Tag: Oświęcim

From May 1940 until January 1945, other than for a short period in early 1944 when he was in Berlin, Rudolf Hoess was the camp commandant at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He managed to evade capture after the end of the Second World War, but British forces eventually caught up with him, arresting him in his new role as a farm-worker. The trial was under the control of the new Polish government and it began on 11 March 1947. Hoess was found guilty on 2 April 1947 and after some deliberation, it was decided that he should die at Auschwitz on 14 April 1947.

This is the location where Hoess was hanged for his crimes against humanity. The execution was photographed, but the public was mostly limited from watching, following the grisly scenes in Poznan when Arthur Greise was executed when it turned into almost a day out for families.

Hoess being escorted to the gallows. Before he died, the Polish authorities had encouraged him to write his memoirs, to ensure that his story was told. Before his death, Hoess had sought the presence of a priest, which was allowed and Hoess was the last person to be killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This railroad car has been placed at the ramp at Birkenau concentration camp where victims were hounded off trains to face the selection process, where most were sent immediately to their deaths. Over 120,000 of these cars were produced in Germany between 1919 and 1925, designed to transport freight around the country. Thousands of them were ultimately used to transport victims as part of the Nazi’s final solution plan, each initially intended to hold 50 people but there were frequently over 150 in this small space.

The railroad car here was restored with funding from Sir Frank Lowy, the former chairman of the Westfield shopping centre company. His father, Hugo Lowy, was beaten to death here on the ramp when he refused to leave his Jewish prayer shawl on the train. Frank Lowy only found out about this over forty years on and he said about his father:

“Actually, in a way, in all my sadness, I felt very proud: that my father was able to make such a sacrifice of his life for his principles. I finally found out what happened to him. I used to dream about him, but after I discovered it, I didn’t dream anymore. You know, it was kind of a closure. In my dreams about my father, he bent over me and I didn’t know if he was really there or not. I dreamed about him many, many times. The dreams have not returned. So it must have been some kind of closure.”

The railroad car may not have been one which actually transported prisoners, but is an authentic one from the period. What is known though is that Hugo Lowy died at around the spot where the railroad car is now placed. A tribute not just to him, but to all those who died here.

Much has already been written about this room at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the shoes that were taken from victims when they arrived at the concentration camp. There are around 25,000 pairs of shoes here, this would be about the number of shoes taken every day or two at the camp, to give this some sense of perspective. The leather smell from the shoes is also evident when visitors walk into the room as the shoes very slowly decay.

This photo was taken at Auschwitz in May 1944, when the female prisoners were given the task of sorting the shoes that had been taken from mostly Hungarian Jews.

It’s hard to imagine the suffering that would have taken place in this small area, formerly a wooden barracks at Birkenau where children were kept. They were mostly Jewish twins, kept alive for a while so that Josef Mengele could conduct experiments on them.

Mengele would work in his laboratories every morning, before rushing to the ramps where Jewish prisoners were being brought in by train in vast numbers nearly every day. Usually Hungarian Jews, he would monitor the selection process of who would live and die, looking particularly for anyone he considered might be useful for his medical research.

The children would for a while receive sufficient food and drink, and for the twins, it was essential that both stayed alive. If one died, usually due to some experiment initiated by Mengele, then the other would be killed so that there could be a comparable autopsy.

Today, there isn’t much left of this barracks. Like many others on the site, it was only ever a temporary wooden structure and it wasn’t well-built at the time meaning it has since been lost. All that remains now is the bricked area in the centre of the barracks, which was part of a rudimentary and mostly ineffective brick heating duct.