The Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945. At least 1.3 million people were deported there between 1940 and 1945; of these, more than 1.1 million were murdered, mainly by poisonous gas and then incinerated in ovens. That day was designated by UN General Assembly Resolution 60/7 on November 1, 2005, to remember the genocide of six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945.
The order to carry out the “Final Solution” – the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the Jews, first in Europe and subsequently in other parts of the world that would fall under Nazi German domination – was initially given on July 31, 1941, when Nazi leader Hermann Göring issued orders to Lt.-Gen. Reinhard Heydrich – chief of the RSHA, the Reich Security Main Office, described by some as the darkest figure of the Nazi hierarchy – to prepare and expedite a comprehensive plan that envisioned the eradication of some 11 million Jews as part of the Nazi program.
Heydrich convened a conference on January 20, 1942, when 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials met at a palatial villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” That was the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the European Jews. It is said that at some still undetermined time in 1941, Adolf Hitler authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder, although his name does not appear on any relevant documents.
The 15 participants at the infamous Wannsee Conference were:
- Reinhard Heydrich, who convened it
- SS Major General Heinrich Müller, chief of RSHA Department IV (Gestapo)
- SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, chief of the RSHA Department IV B4 (Jewish Affairs)
- SS Colonel Eberhard Schöngarth, commander of the RSHA field office for the Government General in Krakow, Poland
- SS Major Rudolf Lange, commander of RSHA Einsatzkommando 2, deployed in Latvia in the autumn of 1941
- SS Major General Otto Hofmann, chief of SS Race and Settlement Main Office
Representing the agencies of the state were:
- State Secretary Roland Freisler (Justice Ministry)
- Ministerial Director Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Cabinet)
- State Secretary Alfred Meyer (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories-German-occupied USSR)
- Ministerial Director Georg Leibrandt (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories)
- Undersecretary of State Martin Luther (Foreign Office)
- State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart (Interior Ministry)
- State Secretary Erich Naumann (Office of Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan)
- State Secretary Josef Bühler (Office of the Government of the Governor General-German-occupied Poland)
- Ministerial Director Gerhard Klopfer (Nazi Party Chancellery)
The goal of the conference was to disclose to the participants that Adolf Hitler himself had tasked Heydrich and the RSHA with coordinating the operation. It was not to deliberate whether such a plan should be undertaken but to discuss the implementation of a policy decision that had already been made at the highest level of the Nazi regime.
It was Soviet troops under the command of Vasily Petrenko who liberated Auschwitz, where they found more than 7,000 remaining prisoners, mostly ill and dying. Petrenko was subsequently promoted to the rank of general and died in 2003 at the age of 91. When he was honored at a Jewish event in London on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, he told me how proud he was that his actions are remembered and that he hoped the Holocaust would never be forgotten.
“Today on January 27, we remember all the victims of the Holocaust, including those in the Auschwitz concentration camp, which I liberated,” he said in Russian. “In this country [England], everybody remembers the Holocaust and this memorial day is a good example for my country too. Best wishes to the Jewish community!”
Auschwitz-Birkenau serves as the paradigm for all the camps. According to statistics by the German Ministry of Justice, about 1,200 camps and sub-camps were run in countries occupied by Nazi Germany, while the Jewish Virtual Library estimates that the number of Nazi camps was closer to 15,000 in all occupied Europe.
The sub-camps were locations where, for instance, underground tunnels were dug like the factory for the V1 and V2 rockets. Jewish slave laborers were used until they were too weak and died. Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist, was in charge. After World War II, he was arrested as a war criminal but instead of sitting on the benches at the Nuremberg trials, he was shipped to the US where he was later honored as a pioneer of American space rockets. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1975 two years before he died at the age of 65.
Walter Bingham, 98, survived the Holocaust thanks to a Kindertransport from Germany to Britain in 1939, where he lived until making aliyah in 2004. He holds the Guinness World Record as the world’s oldest active journalist and radio talk show host.