapo dragged him from his home and deposited him in the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was stripped naked, given a convict uniform with a red-and-yellow triangle (signaling that he was both a political prisoner and a Jew) and forced to work as a slave in a quarry. He was routinely beaten. Three times he was subjected to the sadistic punishment known as “25 blows”. On 19 October 1942 he was thrown into a freight car and taken to Auschwitz, where he barely avoided being selected for the gas chambers. Just over two years later he was moved again, this time to Dachau. When this camp was liberated on 29 April 1945, Choinowski was starving and suffering from typhus. Many of the inmates were so emaciated that they could barely acknowledge the American soldiers who came to free them. A teenage survivor recalled how he “watched the people sing and dance with joy, and they seemed to me as if they’d lost their minds. I looked at myself and couldn’t recognize who I was.” Choin¬owski was one of those celebrating. He had endured more than 2,000 days in concentration camps. As he cried with relief, he asked a fellow inmate: “Is this possible?”
MUSELMANN DRAWING (detail) Anonymous 1940s.
NEWLY LIBERATED, prisoners of the Allach concentration camp celebrate their liberation near Dachau, Germany, April 30, 1945. American Soldiers of the U.S. 7th Army, including members of the 42nd Infantry and 45th Infantry and 20th Armored Divisions participated in the subcamp’s liberation. The main concentration camp at Dachau had more than 120 subcamps in the area. U.S. Army photo courtesy of the New York State Military Museum. 1945.Credit...Eric Schwab/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
ON THE 16TH OF APRIL 1947, Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, was executed by hanging for war crimes. The sentence was carried out next to the crematorium of the former Auschwitz I concentration camp.
ONE OF THE HUGE MASS GRAVES at Bergen-Belsen prison camp. From: album entitled "Nazi War Atrocities." Date April 1945
POLISH JEWS TRAVELING to the American zone of Germany, with hopes of emigrating to Palestine.
Poland, 1946.
PRISONERS AFTER THE LIBERATION, prisoners look at the photographer in block 61 of Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945.
PRISONERS AT THE NAZI concentration camp of Dachau, near Munich, on the day it was liberated by allied troops. Eric Schwab/Getty images.
PRISONERS OF AUSCHWITZ greet their liberators. The man holding up his hat has been identified as Irving Meist.
PRISONERS WAVED, to their liberators as U.S. troops arrived at Dachau in April 1945.
RUTH COHEN was born in Mukačevo, Czechoslovakia, in 1930. The territory was annexed by Hungary, a Nazi ally, in 1938. After Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, Ruth and her family were forced into a ghetto and later deported to Auschwitz. Ruth and her sister, Teresa, were then sent to another camp. They were liberated in early 1945.
SAINT GEORGES, FRANCE - a photograph from a children's home where Jewish children were hidden during the Holocaust.
SELF PORTRAIT OF A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR..."After hiding for days under a pile of dead bodies, I was liberated from Buchenwald Concentration Camp by American soldiers on April 11, 1945.
Weighing only 62 lbs., I took my first bite of bread and sip of water as a free man." original medium - acrylic size - 16"x 20" copyright 1999
SICK AND HALF-STARVED, prisoners helping each other to trucks to be transported from the Wobbelin concentration camp to a hospital for medical treatment after their liberation, early May 1945.
SIXTEEN OF NINETEEN DEFENDANTS on trial for war crimes committed during the war at Dora-Mittelbau. The group included four kapos. September 17, 1947, Dachau, Germany (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park)
SOVIET ARMY PHOTO of prisoner barracks at KL Lublin as they appeared shortly after liberation. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Courtesy of Panstwowe Muzeum na Majdanku.
SPECOU at Remagen and the Dora concentration camp / Inventory title: Duben-Dachau-Brenner STARVED PRISONERS, this photo shows starved prisoners, nearly dead from hunger, posing in a concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria. Ebensee was a sub-camp of the main camp 'Mauthausen' near the town of the same name. The camp was reputedly used for "scientific" experiments. It was liberated by the 80th Division of the U.S. Army.
STARVED PRISONERS nearly dead from hunger, pose in concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria. Source: Media Drum Images/Tom Marshall (PhotograFix)
STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND: Romani Survivors in Europe 1945. When the war in Europe ended in the spring of 1945, Romani survivors were scattered, exhausted, and traumatized. Bergen Belsen at the liberation: Members of at least one German Sinti family recognized themselves in this photo. Courtesy of the German Federal Archives.
STUTTHOF LIBERATION, Klintholm Harbour. The freedom fighters made the local residents come down to the barge with food. In late April 1945, the remaining prisoners were removed from Stutthof by sea, since Stutthof was completely encircled by Soviet forces. Again, hundreds of prisoners were forced into the sea and shot. Over 4,000 were sent by small boat to Germany, some to the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, and some to camps along the Baltic coast. Many drowned along the way. Shortly before the German surrender, some prisoners were transferred to Malmo, Sweden, and released to the care of that neutral country. It has been estimated that over 25,000 prisoners, one in two, died during the evacuation from Stutthof and its subcamps. Soviet forces liberated Stutthof on May 9, 1945, and liberated about 100 prisoners who had managed to hide during the final evacuation of the camp.
SURVIVORS AT DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP
SURVIVORS OF AUSCHWITZ, during the first hours of the concentration camps liberation by soldiers of the Soviet army.
SURVIVORS OF DACHAU LIBERATED BY US SEVENTH ARMY, May 1945: Some of the thousands of prisoners at Dachau concentration camp cheer as they see the Americans of the 7th Army arriving to liberate the camp. These men were all due to be cremated.
SURVIVORS OF THE EBENSEE subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Ebensee, Austria, May 8, 1945.
TEETERING ON THE BRINK BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH. A study on the concentration camp Muselmann, The term Muselmann denotes a concentration camp prisoner in the state of utmost physical inanition and psychological exhaustion and is inseparably connected with the problems of concentration camps, particularly of camp prisoners. Paradoxically, this strange-sounding word derived from German became a general label for very many of the prisoners of Nazi German concentration camps, and entered into everyday use in the camps. With the crematorium chimneys smoking on the horizon, every prisoner knew very well what the term meant, regardless of the language they spoke. Its meaning was clear and absolutely unequivocal: it stood for the most wretched of the wretched, a prisoner described by linguist Stanisław Jagielski (1968) as “one who was teetering on the brink of death whilst still alive.”
A DYING PRISONER
A DYING PRISONER, too weak to sit up amid his rags and filth, victim of starvation and incredible brutality, at the Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany on April 18, 1945.
A Young Boy
A YOUNG BOY from Belsen Concentration Camp, 1945, 1945, Eric Taylor ‘I drew the dead and scarcely living people when Belsen concentration camp was overrun, and I witnessed at first hand all the other appalling horrors of war. To me, any attempt to explain in words the overall influence of this experience on my work appears to weaken what I endeavor to say in my painting or sculpture. It means so very much.’
A YOUNG GIRL RECEIVED A FOOD PACKAGE
A YOUNG GIRL RECEIVED A FOOD PACKAGE from a JDC representative. The contents of bundled supplies were written on the blackboard, Vienna, Austria, c.1946. JDC Archives
AFTER THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
AFTER THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR the British government granted asylum to 1000 child survivors of the Holocaust. Only 732 survivors were located and of these the vast majority were male. As a result, upon arrival in the Lake District in August 1945, the group became collectively known as ‘The Boys’, despite the presence of around 200 girls. The teen holding the young child in this photograph is Sidney Finkel, who survived the ghetto in Piotrkow, a forced labor camp in Poland, Buchenwald and a death march to Theresienstadt. More information about the picture and Sidney’s story can be found by consulting his memoir. The man Sidney is handing the baby over to is his older brother Isaac Finkel who survived experiences in the ghetto, forced labor camps and Buchenwald. The boy right next to Sidney (with suitcase in hand) has been identified as Moniek Shannon. He too survived a ghetto, forced labour camp, Buchenwald and a death march to Theresienstadt.
American GIs
AMERICAN GIS hand-carry paintings down the steps of the Neuschwanstein castle under the supervision of Capt. James Rorimer. NARA photo: 239-RC-14-5
AMERICAN TROOPS ARRIVED
AMERICAN TROOPS ARRIVED at the moment a train carrying people to the camp broke open. You can see a mother and her daughter running from the train, during the Holocaust. In the photo is a Jewish woman from the Hungarian town of Makó, who was 35 at the time of the photo. Her daughter was holding her hand.
An emaciated female
AN EMACIATED FEMALE survivor who has just been disinfected lies on a stretcher in Bergen-Belsen.
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION 1
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION 1, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the last extermination center still functioning under the Nazis. They found 7,650 survivors. Some one-and-a-half million people were murdered there, including 960,000 Jews. Auschwitz-Birkenau has become the symbol of the Holocaust and of willful radical evil in our time. What the liberators found in these camps astounded them. They came as soldiers and left as liberators. They had been trained for combat, and most of them had barely even heard of these camps. Upon entering the camps, the soldiers encountered thousands of starving people who had witnessed murder, torture, starvation, and had been dehumanized.
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION 2
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION 2, on 27 January 1945, Auschwitz concentration camp—a Nazi concentration camp where more than a million people were murdered—was liberated by the Red Army.
Bergen Belsen at the liberation
BERGEN BELSEN AT THE LIBERATION: Members of at least one German Sinti family recognized themselves in this photo. Courtesy of the German Federal Archives.
BERGEN-BELSEN, MAY 1945
BERGEN-BELSEN, MAY 1945, surviving prisoners after the liberation.
BERGEN-BELSEN
BERGEN-BELSEN, one of the victims at Bergen-Belsen was this young woman, her face still bearing the scars of a terrible beating by the SS guards.
BORYSLAV
BORYSLAV, Soviet Extraordinary State Commission at the site of mass graves adjoining camp Janowska,1944.
BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP
BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP. A Jewish survivor showing U.S. Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George S. Patton a pyre where the SS attempted to cremate corpses before evacuating the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, 1945.
BUCHENWALD WEDDING RINGS
BUCHENWALD WEDDING RINGS, Wedding rings of the victims found in Buchenwald after camp liberation. Photo taken by US Troop 5. May of 1945.
Charles Martin King Parsons
CHARLES MARTIN KING PARSONS took this photo as he was a chaplain with the British Army, and he entered Bergen-Belsen prison camp in April 1945. The camp was rife with typhus, and once the large wooden huts had been cleared of the surviving prisoners, they were burnt to the ground in May 1945.
CHILD REFUGEES FROM GERMANY
CHILD REFUGEES FROM GERMANY and Austria at the Amsterdam Burgerweeshuis orphanage. Truus Wijsmuller stands at far left, looking at the children she helped save. Overwijsmuller via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0
CHILD SURVIVORS
CHILD SURVIVORS of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Children at Auschwitz
CHILDREN AT AUSCHWITZ, in a still from the Soviet film of the liberation of Auschwitz, January 1945.
CHILDREN LOOKED AFTER
CHILDREN LOOKED AFTER by the Oeuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE), a charity that saved thousands of JEWISH CHILDREN DURING THE WAR. © Courtesy of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC) and the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris
CHILDREN SURVIVORS OF AUSCHWITZ
CHILDREN SURVIVORS OF AUSCHWITZ, this still is from a movie taken by the Russians after they liberated Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland on Jan. 27, 1945.
DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP SURVIVORSDACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP SURVIVORS
DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP SURVIVORS outside the barracks in the newly liberated camp, 1945. Collections of The National WWII Museum.
Dachau Inmate after Liberation
DACHAU INMATE AFTER LIBERATION. After American soldiers liberated Dachau in 1945, an inmate of the camp attacks a German soldier. Credit: Yad Vashem
bottom of page