What happened in the German concentration camps. Women captured by the Germans

Serial killers and other maniacs in most cases are inventions of the imagination of screenwriters and directors. But the Third Reich did not like to strain its imagination. Therefore, the Nazis really warmed up on living people.

The terrible experiments of scientists on humanity, ending in death, are far from fiction. This real events which took place during the Second World War. Why not remember them? Moreover, today is Friday the 13th.

Pressure

German physician Sigmund Rascher was too concerned about the problems that Third Reich pilots could have at an altitude of 20 kilometers. Therefore, as the chief physician at the Dachau concentration camp, he created special pressure chambers in which he placed prisoners and experimented with pressure.

After this, the scientist opened the skulls of the victims and examined their brains. 200 people took part in this experiment. 80 died on the surgical table, the rest were shot.

White phosphorus

From November 1941 to January 1944, drugs that could treat white phosphorus burns were tested on the human body in Buchenwald. It is not known whether the Nazis managed to invent a panacea. But, believe me, these experiments took away plenty of prisoners’ lives.

The food in Buchenwald was not the best. This was especially felt from December 1943 to October 1944. The Nazis mixed various poisons into prisoners' food and then studied their effects on the human body. Often such experiments ended with the immediate dissection of the victim after eating. And in September 1944, the Germans got tired of messing around with experimental subjects. Therefore, all participants in the experiment were shot.

Sterilization

Carl Clauberg - German doctor, who became famous for sterilization during World War II. From March 1941 to January 1945, the scientist tried to find a way to make millions of people infertile in the shortest possible time.

Clauberg succeeded: the doctor injected prisoners of Auschwitz, Revensbrück and other concentration camps with iodine and silver nitrate. Although such injections had a lot side effects(bleeding, pain and cancer), they successfully sterilized a person.

But Clauberg’s favorite was radiation exposure: a person was invited to a special chamber with a chair, sitting on which he filled out questionnaires. And then the victim simply left, not suspecting that she would never be able to have children again. Often such exposures resulted in serious radiation burns.

sea water

During World War II, the Nazis once again confirmed that sea water is undrinkable. On the territory of the Dachau concentration camp (Germany), the Austrian doctor Hans Eppinger and professor Wilhelm Beiglbeck in July 1944 decided to check how long 90 gypsies could live without water. The victims of the experiment were so dehydrated that they even licked the recently washed floor.

Sulfanilamide

Sulfanilamide is a synthetic antimicrobial agent. From July 1942 to September 1943, the Nazis, led by the German professor Gebhard, tried to determine the effectiveness of the drug in the treatment of streptococcus, tetanus and anaerobic gangrene. Who do you think they infected to conduct such experiments?

Mustard gas

Doctors will not find a way to cure a person from a burn with mustard gas if at least one victim of such a chemical weapon does not come to their table. Why look for someone if you can poison and train on prisoners from German concentration camp Sachsenhausen? This is what the minds of the Reich were doing throughout the Second World War.

Malaria

SS Hauptsturmführer and MD Kurt Plötner still could not find a cure for malaria. The scientist was not even helped by the thousand prisoners from Dachau who were forced to take part in his experiments. Victims were infected through the bites of infected mosquitoes and treated with various drugs. More than half of the test subjects did not survive.

1) Irma Grese - (October 7, 1923 - December 13, 1945) - warden of the Nazi death camps Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Irma's nicknames included "Blonde Devil", "Angel of Death", and "Beautiful Monster". She used emotional and physical methods to torture prisoners, beat women to death, and enjoyed arbitrarily shooting prisoners. She starved her dogs so she could set them on victims, and personally selected hundreds of people to be sent to the gas chambers. Grese wore heavy boots and, in addition to a pistol, she always carried a wicker whip.

The Western post-war press constantly discussed the possible sexual deviations of Irma Grese, her numerous connections with the SS guards, with the commandant of Bergen-Belsen Joseph Kramer (“The Beast of Belsen”).
On April 17, 1945, she was captured by the British. The Belsen trial, initiated by a British military tribunal, lasted from September 17 to November 17, 1945. Together with Irma Grese, the cases of other camp workers were considered at this trial - commandant Joseph Kramer, warden Juanna Bormann, and nurse Elisabeth Volkenrath. Irma Grese was found guilty and sentenced to hang.
IN last night Before her execution, Grese laughed and sang songs with her colleague Elisabeth Volkenrath. Even when a noose was thrown around Irma Grese’s neck, her face remained calm. Her last word was “Faster,” addressed to the English executioner.

2) Ilse Koch - (September 22, 1906 - September 1, 1967) - German NSDAP activist, wife of Karl Koch, commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps. She is best known under the pseudonym "Frau Lampshade" and received the nickname "The Witch of Buchenwald" for her brutal torture of camp prisoners. Koch was also accused of making souvenirs from human skin (however, no reliable evidence of this was presented at the post-war trial of Ilse Koch).

On June 30, 1945, Koch was arrested American troops and in 1947 she was sentenced to life imprisonment. However, a few years later, American General Lucius Clay, the military commandant of the American occupation zone in Germany, released her, considering the charges of ordering executions and making souvenirs from human skin insufficiently proven.

This decision caused public protest, so in 1951 Ilse Koch was arrested in West Germany. A German court again sentenced her to life imprisonment.

On September 1, 1967, Koch committed suicide by hanging herself in her cell in the Bavarian prison of Eibach.

3) Louise Danz - b. December 11, 1917 - matron of women's concentration camps. She was sentenced to life imprisonment but later released.

She began working in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, then was transferred to Majdanek. Danz later served in Auschwitz and Malchow.
Prisoners later said they were abused by Danz. She beat them and confiscated the clothes they had been given for the winter. In Malchow, where Danz had the position of senior warden, she starved the prisoners, not giving food for 3 days. On April 2, 1945, she killed a minor girl.
Danz was arrested on June 1, 1945 in Lützow. At the trial of the Supreme National Tribunal, which lasted from November 24, 1947 to December 22, 1947, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1956 due to health reasons (!!!). In 1996, she was charged with the aforementioned murder of a child, but it was dropped after doctors said Dantz would be too hard to bear if she was imprisoned again. She lives in Germany. She is now 94 years old.

4) Jenny-Wanda Barkmann - (May 30, 1922 - July 4, 1946) From 1940 to December 1943 she worked as a fashion model. In January 1944, she became a guard at the small Stutthof concentration camp, where she became famous for brutally beating female prisoners, some of them to death. She also participated in the selection of women and children for the gas chambers. She was so cruel but also very beautiful that the female prisoners nicknamed her “Beautiful Ghost.”

Jenny fled the camp in 1945 when Soviet troops began to approach the camp. But she was caught and arrested in May 1945 while trying to leave the station in Gdansk. She is said to have flirted with the police officers guarding her and was not particularly worried about her fate. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was found guilty, after which she was given the last word. She stated, "Life is indeed great pleasure, and pleasure is usually short-lived."

Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was publicly hanged at Biskupka Gorka near Gdańsk on July 4, 1946. She was only 24 years old. Her body was burned and her ashes were publicly washed away in the latrine of the house where she was born.

5) Hertha Gertrude Bothe - (January 8, 1921 - March 16, 2000) - warden of women's concentration camps. She was arrested on charges of war crimes, but later released.

In 1942, she received an invitation to work as a guard at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. After four weeks of preliminary training, Bothe was sent to Stutthof, a concentration camp located near the city of Gdansk. In it, Bothe received the nickname "Sadist of Stutthof" due to her cruel treatment of female prisoners.

In July 1944, she was sent by Gerda Steinhoff to the Bromberg-Ost concentration camp. From January 21, 1945, Bothe was a guard during the death march of prisoners from central Poland to the Bergen-Belsen camp. The march ended on February 20-26, 1945. In Bergen-Belsen, Bothe led a detachment of 60 women engaged in wood production.

After the liberation of the camp she was arrested. At the Belsen court she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Released earlier specified period December 22, 1951. She died on March 16, 2000 in Huntsville, USA.

6) Maria Mandel (1912-1948) - Nazi war criminal. Occupying the post of head of the women's camps of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the period 1942-1944, she was directly responsible for the death of about 500 thousand female prisoners.

Mandel was described by fellow employees as an "extremely intelligent and dedicated" person. Auschwitz prisoners called her a monster among themselves. Mandel personally selected the prisoners, and sent thousands of them to the gas chambers. There are known cases when Mandel personally took several prisoners under her protection for a while, and when she got bored with them, she put them on the list for destruction. Also, it was Mandel who came up with the idea and creation of a women’s camp orchestra, which greeted newly arrived prisoners at the gate with cheerful music. According to the recollections of survivors, Mandel was a music lover and treated the musicians from the orchestra well, personally coming to their barracks with a request to play something.

In 1944, Mandel was transferred to the post of warden of the Muhldorf concentration camp, one of the parts of the Dachau concentration camp, where she served until the end of the war with Germany. In May 1945, she fled to the mountains near her hometown of Münzkirchen. On August 10, 1945, Mandel was arrested by American troops. In November 1946, she was handed over to the Polish authorities at their request as a war criminal. Mandel was one of the main defendants in the trial of Auschwitz workers, which took place in November-December 1947. The court sentenced her to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on January 24, 1948 in a Krakow prison.

7) Hildegard Neumann (May 4, 1919, Czechoslovakia - ?) - senior guard at the Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt concentration camps.

Hildegard Neumann began her service at the Ravensbrück concentration camp in October 1944, immediately becoming chief warden. Due to her good work, she was transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp as the head of all the camp guards. Beauty Hildegard, according to the prisoners, was cruel and merciless towards them.
She supervised between 10 and 30 female police officers and over 20,000 female Jewish prisoners. Neumann also facilitated the deportation of more than 40,000 women and children from Theresienstadt to the death camps of Auschwitz (Auschwitz) and Bergen-Belsen, where most of them were killed. Researchers estimate that more than 100,000 Jews were deported from the Theresienstadt camp and were killed or died at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, with another 55,000 dying in Theresienstadt itself.
Neumann left the camp in May 1945 and suffered no criminal liability for war crimes. The subsequent fate of Hildegard Neumann is unknown.

Fascism and atrocities will forever remain inseparable concepts. Since the bringing of the bloody ax of war Nazi Germany over the world, the innocent blood of a huge number of victims was shed.

The birth of the first concentration camps

As soon as the Nazis came to power in Germany, the first “death factories” began to be created. A concentration camp is a deliberately designed center designed for the mass involuntary incarceration and detention of prisoners of war and political prisoners. The name itself still inspires horror in many people. Concentration camps in Germany were the location of those persons who were suspected of supporting the anti-fascist movement. The first were located directly in the Third Reich. According to the “Extraordinary Decree of the Reich President on the protection of the people and the state,” all those who were hostile to the Nazi regime were arrested for an indefinite period.

But as soon as hostilities began, such institutions turned into ones that suppressed and destroyed a huge number of people. German concentration camps during World War II were filled with millions of prisoners: Jews, communists, Poles, gypsies, Soviet citizens and others. Among the many reasons for the death of millions of people, the main ones were the following:

severe bullying;
illness;
poor living conditions;
exhaustion;
hard physical labor;
inhumane medical experiments.

Development of a cruel system

The total number of correctional labor institutions at that time was about 5 thousand. German concentration camps during the Great Patriotic War had different purposes and capacity. The spread of racial theory in 1941 led to the emergence of camps or “death factories”, behind the walls of which Jews were methodically killed first, and then people belonging to other “inferior” peoples. Camps were created in the occupied territories

The first phase of the development of this system is characterized by the construction of camps on German territory, which were most similar to holds. They were intended to contain opponents of the Nazi regime. At that time, there were about 26 thousand prisoners, absolutely protected from the outside world. Even in the event of a fire, rescuers did not have the right to be on the camp territory.

The second phase was 1936-1938, when the number of arrestees grew rapidly and new places of detention were required. Among those arrested were homeless people and those who did not want to work. A kind of cleansing of society from asocial elements that disgraced the German nation was carried out. This is the time of the construction of such well-known camps as Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. Later, Jews began to be sent into exile.

The third phase of the development of the system begins almost simultaneously with the Second World War and lasts until the beginning of 1942. The number of prisoners inhabiting German concentration camps during the Great Patriotic War almost doubled thanks to captured French, Poles, Belgians and representatives of other nations. At this time, the number of prisoners in Germany and Austria was significantly inferior to the number of those in camps built in the conquered territories.

During the fourth and final phase (1942-1945), the persecution of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war intensified significantly. The number of prisoners is approximately 2.5-3 million.

The Nazis organized “death factories” and other similar institutions of forced detention in the territories of various countries. The most significant place Among them were concentration camps in Germany, the list of which is as follows:

Buchenwald;
Halle;
Dresden;
Dusseldorf;
Catbus;
Ravensbrück;
Schlieben;
Spremberg;
Dachau;
Essen.

Dachau - first camp

Among the first in Germany, the Dachau camp was created, located near the small town of the same name near Munich. He was a kind of model for the creation of the future system of Nazi correctional institutions. Dachau is a concentration camp that existed for 12 years. A huge number of German political prisoners, anti-fascists, prisoners of war, clergy, political and social activists from almost all European countries served their sentences there.

In 1942, a system consisting of 140 additional camps began to be created in southern Germany. All of them belonged to the Dachau system and contained more than 30 thousand prisoners, used in a variety of hard jobs. Among the prisoners were well-known anti-fascist believers Martin Niemöller, Gabriel V and Nikolai Velimirovich.

Officially, Dachau was not intended to exterminate people. But despite this, the official number of prisoners killed here is about 41,500 people. But the real number is much higher.

Also behind these walls, various medical experiments were carried out on people. In particular, experiments took place related to the study of the effect of altitude on the human body and the study of malaria. In addition, new medications and hemostatic agents were tested on prisoners.

Dachau, a notorious concentration camp, was liberated on April 29, 1945 by the US 7th Army.

“Work makes you free”

This phrase made of metal letters, placed above the main entrance to the Nazi building, is a symbol of terror and genocide.

Due to the increase in the number of arrested Poles, the need arose to create a new place for their detention. In 1940-1941, all residents were evicted from the territory of Auschwitz and the surrounding villages. This place was intended for the formation of a camp.

It included:

Auschwitz I;
Auschwitz-Birkenau;
Auschwitz Buna (or Auschwitz III).

The entire camp was surrounded by towers and electrified barbed wire. The restricted zone was located at a great distance outside the camps and was called the “zone of interest.”

Prisoners were brought here on trains from all over Europe. After this, they were divided into 4 groups. The first, consisting mainly of Jews and people unfit for work, were immediately sent to the gas chambers.

Representatives of the second performed various tasks various works at industrial enterprises. In particular, prison labor was used at the Buna Werke oil refinery, which produced gasoline and synthetic rubber.

A third of the new arrivals were those who had congenital physical abnormalities. They were mostly dwarfs and twins. They were sent to the “main” concentration camp to conduct anti-human and sadistic experiments.

The fourth group consisted of specially selected women who served as servants and personal slaves of the SS men. They also sorted personal belongings confiscated from arriving prisoners.

Mechanism for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question

Every day there were more than 100 thousand prisoners in the camp, who lived on 170 hectares of land in 300 barracks. The first prisoners were engaged in their construction. The barracks were wooden and had no foundation. In winter, these rooms were especially cold because they were heated with 2 small stoves.

The crematoria at Auschwitz Birkenau were located at the end railway tracks. They were combined with gas chambers. Each of them contained 5 triple furnaces. Other crematoria were smaller and consisted of one eight-muffle furnace. They all worked almost around the clock. The break was taken only to clean the ovens from human ashes and burnt fuel. All this was taken to the nearest field and poured into special pits.

Each gas chamber accommodated about 2.5 thousand people; they died within 10-15 minutes. After this, their corpses were transferred to crematoriums. Other prisoners had already been prepared to take their place.

Crematoria could not always accommodate a large number of corpses, so in 1944 they began to burn them right on the street.

Some facts from the history of Auschwitz

Auschwitz is a concentration camp whose history includes approximately 700 escape attempts, half of which were successful. But even if someone managed to escape, all his relatives were immediately arrested. They were also sent to camps. The prisoners who lived with the escapee in the same block were killed. In this way, the concentration camp management prevented escape attempts.

The liberation of this “death factory” took place on January 27, 1945. 100 rifle division General Fyodor Krasavin occupied the territory of the camp. Only 7,500 people were alive at that time. The Nazis killed or transported more than 58 thousand prisoners to the Third Reich during their retreat.

To this day, the exact number of lives that Auschwitz took is unknown. The souls of how many prisoners wander there to this day? Auschwitz is a concentration camp whose history consists of the lives of 1.1-1.6 million prisoners. He has become a sad symbol of outrageous crimes against humanity.

Guarded detention camp for women

The only large concentration camp for women in Germany was Ravensbrück. It was designed to hold 30 thousand people, but at the end of the war there were more than 45 thousand prisoners. These included Russian and Polish women. A significant part were Jewish. This women's concentration camp was not officially intended to carry out various abuses of prisoners, but there was also no formal prohibition of such.

Upon entering Ravensbrück, women were stripped of everything they had. They were completely undressed, washed, shaved and given work clothes. After this, the prisoners were distributed to barracks.

Even before entering the camp, the healthiest and most efficient women were selected, the rest were destroyed. Those who survived performed various jobs related to construction and sewing workshops.

Towards the end of the war, a crematorium and a gas chamber were built here. Before this, mass or single executions were carried out when necessary. Human ashes were sent as fertilizer to the fields surrounding the women's concentration camp or simply poured into the bay.

Elements of humiliation and experiences in Ravesbrück

The most important elements of humiliation included numbering, mutual responsibility and unbearable living conditions. Also a feature of Ravesbrück is the presence of an infirmary designed for conducting experiments on people. Here the Germans tested new drugs, first infecting or maiming prisoners. The number of prisoners rapidly decreased due to regular purges or selections, during which all women who lost the opportunity to work or had poor appearance were destroyed.

At the time of liberation, there were approximately 5 thousand people in the camp. The remaining prisoners were either killed or taken to other concentration camps in Nazi Germany. The women prisoners were finally released in April 1945.

Concentration camp in Salaspils

At first, the Salaspils concentration camp was created to contain Jews. They were delivered there from Latvia and other European countries. The first construction work was carried out by Soviet prisoners of war who were in Stalag 350, located nearby.

Since at the time of the start of construction the Nazis had practically exterminated all Jews on the territory of Latvia, the camp was unclaimed. In connection with this, in May 1942, a prison was built in an empty building in Salaspils. It contained all those who evaded labor service, sympathized Soviet power, and other opponents of Hitler's regime. People were sent here to die a painful death. The camp was not like other similar institutions. There were no gas chambers or crematoria here. Nevertheless, about 10 thousand prisoners were destroyed here.

Children's Salaspils

The Salaspils concentration camp was a place where children were imprisoned and used to provide blood for wounded German soldiers. After the blood removal procedure, most of the juvenile prisoners died very quickly.

The number of little prisoners who died within the walls of Salaspils is more than 3 thousand. These are only those children of concentration camps who were under 5 years old. Some of the bodies were burned, and the rest were buried in the garrison cemetery. Most of the children died due to the merciless pumping of blood.

The fate of the people who ended up in concentration camps in Germany during the Great Patriotic War was tragic even after liberation. It would seem that what else could be worse! After fascist correctional labor institutions, they were captured by the Gulag. Their relatives and children were repressed, and the former prisoners themselves were considered “traitors.” They worked only in the most difficult and low-paid jobs. Only a few of them subsequently managed to become people.

The concentration camps of Germany are evidence of the terrible and inexorable truth of the deepest decline of humanity.

I apologize if you encounter factual errors in today's material.

Instead of a preface:

"When there were no gas chambers, we shot on Wednesdays and Fridays. The children tried to hide on these days. Now the crematorium ovens work day and night and the children no longer hide. The children are used to it.

This is the first eastern subgroup.

How are you, children?

How are you living, children?

We live well, our health is good. Come.

I don’t need to go to the gas station, I can still give blood.

The rats ate my rations, so I didn’t bleed.

I'm assigned to load coal into the crematorium tomorrow.

And I can donate blood.

They don't know what it is?

They forgot.

Eat, children! Eat!

Why didn't you take it?

Wait, I'll take it.

Maybe you won't get it.

Lie down, it doesn't hurt, it's like falling asleep. Get down!

What's wrong with them?

Why did they lie down?

The children probably thought they were given poison..."

A group of Soviet prisoners of war behind barbed wire

Majdanek. Poland

The girl is a prisoner of the Croatian concentration camp Jasenovac

KZ Mauthausen, jugendliche

Children of Buchenwald

Joseph Mengele and child

Photo taken by me from Nuremberg materials

Children of Buchenwald

Mauthausen children show numbers etched into their hands

Treblinka

Two sources. One says that this is Majdanek, the other says Auschwitz

Some creatures use this photo as “proof” of hunger in Ukraine. It is not surprising that it is from Nazi crimes that they draw “inspiration” for their “revelations”

These are the children released in Salaspils

“Since the fall of 1942, masses of women, old people, and children from the occupied regions of the USSR: Leningrad, Kalinin, Vitebsk, Latgale were forcibly brought to the Salaspils concentration camp. Children from infancy to 12 years old were forcibly taken away from their mothers and kept in 9 barracks of which the so-called 3 sick leaves, 2 for crippled children and 4 barracks for healthy children.

The permanent population of children in Salaspils was more than 1,000 people during 1943 and 1944. Their systematic extermination took place there by:

A) organizing a blood factory for the needs German army, blood was taken from both adults and healthy children, including babies, until they fainted, after which the sick children were taken to the so-called hospital, where they died;

B) gave children poisoned coffee;

C) children with measles were bathed, from which they died;

D) they injected children with child, female and even horse urine. Many children's eyes festered and leaked;

D) all children suffered from dysenteric diarrhea and dystrophy;

E) naked children in winter time they were driven to a bathhouse through the snow at a distance of 500-800 meters and kept in barracks naked for 4 days;

3) children who were crippled or injured were taken away to be shot.

Mortality among children from the above causes averaged 300-400 per month during 1943/44. to the month of June.

According to preliminary data, over 500 children were exterminated in the Salaspils concentration camp in 1942, and in 1943/44. more than 6,000 people.

During 1943/44 More than 3,000 people who survived and endured torture were taken from the concentration camp. For this purpose, a children's market was organized in Riga at 5 Gertrudes Street, where they were sold into slavery for 45 marks per summer period.

Some of the children were placed in children's camps organized for this purpose after May 1, 1943 - in Dubulti, Bulduri, Saulkrasti. After this, the German fascists continued to supply the kulaks of Latvia with slaves of Russian children from the above-mentioned camps and export them directly to the volosts of the Latvian counties, selling them for 45 Reichsmarks over the summer period.

Most of these children who were taken out and given away to be raised died because... were easily susceptible to all kinds of diseases after losing blood in the Salaspils camp.

On the eve of the expulsion of German fascists from Riga, on October 4-6, they loaded infants and small children under 4 years of age from Riga onto the ship "Menden". orphanage and the Mayor's orphanage, where the children of executed parents were kept, who came from the dungeons of the Gestapo, prefectures, prisons and partly from the Salaspils camp, and 289 small children were exterminated on that ship.

They were hijacked by the Germans to Libau, located there orphanage infants. Children from Baldonsky and Grivsky orphanages; nothing is known about their fate yet.

Not stopping at these atrocities, the German fascists in 1944 sold low-quality products in Riga stores only using children's cards, in particular milk with some kind of powder. Why did small children die in droves? More than 400 children died in the Riga Children's Hospital alone in 9 months of 1944, including 71 children in September.

In these orphanages, the methods of raising and maintaining children were police and under the supervision of the commandant of the Salaspils concentration camp, Krause, and another German, Schaefer, who went to the children's camps and houses where the children were kept for “inspection.”

It was also established that in the Dubulti camp, children were put in a punishment cell. To do this, the former head of the Benoit camp resorted to the assistance of the German SS police.

Senior NKVD operative officer, security captain /Murman/

Children were brought from the eastern lands occupied by the Germans: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine. Children ended up in Latvia with their mothers, where they were then forcibly separated. Mothers were used as free labor force. Older children were also used in various kinds of auxiliary work.

According to the People's Commissariat of Education of the LSSR, which investigated the facts of the abduction of civilians into German slavery, as of April 3, 1945, it is known that 2,802 children were distributed from the Salaspils concentration camp during the German occupation:

1) on kulak farms - 1,564 people.

2) to children's camps - 636 people.

3) taken into care by individual citizens - 602 people.

The list is compiled on the basis of data from the card index of the Social Department of Internal Affairs of the Latvian General Directorate “Ostland”. Based on the same file, it was revealed that children were forced to work from the age of five.

IN last days During their stay in Riga in October 1944, the Germans broke into orphanages, into the homes of infants, into apartments, grabbed children, drove them to the port of Riga, where they loaded them like cattle into the coal mines of steamships.

Through mass executions in the vicinity of Riga alone, the Germans killed about 10,000 children, whose corpses were burned. 17,765 children were killed in mass shootings.

Based on the investigation materials for other cities and counties of the LSSR, the following number of exterminated children was established:

Abrensky district - 497
Ludza County - 732
Rezekne County and Rezekne - 2,045, incl. through Rezekne prison more than 1,200
Madona County - 373
Daugavpils - 3,960, incl. through Daugavpils prison 2,000
Daugavpils district - 1,058
Valmiera County - 315
Jelgava - 697
Ilukstsky district - 190
Bauska County - 399
Valka County - 22
Cesis County - 32
Jekabpils County - 645
Total - 10,965 people.

In Riga, dead children were buried in the Pokrovskoye, Tornakalnskoye and Ivanovskoye cemeteries, as well as in the forest near the Salaspils camp."

In the ditch

The bodies of two child prisoners before the funeral. Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. 04/17/1945

Children behind the wire

Soviet child prisoners of the 6th Finnish concentration camp in Petrozavodsk

“The girl who is second from the post on the right in the photo - Klavdia Nyuppieva - published her memoirs many years later.

“I remember how people fainted from the heat in the so-called bathhouse, and then they were doused with cold water. I remember the disinfection of the barracks, after which there was a noise in the ears and many had nosebleeds, and that steam room where all our rags were processed with great “diligence.” One day the steam room burned down, depriving many people of their last clothes.”

The Finns shot prisoners in front of children and administered corporal punishment to women, children and the elderly, regardless of age. She also said that the Finns shot young guys before leaving Petrozavodsk and that her sister was saved simply by a miracle. According to available Finnish documents, only seven men were shot for attempting to escape or other crimes. During the conversation, it turned out that the Sobolev family was one of those who were taken from Zaonezhye. It was difficult for Soboleva’s mother and her six children. Claudia said that their cow was taken away from them, they were deprived of the right to receive food for a month, then, in the summer of 1942, they were transported on a barge to Petrozavodsk and assigned to concentration camp number 6, in the 125th barrack. The mother was immediately taken to the hospital. Claudia recalled with horror the disinfection carried out by the Finns. People burned out in the so-called bathhouse, and then they were doused with cold water. The food was bad, the food was spoiled, the clothes were unusable.

Only at the end of June 1944 were they able to leave the barbed wire of the camp. There were six Sobolev sisters: 16-year-old Maria, 14-year-old Antonina, 12-year-old Raisa, nine-year-old Claudia, six-year-old Evgenia and very little Zoya, she was not yet three years old.

Worker Ivan Morekhodov spoke about the attitude of the Finns towards the prisoners: “There was little food, and it was bad. The baths were terrible. The Finns showed no pity.”

In a Finnish concentration camp

Auschwitz (Auschwitz)

Photos of 14-year-old Czeslava Kvoka

Photos of 14-year-old Czeslava Kwoka, provided State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau were taken by Wilhelm Brasse, who worked as a photographer at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where about 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, died from repression during World War II. In December 1942, a Polish Catholic woman, Czeslawa, originally from the town of Wolka Zlojecka, was sent to Auschwitz along with her mother. Three months later they both died. In 2005, photographer (and fellow prisoner) Brasset described how he photographed Czeslava: “She was so young and so scared. The girl did not understand why she was here and did not understand what was being said to her. And then the kapo (prison guard) took a stick and hit her in the face. This German woman simply took out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful, young and innocent creature. She cried, but could not do anything. Before being photographed, the girl wiped tears and blood from her broken lip. Frankly, I felt as if I had been beaten, but I could not intervene. It would have ended fatally for me."

Great Patriotic War left an indelible mark on the history and destinies of people. Many lost loved ones who were killed or tortured. In the article we will look at the Nazi concentration camps and the atrocities that happened on their territories.

What is a concentration camp?

A concentration camp or concentration camp is a special place intended for the detention of persons of the following categories:

political prisoners (opponents of the dictatorial regime);
prisoners of war (captured soldiers and civilians).

Nazi concentration camps became notorious for their inhuman cruelty to prisoners and impossible conditions of detention. These places of detention began to appear even before Hitler came to power, and even then they were divided into women's, men's and children's. Mainly Jews and opponents of the Nazi system were kept there.

Life in the camp

Humiliation and abuse for prisoners began from the moment of transportation. People were transported in freight cars, where there was not even running water or a fenced-off latrine. Prisoners had to relieve themselves publicly, in a tank standing in the middle of the carriage.

But this was only the beginning; a lot of bullying and torment were prepared for the concentration camps of fascists who were undesirable to the Nazi regime. Torture of women and children, medical experiments, aimless exhausting work - this is not the whole list.

The conditions of detention can be judged from the prisoners’ letters: “they lived in hellish conditions, ragged, barefoot, hungry... I was constantly and severely beaten, deprived of food and water, tortured...”, “They shot me, flogged me, poisoned me with dogs, drowned me in water, beat me to death.” with sticks and starvation. They were infected with tuberculosis... suffocated by a cyclone. Poisoned with chlorine. They burned..."

The skin was removed from the corpses and the hair was cut off - all this was then used in textile industry Germany. The doctor Mengele became famous for his horrific experiments on prisoners, at whose hands thousands of people died. He studied mental and physical exhaustion of the body. He conducted experiments on twins, during which they received organ transplants from each other, blood transfusions, and sisters were forced to give birth to children from their own brothers. Performed sex reassignment surgery.

All fascist concentration camps became famous for such abuses; we will consider the names and conditions of detention in the main ones below.

Camp diet

Typically, the daily ration in the camp was as follows:

bread - 130 gr;
fat - 20 g;
meat - 30 g;
cereal - 120 gr;
sugar - 27 gr.

Bread was handed out, and the rest of the products were used for cooking, which consisted of soup (issued 1 or 2 times a day) and porridge (150 - 200 grams). It should be noted that such a diet was intended only for working people. Those who, for some reason, remained unemployed received even less. Usually their portion consisted of only half a portion of bread.

List of concentration camps in different countries

Fascist concentration camps were created in the territories of Germany, allied and occupied countries. There are a lot of them, but let’s name the main ones:

In Germany - Halle, Buchenwald, Cottbus, Dusseldorf, Schlieben, Ravensbrück, Esse, Spremberg;
Austria - Mauthausen, Amstetten;
France - Nancy, Reims, Mulhouse;
Poland - Majdanek, Krasnik, Radom, Auschwitz, Przemysl;
Lithuania - Dimitravas, Alytus, Kaunas;
Czechoslovakia - Kunta Gora, Natra, Hlinsko;
Estonia - Pirkul, Pärnu, Klooga;
Belarus - Minsk, Baranovichi;
Latvia - Salaspils.

And this is far from full list all concentration camps that were built by Nazi Germany in the pre-war and war years.

Salaspils

Salaspils, one might say, is the most terrible Nazi concentration camp, because in addition to prisoners of war and Jews, children were also kept there. It was located on the territory of occupied Latvia and was the central eastern camp. It was located near Riga and operated from 1941 (September) to 1944 (summer).

Children in this camp were not only kept separately from adults and exterminated en masse, but were used as blood donors for German soldiers. Every day, about half a liter of blood was taken from all children, which led to the rapid death of donors.

Salaspils was not like Auschwitz or Majdanek (extermination camps), where people were herded into gas chambers and then their corpses were burned. It was used for medical research, which killed more than 100,000 people. Salaspils was not like other Nazi concentration camps. Torture of children was a routine activity here, carried out according to a schedule with the results carefully recorded.

Experiments on children

Testimony of witnesses and results of investigations revealed the following methods of extermination of people in the Salaspils camp: beating, starvation, arsenic poisoning, injection hazardous substances(most often for children), performing surgical operations without painkillers, pumping out blood (only for children), executions, torture, useless hard work (carrying stones from place to place), gas chambers, burying alive. In order to save ammunition, the camp charter prescribed that children should be killed only with rifle butts. The atrocities of the Nazis in the concentration camps surpassed everything that humanity had seen in modern times. Such an attitude towards people cannot be justified, because it violates all conceivable and inconceivable moral commandments.

Children did not stay with their mothers for long and were usually quickly taken away and distributed. Thus, children under six years of age were kept in a special barracks where they were infected with measles. But they did not treat it, but aggravated the disease, for example, by bathing, which is why the children died within 3-4 days. The Germans killed more than 3,000 people in one year in this way. The bodies of the dead were partly burned and partly buried on the camp grounds.

In the Act Nuremberg trials“about the extermination of children” the following numbers were given: during the excavation of only a fifth of the concentration camp territory, 633 bodies of children aged 5 to 9 years, arranged in layers, were discovered; an area soaked in an oily substance was also found, where the remains of unburned children’s bones (teeth, ribs, joints, etc.) were found.

Salaspils is truly the most terrible Nazi concentration camp, because the atrocities described above are not all the tortures that the prisoners were subjected to. Thus, in winter, children brought in barefoot and naked were driven half a kilometer to a barracks, where they had to wash themselves in ice water. After this, the children were driven in the same way to the next building, where they were kept in the cold for 5-6 days. Moreover, the age of the eldest child did not even reach 12 years. Everyone who survived this procedure was also subjected to arsenic poisoning.

Infants were kept separately and given injections, from which the child died in agony within a few days. They gave us coffee and poisoned cereals. About 150 children died from experiments per day. The bodies of the dead were carried out in large baskets and burned, dumped in cesspools, or buried near the camp.

Ravensbrück

If we start listing women's concentration camps fascists, then Ravensbrück will come first. This was the only camp of this type in Germany. It could accommodate thirty thousand prisoners, but by the end of the war it was overcrowded by fifteen thousand. Mostly Russian and Polish women were detained; Jews numbered approximately 15 percent. There were no prescribed instructions regarding torture and torment; the supervisors chose the line of behavior themselves.

Arriving women were undressed, shaved, washed, given a robe and assigned a number. Race was also indicated on clothing. People turned into impersonal cattle. In small barracks (in the post-war years, 2-3 refugee families lived in them) there were approximately three hundred prisoners, who were housed on three-story bunks. When the camp was overcrowded, up to a thousand people were herded into these cells, all of whom had to sleep on the same bunks. The barracks had several toilets and a washbasin, but there were so few of them that after a few days the floors were littered with excrement. Almost all Nazi concentration camps presented this picture (the photos presented here are only a small fraction of all the horrors).

But not all women ended up in the concentration camp; a selection was made beforehand. The strong and resilient, fit for work, were left behind, and the rest were destroyed. Prisoners worked at construction sites and sewing workshops.

Gradually, Ravensbrück was equipped with a crematorium, like all Nazi concentration camps. Gas chambers (nicknamed gas chambers by prisoners) appeared towards the end of the war. Ashes from crematoria were sent to nearby fields as fertilizer.

Experiments were also carried out in Ravensbrück. In a special barracks called the "infirmary", German scientists tested new medicines, pre-infecting or crippling experimental subjects. There were few survivors, but even those suffered from what they had endured until the end of their lives. Experiments were also conducted with irradiating women with X-rays, which caused hair loss, skin pigmentation, and death. Excisions of the genital organs were carried out, after which few survived, and even those quickly aged, and at the age of 18 they looked like old women. Similar experiments were carried out in all Nazi concentration camps; torture of women and children was the main crime of Nazi Germany against humanity.

At the time of the liberation of the concentration camp by the Allies, five thousand women remained there; the rest were killed or transported to other places of detention. The Soviet troops who arrived in April 1945 adapted the camp barracks to accommodate refugees. Ravensbrück later became a base for the deployment of Soviet military units.

Nazi concentration camps: Buchenwald

Construction of the camp began in 1933, near the town of Weimar. Soon, Soviet prisoners of war began to arrive, becoming the first prisoners, and they completed the construction of the “hellish” concentration camp.

The structure of all structures was strictly thought out. Immediately behind the gates began the “Appelplat” (parallel ground), specially designed for the formation of prisoners. Its capacity was twenty thousand people. Not far from the gate there was a punishment cell for interrogations, and opposite there was an office where the camp fuehrer and the officer on duty - the camp authorities - lived. Deeper down were the barracks for prisoners. All barracks were numbered, there were 52 of them. At the same time, 43 were intended for housing, and workshops were set up in the rest.

The Nazi concentration camps left behind a terrible memory; their names still evoke fear and shock in many, but the most terrifying of them is Buchenwald. The most scary place considered a crematorium. People were invited there under the pretext of a medical examination. When the prisoner undressed, he was shot and the body was sent to the oven.

Only men were kept in Buchenwald. Upon arrival at the camp, they were assigned a number German, which had to be learned in the first 24 hours. The prisoners worked at the Gustlovsky weapons factory, which was located a few kilometers from the camp.

Continuing to describe the Nazi concentration camps, let us turn to the so-called “small camp” of Buchenwald.

Small camp of Buchenwald

The “small camp” was the name given to the quarantine zone. The living conditions here were, even compared to the main camp, simply hellish. In 1944, when German troops began to retreat, prisoners from Auschwitz and the Compiegne camp were brought to this camp; they were mainly Soviet citizens, Poles and Czechs, and later Jews. There was not enough space for everyone, so some of the prisoners (six thousand people) were housed in tents. The closer 1945 got, the more prisoners were transported. Meanwhile, the “small camp” included 12 barracks measuring 40 x 50 meters. Torture in Nazi concentration camps was not only specially planned or for scientific purposes, life itself in such a place was torture. 750 people lived in the barracks; their daily ration consisted of a small piece of bread; those who were not working were no longer entitled to it.

Relations among prisoners were tough; cases of cannibalism and murder for someone else's portion of bread were documented. A common practice was to store the bodies of the dead in barracks in order to receive their rations. The dead man's clothes were divided among his cellmates, and they often fought over them. Due to such conditions in the camp there were widespread infectious diseases. Vaccinations only worsened the situation, since injection syringes were not changed.

Photos simply cannot convey all the inhumanity and horror of the Nazi concentration camp. The stories of witnesses are not intended for the faint of heart. In each camp, not excluding Buchenwald, there were medical groups of doctors who conducted experiments on prisoners. It should be noted that the data they obtained allowed German medicine to step far forward - no other country in the world had such a number of experimental people. Another question is whether it was worth the millions of tortured children and women, the inhuman suffering that these innocent people endured.

Prisoners were irradiated, healthy limbs were amputated, organs were removed, and they were sterilized and castrated. They tested how long a person could withstand extreme cold or heat. They were specially infected with diseases and introduced experimental drugs. Thus, an anti-typhoid vaccine was developed in Buchenwald. In addition to typhus, prisoners were infected with smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria, and paratyphoid.

Since 1939, the camp was run by Karl Koch. His wife, Ilse, was nicknamed " the witch of Buchenwald"for his love of sadism and inhuman abuse of prisoners. They feared her more than her husband (Karl Koch) and Nazi doctors. She was later nicknamed "Frau Lampshaded". The woman owed this nickname to the fact that she made various decorative things from the skin of killed prisoners, in particular, lampshades, which she was very proud of. Most of all, she liked to use the skin of Russian prisoners with tattoos on their backs and chests, as well as the skin of gypsies. Things made of such material seemed to her the most elegant.

The liberation of Buchenwald took place on April 11, 1945, at the hands of the prisoners themselves. Having learned about the approach of the allied troops, they disarmed the guards, captured the camp leadership and controlled the camp for two days until American soldiers approached.

Auschwitz (Auschwitz-Birkenau)

When listing Nazi concentration camps, it is impossible to ignore Auschwitz. It was one of the largest concentration camps, in which, according to various sources, from one and a half to four million people died. The exact details of the dead remain unclear. The victims were mainly Jewish prisoners of war, who were exterminated immediately upon arrival in gas chambers.

The concentration camp complex itself was called Auschwitz-Birkenau and was located on the outskirts of the Polish city of Auschwitz, whose name became a household name. The following words were engraved above the camp gate: “Work sets you free.”

This huge complex, built in 1940, consisted of three camps:

Auschwitz I or the main camp - the administration was located here;
Auschwitz II or "Birkenau" - was called a death camp;
Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz.

Initially, the camp was small and intended for political prisoners. But gradually more and more prisoners arrived at the camp, 70% of whom were destroyed immediately. Many tortures in Nazi concentration camps were borrowed from Auschwitz. Thus, the first gas chamber began to function in 1941. The gas used was Cyclone B. The terrible invention was first tested on Soviet and Polish prisoners totaling about nine hundred people.

Auschwitz II began its operation on March 1, 1942. Its territory included four crematoria and two gas chambers. In the same year, medical experiments on sterilization and castration began on women and men.

Small camps gradually formed around Birkenau, where prisoners working in factories and mines were kept. One of these camps gradually grew and became known as Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz. Approximately ten thousand prisoners were held here.

Like any Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz was well guarded. Contacts with the outside world were prohibited, the territory was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and guard posts were set up around the camp at a distance of a kilometer.

Five crematoria operated continuously on the territory of Auschwitz, which, according to experts, had a monthly capacity of approximately 270 thousand corpses.

January 27, 1945 Soviet troops Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was liberated. By that time, approximately seven thousand prisoners remained alive. Such a small number of survivors is due to the fact that about a year earlier, mass murders in gas chambers (gas chambers) began in the concentration camp.

Since 1947, a museum began to function on the territory of the former concentration camp and memorial complex, dedicated to the memory of all those who died at the hands of Nazi Germany.

Conclusion

During the entire war, according to statistics, approximately four and a half million Soviet citizens were captured. These were mostly civilians from the occupied territories. It’s hard to even imagine what these people went through. But it was not only the bullying of the Nazis in the concentration camps that they were destined to endure. Thanks to Stalin, after their liberation, returning home, they received the stigma of “traitors.” The Gulag awaited them at home, and their families were subjected to serious repression. One captivity gave way to another for them. In fear for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, they changed their last names and tried in every possible way to hide their experiences.

Until recently, information about the fate of prisoners after release was not advertised and kept silent. But people who have experienced this simply should not be forgotten.