Auschwitz Liberated 25 Years Ago

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32209, 30 January 1970, Page 5

Auschwitz Liberated 25 Years Ago

(By

MARTIN ZUCKER,

of the

Associated Press, through N.Z.P.A.)

OSWIECIM (Poland), January 25. Fresh snow covers the ground round Auschwitz but a grey grimness hangs over the Nazis’ death camp, liberated 25 years ago this week. It is a deserted hell, made into a museum and monument to four million victims of Adolf Hitler’s inhumanity. The thick wire fences still stand. So do the wooden watchtowers, once manned by soldiers guarding the Third Reich's biggest factory for annihilation. In places, human ashes and bone fragments are still visible. The “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign, so hideously ironic, still reigns over the entrance way to Auschwitz I, the main camp. It means “work brings freedom.”

Below the sign have passed more than seven and a half million visitors, including one million foreigners since the Polish Government made the camp a museum in 1947. Murder Remnants

Inside the gate are the redbrick blockhouses in which prisoners lived. They are now filled with the remnants of mass murder found after the camp was reached on January 27, 1945, by the Soviet Army. One display has two tons of nair cut from 40,000 women gassed in the last days. Another is filled with shoes, another with artificial legs, another with shaving and clothes brushes. One shows a great heap of suitcases bearing the names of Jews who were brought like cattle in freight cars from all over Europe to be liquidated in Auschwitz’s gas chambers. The camp was opened in June, 1940, to hold Poles arrested for resistance to the Nazi occupation of their country. Later it was expanded and designated by the Nazi heirarchy to be the centre for the “final solution of the Jewish question.” Three-quarters of Auschwitz’s victims are believed to have been Jews, but in nearly five years of operation some 28 ethnic groups from 24 countries were counted among the dead. From the main camp the visitor can go by bus toAuschwitz 11, the camp known as Birkenau, one and a half miles away. Here were located four gas chambers and crematoria, destroyed by the Nazis before they fled, but preserved as ruins.

Here, under a watchtower crowning a long, low barracks, came the trains bearing human cargo to the death factory. Under a cover of snow, the outline of the tracks can still be seen. Doctor’s Selections Here, the selections were made by doctors: Those who were to go directly to the gas chambers or those deemed capable of heavy labour, which meant usually a slow death by starvation or disease. Rudolf Hess, the commandant of Auschwitz, stated at the Nazi war crimes trial at Nurenberg in 1946 that each Birkenau gas chamber could hold 2000 victims at one time. Hess, who was hanged at Auschwitz by the Polish Government in 1947, described the Birkenau facilities as an “improvement” on those at Treblinka, another death camp in Poland, where the gas chambers could hold 200 persons at one time. The third camp at Auschwitz was a chemical complex —the Buna Worke—which the Nazis built for the German I. G. Farben Company with slave labour. Most of the 42,000 inhabitants of the town of Oswiecim, where Auschwitz is located, eam their living either directly or indirectly from this plant “It is the symbol of life with which the people here associate themselves,” said one citizen, “rather than Auschwitz, the symbol of death.” The museum at Auschwitz is directed by Kazimierz Smolen, aged 49, a former prisoner. He was arrested by the Gestapo as a 19-year-old in Silesia in 1940 for having distributed anti-occupation leaflets. 1327th Prisoner The tattooed number on his arm signifies he was the 1327th prisoner sent to the camp. Smolen worked as a clerk in the reception shack for political prisoners. “I was young and strong and had the good luck to work in the office,” he says. Seven or eight Poles who worked with him also survived. Prisoners were forced to work there under inhuman conditions. After three or foun months, according to survivors, many men died from beatings, hunger or overwork. In three years an estimated 30,000 prisoners died there.

In 1945, the retreating Nazis destroyed most of the plant But on the ruins the Polish Government erected one of the country’s largest chemical works. The Oswieelm chemical complex, producing Over 150 varieties of synthetic rubbers and plastics, employs some 11,000 workers. After the war, Smolen studied law and worked with the Nazi War Crimes Commission in Krakow. He was appointed museum director in 1955. v Occasional Nightmares Occasionally when he is working intensely preparing material for an Auschwitz exhibition be has nightmares. “This happens particularly after sorting through the

picture flies for the most vivid photographs,” he says. Smolen heads a staff of about 120, including researchers, guides, watchmen and cleaning women. Visitors include Polish schoolchildren, Charles de Gaulle, Josip Tito, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Shah of Iran, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, and Robert F. Kennedy have been among prominent visitors. There have been six Auschwitz trials in West Germany involving 74 dependants who were among the camp staff. Dr Horst Schumann, extradited from Ghana in 1968, is to go on trial soon, accused of conducting sterilisation experiments on Jews and gipsies at Auschwitz.