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From the gates of the Auschwitz memorial complex in Poland, the famous inscription Arbeit Macht Frei - "Work makes you free" has mysteriously disappeared. Unidentified criminals removed the metal part of the gate of the Auschwitz memorial complex ("Auschwitz-Birkenau"), NEWSru Israel reports with reference to the Israeli radio station Kol Israel.
It remains unclear how the iron inscription Arbeit Macht Frei, which is one of the symbols of the death camp, was stolen. During the Second World War, the Nazis killed up to one and a half million people here. Museum employees have already reported the theft to the police, RIA Novosti reports.
The police have already investigated the crime scene. The sniffer dog initially took the trail, but lost it near the highway, where the criminals most likely left by car.
The gates of the former concentration camp are constantly monitored by surveillance cameras, but according to available information, they did not record the moment the inscription was stolen, police spokesman Dariusz Nowak said. It is also unclear who and why might need this museum exhibit.
At the entrance to Auschwitz there were several cast-iron inscriptions "Arbeit Macht Frei": one above the main entrance, others on the side gate. Apparently, one of the side inscriptions was stolen.
The theft was discovered in the morning by security officers, who called the police. The thieves, having penetrated the gate and rising to a height of several meters, unscrewed the fasteners that held the tablet with the inscription, and then lowered it to the ground and stole it.
The stolen inscription has so far been one of the main symbols of the museum and its main exhibit, ITAR-TASS reports. By order of the Nazis, it was made in 1940 by Polish political prisoners thrown into a concentration camp.
The police find it difficult to answer whether this crime was the work of non-ferrous metal hunters or the theft has a political connotation. The situation is complicated by the fact that already in January 2010 Poland will celebrate the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by Soviet troops at a broad international level.
Meanwhile, the museum management does not consider the theft of the table with the inscription Arbeit macht frei an accident. "We just can't believe that it was possible to steal such a thing in such a place," says museum spokesman Jaroslav Mensfelt. "It was done by someone who knew very well what he was going to do."
The vandal had to know how to get into the museum, how to find the table and how the guards walk. "The attacker should have been well prepared," the spokesman added.
A saying that has acquired an ominous meaning
Arbeit Macht Frei is the title of a novel by the German nationalist writer Lorenz Diefenbach, published in Vienna in 1872. The phrase eventually became popular in nationalist circles.
In 1928, it was adopted by the government of the Weimar Republic as a slogan praising the desired policy of massive public works programs to end unemployment. She also parodied the medieval expression "Stadtluft Macht Frei" ("City air frees" - the custom by which a serf who has lived in the city long enough becomes free). When the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) came to power in 1933, it continued to use this slogan.
As a slogan, this catchphrase was placed at the entrance of many Nazi concentration camps - either in mockery or to give false hope. Despite the fact that the use of inscriptions of this type over the entrances to various institutions was common in Germany, this particular slogan was placed on the orders of SS General Theodor Eicke, head of the German concentration camp system and commandant of the Dachau concentration camp.
The largest concentration camp
During World War II, columns of prisoners from the Auschwitz concentration camp went to work every day under the slogan "Work sets you free" and to the sound of a symphony orchestra.
In the years 1940-1945 "Auschwitz-Birkenau" in Auschwitz was the largest Nazi concentration camp of mass extermination of people during the Second World War. It is located 70 kilometers from Krakow, in southern Poland.
The camp was created on the orders of Himmler on April 27, 1940. Starting from June 14, 1940, transports with political prisoners and Poles from overcrowded prisons began to arrive here.
The Birkenau camp was divided into several zones and sectors. The total number of prisoners in August 1944 reached over 100 thousand people. There was no water in the camp, the prisoners lived in terrible sanitary conditions.
On the territory of the camp, the Nazis built four crematoria with gas chambers and two temporary gas chambers, as well as pits and fire pits.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was a place of mass extermination of people - primarily Jews - from Poland, the USSR, Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Greece, Holland, Yugoslavia, Norway, Romania, Italy, Hungary.
In the spring of 1942, the first experiments on the use of Zyklon-B gas were started on Soviet prisoners and sick prisoners. First, the corpses were buried, and later they were burned in crematoria and specially dug trenches. The prisoners were also subjected to pseudo-medical experiments.
From the word "Buchenwald" goosebumps go down the spine, many are familiar with it from school lessons, where they showed photographs of the chronicles of those years, which depict ovens filled with human bones and people who look more like living skeletons.
On the gates of this concentration camp was written in large metal letters: "Jedem das Seine", which in Russian means - "To each his own." The inscription was located so that it was read from the inside. With this, the fascists emphasized that their destiny was to dominate and command, and the lot of everyone else was to be slaves. It is difficult to imagine a more mocking inscription.
Buchenwald was located in Germany, not far from the city of Weimar (Weimar)
More facts about Buchenwald
Each prisoner had a set of numbers instead of a name. It was necessary to learn how to pronounce the number in German in a day.
Over the prisoners were made medical experiments. Vaccines were tested on people, infecting them with tuberculosis and typhus, and hormonal experiments were carried out.
Not all corpses were disposed of, some were used to make souvenirs and leather goods.
After the victory in 1945, the territory of Buchenwald passed to the USSR, a branch of the Gulag was opened there, many more people died, and only in 1950 the victims stopped.
Now this place is a museum, a memorial complex, a center for the study of Nazism.
In 1936, the beloved Olympic Games are held in the capital of Germany, embodying the unity of peoples from all continents of the globe. Simultaneously with this peaceful event in every sense, one of the largest and most terrible concentration camps of the Third Reich, Sachsenhausen, is being created. It was located north of Berlin in the city. According to some estimates, up to 200 thousand prisoners have been here in different years. From 30 to 40 thousand people died outside the gates of this camp. Let's see how this place looks now and get to know its history better.
After Sachsenhausen, which was built "thanks" to Heinrich Himmler, a whole era of concentration camps began. They began to appear everywhere: Buchenwald near Weimar, the Ravensbrück women's camp near Furstenberg, Auschwitz (Auschwitz) in Poland, and many others.
In Sachsenhausen, there was also the central administration of the concentration camps of the entire Third Reich. In addition, the SS training center was located here, from where "first-class" guards and warders were produced.
Entrance to the territory of the camp, and now the memorial complex, is free. If you wish, you can take an audio guide at the information center (2-3 euros).
We approach the so-called Tower "A". The checkpoint and commandant's office of the camp were also located here.
The territory of the camp represented the shape of a triangle. 19 observation towers were installed along the entire perimeter.
Directly in front of the checkpoint, there was an apel-platz of checks, on which not only prisoners were lined up for roll calls, but also public executions were carried out.
If a prisoner came too close to a live barbed wire fence, he was simply shot.
The so-called shoe test track was also located here. The prisoners had to overcome colossal distances at different paces every day.
The "residential" barracks were also preserved. Now they serve as museum premises.
At the exposition, even drawings of prisoners can be found.
Various household items, documents, etc.
There is a heavy atmosphere everywhere. The air seems to be charged with negative energy. Even my head starts to ache.
This is felt most strongly in Barrack "C", where the massacres were carried out. There was also a crematorium and a gas chamber.
We went to the cell. It also served as a bomb shelter.
Monument to Soviet soldiers-liberators.
The camp was liberated on April 22, 1945 by Soviet troops. Immediately after his release, he was transformed into a special camp No. 7 of the NKVD. Now the enemies of the Soviet regime (soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht, anti-communists, SS men) were dying here. Sometimes old men, women and children fell under the status of criminals. During the existence of the special camp, more than 60,000 people have been here, of which 12,000 have died. The numbers are no less shocking.
Arbeit macht frei (Arbeit macht frei, "Work sets you free", "work sets you free") - it is this well-known phrase, associated with the massacres in Nazi Germany, that "flaunts" on the gates of the checkpoint. This phrase can be found in many "institutions" of this type.
Last year (on my website) I spoke in sufficient detail about an even more terrible place - about
The history of Auschwitz, a small town located sixty kilometers west of Krakow, did not stand out in any way among the annals of other settlements in Poland until January 1945. During the Vistula-Oder operation, Soviet troops reached the lines set by order, occupying the area of Auschwitz and Birkenau (the names adopted by the Germans after the seizure of the territory in 1939). What the soldiers saw shocked them.
No, it was not the very fact of the existence of the death camp that caused confusion among Soviet soldiers and officers. Some of our military men knew, sometimes from their own life experience, that there were institutions of a similar profile in the USSR, and not only in Kolyma. The shock was caused by the pedantry and systematic nature of the process of mass deprivation of life. The cynical inscription on the gates of Auschwitz read: "Work makes you free." Everything was put on a broad industrial footing, the belongings of the murdered prisoners were added up systematically. Toothbrushes, shoes, suitcases, cut hair (they were used to insulate the strong hulls of submarines), suits, dresses and much more were sorted and loaded into separate storage facilities. Behind the crematorium, the Soviet military discovered a whole lake, but instead of water, it was filled with human fat. The ashes served as fertilizer for agricultural land. As it turned out later, there were several such camps in fascist Germany, and each of them had its own “slogan”. For example, over the gates of Buchenwald it was inscribed: "To each his own."
General information about the organization
The camp was sensibly set up in German. Part of it was even used by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs for about two years after its release for its intended purpose. The history of this place of mass extermination of "subhumans" began in 1939, after part of the Polish territory became part of the Reich. The rest of the occupied lands, for the most part, throughout the war retained the status of occupied. In May 1940, work began here with the aim of rebuilding the old barracks of the Polish (and earlier Austro-Hungarian) army in order to isolate "undesirable elements" such as Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, resistance members, etc. Second floors were built on, locals were evicted residents, special-purpose buildings appeared. Since February 1942, new prisoners appeared in the camp - Soviet prisoners of war, mostly political workers. A reliable barbed wire fence was erected, to which high voltage was applied, and at the same time an inscription appeared on the gates of Auschwitz. Actually, there was not one camp here, but a whole network, which included three main camps, divided, in turn, into subdivisions. Each category of prisoners was kept separately, with the exception of those whose labor could not be profitably used. These were destroyed immediately.
So, constantly expanding and improving technology, the largest concentration camp in the Third Reich, Auschwitz, increased productivity. The death factory worked at full capacity, its crematoria did not always cope with the load, and then the corpses were burned in ditches. Every day, several echelons with “human material” entered the gates, filtration was immediately carried out, and those who were of no value were waiting for the gas chambers commissioned in 1943.
Performance
The inscription on the gates of Auschwitz fully corresponded to its murderously troublesome nature. It really took a lot of work. All the hard and dirty work was done by the prisoners themselves, and six thousand guards from the SS division "Dead Head" only guarded and kept order. The furnaces interrupted their work for three hours a day - at this time the ashes were unloaded from them. There were 46 of them in total, 30 in the first two crematoria and 16 more in the “second stage”. The total average productivity was eight thousand burned corpses per day.
It was not easy to estimate the number of victims of this death factory, the Nazis tried to hide the scale of the crime. Even the camp commandant had no idea about the number of people killed by him, naming an approximate figure of two and a half million during the Nuremberg trials. According to the historian J. Weller, more than 1.6 million prisoners entered the gates of Auschwitz and did not return, of which 1.1 million were Jews.
medical experiments
It was here that the sinister Dr. Mengele conducted his research. Under his leadership, other doctors, who without any stretch can be called killer doctors, did unthinkable things with the prisoners. They infected prisoners with deadly viruses, performed amputations and abdominal operations without anesthesia, just for training. Experiments were conducted on the mass deprivation of childbearing functions by irradiation, sterilization and castration. The effects of chemicals on the body, the consequences of freezing, and many other anti-human experiments were studied. Most fanatics suffered a well-deserved punishment. The first commandant of the camp, R. Hess, hoped to escape retribution by surrendering to the allies, but was handed over by the British to the Poles. He was hanged near crematorium No. 1 in 1947. Well, to each his own.
History with an inscription
Collectors are strange people, in their passion they sometimes violate the boundaries of reason. Who could have imagined that some of them were haunted by the inscription on the gates of Auschwitz, which has become an open-air museum? However, at the end of 2009, she disappeared. Five people took part in the theft: they cut off a fragment of the fence and sawed it into pieces. The customer of the crime was a certain Swedish citizen, who has so far managed to avoid responsibility. How much he promised to pay the performers remains a mystery to this day.
After the restoration, the famous ominous inscription will take its place in the museum exposition of Auschwitz, they will not put it in its place.
Weimar is a city in Germany where J. Goethe, F. Schiller, F. Liszt, J. Bach and other outstanding people of this country were born and lived. They turned a provincial town into a German center of culture. And in 1937, highly cultured Germans built a concentration camp nearby for their ideological opponents: communists, anti-fascists, socialists and others objectionable to the regime.
The inscription on the gates of Buchenwald, translated from German, meant “to each his own”, and the word “Buchenwald” itself literally means “beech forest”. The camp was built for especially dangerous criminals. Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Slavs, mulattoes and other racially "inferior" people, "subhumans", appeared later. The true Aryans invested in the term "subhuman" that this is a likeness of a person, which is spiritually much lower than the beast. This is a source of unbridled passions, the desire to destroy everything around, primitive envy and meanness, not covered by anything. But the most important thing is that these are not individuals of some people, but entire nations and even races. The Nazis believed that as a result the most degenerate people on Earth began to rule the country, and the communists were born criminals. After the attack on the USSR, Soviet prisoners began to enter the camp, but almost all of them were shot.
So, in a few days in September 1941, 8483 people were killed. At first, there was no record of Soviet prisoners, so it is impossible to establish how many people were shot in total. The reason for the shootings is trivial. The International Red Cross could supply prisoners of war with parcels from home, but the USSR had to give lists of those who were taken prisoner, and no one needed the prisoners. Therefore, by the spring of 1942, 1.6 million Soviet prisoners remained, and in 1941 there were 3.9 million of them. The rest were killed, died of starvation, disease, and froze to death in the cold.
Documents were announced according to which the Nazis were going to exterminate the population in the occupied territories: 50% in Ukraine, 60% in Belarus, up to 75% in Russia, the rest were supposed to work for the Nazis. In September 1941, Soviet prisoners of war appeared in Germany. They were immediately forced to work, including in military factories. Professional soldiers and patriots did not want to work for the enemy. Those who refused were sent to concentration camps. And for them the inscription on the gates of Buchenwald was intended. The weak and professionally unfit were destroyed, and the rest were forced to work.
You work - you are fed, you do not work - you are hungry. And so that the “non-humans” would understand, the inscription on the gates of Buchenwald was made so that it could be read from the inside, the Nazis did what they wanted. For example, the wife of the head of the camp, Elsa Koch, selected newcomers with interesting tattoos and made lampshades, purses, etc. from their skin, and gave written advice to her friends - the wives of the guards of other camps - on this procedure. The heads of some of the dead were dried to the size of folded fists. Doctors tested anti-frostbite, typhoid, tuberculosis and plague vaccines on people. They conducted medical experiments, organized epidemics and tested means of dealing with them. They pumped out blood for the wounded, and not 300 - 400 grams, but all at once. Describe even part of the horrors that the prisoners experienced,
The inscription on the gates of Buchenwald must be perceived taking into account the high level of education of German society. For him, only the Aryans were people, and all the rest were subhuman, “untermensch”, they were not even people, but only looked like people. Their fate with the complete victory of National Socialism is only slavery and life in the position of working cattle. And no democracy. This is the idea from which the inscription on the gates of Buchenwald was born. From the beginning of April 1945, under the leadership of an underground international resistance organization, the prisoners ceased to be subordinate to the camp administration. And two days later, having heard the cannonade from the west, the camp rose in revolt. Having broken the live barbed wire fences in many places, the prisoners seized the barracks of the SS guards and almost 800 guards. Most were shot or torn apart by hand, and 80 people were taken prisoner. On April 11, at 15:15, a battalion of Americans occupied the self-liberated camp. They restored the fence, herded the prisoners into the barracks and ordered them to hand over their weapons. Only a battalion of Soviet prisoners did not hand over their weapons. On April 13, the gates of Buchenwald opened wide open - Soviet troops entered the camp. This is the end of Hitler's history of Buchenwald. Of the 260,000 people who ended up in the camp, the Germans killed almost 60,000. In total, almost 12 million people were killed in German concentration camps during the Second World War.
