Which troops liberated auschwitz

Back at Auschwitz, where by some estimates 9, prisoners remained, only a few SS guards maintained their watch. Most of the prisoners were too sick to move. Among the last acts of the SS were to set fire to huge piles of camp documents, a last-ditch effort to hide the evidence.

A surreal quiet fell on Auschwitz in late January, a period filled with confusion and suffering. Then, Soviet scouts stumbled into Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The liberators had not intended to go toward the camp; though Soviet premier Joseph Stalin had heard about its existence in intelligence communications and conversations with other Allied leaders, Red Army commanders had no idea it existed. The Soviets had liberated Majdanek, a Nazi concentration and extermination camp, in July There, they found a working camp that had been only partially destroyed during its hasty evacuation.

It was the first Allied concentration camp liberation, and in the months to follow, the Allies would encounter many more camps as they squeezed the German army from the West and the East. As Soviet scouts, then troops, arrived at the Auschwitz complex, bewildered prisoners greeted them with tears and embraces.

Anna Polshchikova, a Russian prisoner, later recalled the gruff confusion of the first soldiers. We were baffled and did not know what to say. We looked wretched and pathetic, so they relented and asked again, in a kinder tone. The first Soviet troops to arrive moved on toward other targets, but the Red Army soon took over the camps, establishing field hospitals on site.

Polish Red Cross workers—volunteer doctors, nurses and paramedics who just months earlier had participated in the Warsaw Uprising—assisted in the recovery too. Survivors suffered from malnutrition, bedsores, frostbite, gangrene, typhus, tuberculosis and other ailments. And though the SS had attempted to destroy all evidence of mass murder, they had left massive storerooms filled with shoes, dishes, suitcases, and human hair.

They diagnosed patients, gave them identification documents and clothing, and sent over 7, letters to help the patients locate family and friends around the world. At least of the 4, patients died, many from refeeding syndrome or a lack of sanitary facilities.

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