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LIBERATION
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.
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION 1945
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION 1945, prisoners of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp after their release.
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION 2019
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION 2019, event poster.
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION, 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
AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION, 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.
DACHAU LIBERATION
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.
INMATES WAVING
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."
LIBERATION FROM WOBBELIN
LIBERATION FROM WOBBELIN, “I looked around at all of us, still in our shabby striped uniforms. We have survived I said to myself……In that moment the fear began to fall away from my heart.” George Salton (USHMM photo, liberated prisoners from Wobbelin concentration camp).
LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ
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 KL AUSCHWITZ
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.
MAUTHAUSEN LIBERATION DEAD LEFT UNBURIED
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
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.
MORITZ CHOINOWSKI
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?”
NEWLY LIBERATED
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.
PRISONERS OF AUSCHWITZ
PRISONERS OF AUSCHWITZ, greet their liberators. The man holding up his hat has been identified as Irving Meist.
PRISONERS WAVED
PRISONERS WAVED, to their liberators as U.S. troops arrived at Dachau in April 1945.
STUTTHOF LIBERATION
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.
SURVIVIORS OF DACHAU LIBERATED BY US SEVENTH 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 AUSCHWITZ
SURVIVORS OF AUSCHWITZ, during the first hours of the concentration camps liberation by soldiers of the Soviet army.
TAKEN AT AUSCHWITZ
TAKEN AT AUSCHWITZ, shortly after liberation by the Red Army on January 27, 1945.
THE LIBERATION
THE LIBERATION, of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, April 1945. Prisoners sit by the wire fence dividing the various sections of the camp. They are eating their first meal after the liberation of the camp.
THE LIBERATION OF MAJDANEK
THE LIBERATION OF MAJDANEK, On the night of July 22-23, 1944, soldiers of the Red Army came upon Majdanek, the first of the Nazi camps to be liberated. They freed just under 500 prisoners and occupied the nearby city of Lublin on July 24. What Soviet and Polish researchers uncovered and documented behind the camp’s electrified barbed wire, soon reinforced by the investigative work conducted by others outside of the USSR, definitively shaped our understanding of the Nazi genocide. While still largely unfamiliar to most Americans, the liberation of Majdanek was one of the most significant moments in the history of World War II and the Holocaust. Its name, taken from Majdan-Tatarski, a suburb of the major industrial center of Lublin, Majdanek had originally been envisioned by the SS as a key link in the colonization and exploitation of the General Government, the area of Poland under German occupation. Jewish soldiers in the Polish army, who had been taken prisoner, had been doing work in Lublin for the firm, the German Supply Establishment, since late 1940. In July 1941, a month after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler traveled to Lublin, for a meeting with Odilo Globocnik, the notorious SS and Police Leader in the region. Himmler made his intentions clear to Globocnik—establish a concentration camp near the city that could hold up to 50,000 inmates. They would work in SS economic enterprises for as long as they could endure. Poles, many of them political prisoners, Jews, and Soviet prisoners of war would constitute this unfree labor army. In short, Majdanek began as a forced-labor operation, not as an extermination center, like the Operation Reinhard camps (Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor) that Himmler later ordered Globocnik to create. Construction of the site, which was never completely finished, started in October 1941, when 2,000 Soviet POWs were dragooned. The first Jewish inmates, literally grabbed off the streets of Lublin, set foot in Majdanek in mid-December of that year. Non-Jewish Poles arrived two months later. In 1942-43, Majdanek transformed, however. As the Nazi mass annihilation of European Jews escalated, the SS installed gas chambers and crematoria there. Polish, Czech, Slovakian, and Hungarian Jews were deported directly or diverted to Majdanek because of overcrowding at other killing centers. The Nazis also transported Jews from Germany, France, and the Low Countries to the camp. In 1943, SS personnel at Majdanek murdered thousands from the Warsaw and Bialystok Ghettos in Poland after Himmler called for their liquidation. The camp’s “efficiency” increased as its usefulness to the “Final Solution” expanded. Even within the culture of the SS, a culture defined by cruelty and contempt for the “other,” the staff at Majdanek gained a reputation for savagery.
WORLD WAR II
WORLD WAR II, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp Holocaust Germany April 1945.
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