On January 27, 1945, forces from the 107th Division of the 60th Army of the Red Army approached the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp complex, about 60 km (37 miles) west of Krakow, Poland. It is said that Major Anatoly Shapiro, commander of the 106th Rifle Corps whose unit broke through to the complex, opened the outer gate of the Auschwitz 1 camp. It's impossible to know if the Jewish Major Shapiro was indeed the first liberator, since there were several camps operating at Auschwitz, but for approximately 7,000 prisoners – unfortunate human skeletons – that day became their long-awaited day of liberation.
Many of them died in the following days from exhaustion and disease, even though four days later, two Red Army field hospitals were sent to the complex. But liberation came too late not only for them – but also for the hundreds of thousands murdered at Auschwitz in the months preceding liberation. Therefore, one must ask the painful question: Why didn't the Soviet Union end the operation of the Nazis' largest death factory half a year earlier, in summer 1944?
Most researchers of World War II history believe that from a military perspective, Auschwitz could have been liberated many months before January 1945.
"There is no dispute that had such a decision been made, the Soviets could have ended the horror of Auschwitz earlier," states Dr. Yaakov Falkov, a historian from Tel Aviv University. "Starting from late June 1944, the Soviets conducted a very large offensive operation, Operation Bagration, during which they destroyed the German Army Group Center, reclaimed Belarus territories, and positioned themselves on the Soviet border from before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. They were dozens of kilometers away from the Nazi extermination camps in the eastern part of Poland. From an operational standpoint, they could have continued westward into occupied Poland at that time." So what or who prevented them from breaking through another 200 km (124 miles) forward to Auschwitz?
The German lines were breached
Official Russian historians claim that the rapid advance itself made it impossible to continue the offensive. According to them, the forces were worn down, the Red Army's supply lines were stretched beyond reason, and the engines of heavy vehicles required maintenance and replacement. There was also a need to reinforce the military forces because during Lvov-Sandomierz Offensive alone, the Red Army suffered about 65,000 dead, captured, or missing, and another quarter million soldiers were wounded.
"Despite the casualties, the Red Army had no numerical or material problem continuing the attack and exploiting the German casualties and chaos," responds Dr. Falkov. "German defense lines were breached and completely destroyed. The wait of about half a year gave the Germans time to build new defense systems, transfer more forces to the Eastern Front, and make future Soviet advancement more difficult."
The Soviet positioning not far from Auschwitz already in summer 1944 raises another question. "Usually, and rightly so, Britain and the US are asked why they didn't bother to bomb the extermination facilities or at least disable the railway tracks that led to them and were used by the Nazis to transport Jews to the camps," Dr. Falkov reminds us. "But why isn't the same criticism directed at the Soviet Union? Practically speaking, from summer 1944 onward, the Red Army had no difficulty sending its planes to bomb Auschwitz and its access routes, especially since they knew about the place and were aware of what was happening there."
"No data available"
The awareness issue is indeed critical. Historians representing the official Russian position tend to deny that the Soviets knew about Auschwitz in real time, citing as evidence the statements of 107th Infantry Division commander General Vasily Petrenko. After completing his military service, Petrenko became a military historian and researched, among other things, archive documents of the 60th Army, to which his division belonged. Petrenko wrote that "in January 1945, the 60th Army still had no data on Auschwitz, and they received it only during the battles." Petrenko speculated that if the 60th Army commanders had known about the existence of a horrific extermination camp, they would have constructed attack plans differently.
Dr. Falkov does not doubt Petrenko's testimony. The assault units operating in the Auschwitz area in January 1945 indeed did not know about the camp and were not instructed to liberate it. "They were only engaged in operational missions and received no prioritization from commanders to send forces to the camp," confirms Falkov. "This is what allowed the Germans on January 18, 1945, just one day after the Red Army entered Warsaw, to operate freely in the Auschwitz area and even evacuate the majority of remaining prisoners from the camp – 58,000 prisoners deemed fit for work were removed from Auschwitz by the Nazis for death marches, and many were murdered and killed afterwards. The Nazis did this in an orderly fashion, without anyone interfering."
Does Petrenko's testimony explain and whitewash what happened? Not entirely, rules Dr. Falkov, adding, "Even as late as January 1945, the Soviets had not turn their intelligence and knowledge about the Auschwitz complex, its operation and purpose, into something operational for the advancing forces. The combat units of the 60th Army were indeed not equipped with operational intelligence about Auschwitz and did not receive orders to liberate it, but not because Soviet leadership lacked such intelligence, but because the liberation of Jews and saving them from death simply did not interest them and was not a consideration in their eyes."
Moscow collected information
The inevitable conclusion is that decision-makers in Moscow did know about Auschwitz. "First, intelligence units operated in Polish territories on behalf of various Soviet intelligence bodies, from military intelligence to the NKVD (Soviet secret security service)," explains Dr. Falkov. "Additionally, the Ukrainian headquarters of the partisan movement sent its people to Poland. In the second half of 1944, this area was full of Soviet spies and agents, and some knew about and reported on the camps and what was happening in them. Here and there, they even encountered people who had escaped from the camps. Intelligence messages transferred to Moscow in July-August 1944 explicitly reported on Auschwitz and the mass murders within it. I personally located in the archive of the International Institute for Holocaust Research in Washington at least one such document. It describes Auschwitz, and on the report, General Pavel Sudoplatov, head of the Fourth Directorate of NKVD, wrote in his own handwriting the instruction 'to file in the Auschwitz file'."
"The units in the Red Army fighting at the front were not equipped with intelligence about Auschwitz and did not receive orders to liberate it not because Soviet leadership lacked such intelligence, but because the liberation of Jews and saving them from death simply did not interest them and was not a consideration in their eyes."
Dr. Falkov is convinced that the Soviet leadership knew about the extermination camps at Auschwitz long before summer 1944, but despite their knowledge and capability, they never gave the directive to liberate them. "The Soviet leadership had no intention whatsoever to expedite the rescue of Jews, and even when the opportunity presented itself in January 1945, they did not bother to focus the offensive effort on the camp area and did not make it difficult for the Nazis to complete their horrific plans," he emphasizes, adding that the logistical effort of the Germans, which involved establishing Auschwitz and the massive transport of trains to it from all corners of occupied Europe, could not have been missed.
Q: The Soviets had no illusions about Hitler's plans regarding the Jews.
"Correct. In a broader perspective, the Soviet Union was aware of the seriousness of Nazi intentions regarding Jews since 1933. Soviet intelligence identified this as one of the unique and central characteristics of the new Nazi regime and closely followed it with the understanding that this would be a formative motif of Hitler's policy. Intelligence reports to Moscow before the outbreak of World War II explained that the consideration of 'action against the Jews' played an important role in Hitler's decision to invade Poland, and these reports reached all the 'top leaders' – Stalin, Molotov, Bulganin – all of them."
Q: How did this change after the outbreak of World War II?
"Soviet intelligence understood what was happening to the Jews throughout the war and did not hide this knowledge from the leadership. After the German invasion of Poland, tens of thousands of Jews fled from it to the Soviet Union, mainly to the Lvov area. Most were caught by the Soviets near the border, arrested for illegal border crossing, and sent to the Gulag. Even before being sent to the camps, they were thoroughly interrogated by the NKVD to extract information about what was happening in Poland. I dedicated an entire chapter in my research to this obscure affair. The information collected by the NKVD was consolidated and reported upward."
Nevertheless, the lack of Soviet action is attempted to be excused by claiming that the extent of the Jewish extermination by the Nazis only became clear after 1945.
"After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, reports from the field about what was being done to Jews in Nazi-occupied territories reached the Soviet leadership in bulk, and in all of them, to describe the situation, the term 'total extermination' was used. Note that the authors of these reports were Soviet security personnel and functionaries – very tough people who had survived Stalin's great purges, murdered and sent 'enemies of the people' to Gulag camps, but even they had never seen genocide on such a scale and with such cruelty. Even they, people whose hands were stained with blood, were shocked and expressed this shock in their reports.
"The senior ranks in Moscow were updated throughout the entire Nazi occupation period that the Germans were trying to 'finish off' all the Jews. Based on indirect evidence, there is speculation that even in the Warsaw Ghetto, a branch of the NKVD operated, and it certainly reported to Soviet intelligence about the transports from the ghetto. Specifically regarding Auschwitz, I'll mention that a communist underground in Belgium, in cooperation with Polish communists, actually worked to try to thwart the transports of Jews to Auschwitz. This underground was in close contact with Moscow. Could it be that their operators in Moscow didn't know? Even if they didn't know in 1942, they certainly knew in 1944. They knew and did nothing."
The suppression in the Soviet Union
In Petrenko's memoir, written and published after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is noted that the advance order he received on the night of January 26, 1945, included no reference to the mission of liberating the camp. Amazingly, even the two official announcements from the Soviet Union's official information bureau, published in late January 1945, make no mention at all that the liberated place was used for the genocide of the Jewish people.
Zinovy Tolkachev, a Jewish artist who was embedded with Red Army combat units during the war to document the campaign, arrived at Auschwitz around January 27, 1945, and documented the camp's liberation in paintings and drawings. The series of paintings he created was published as a book in Poland after the war and was even sent to the heads of state who fought against Nazi Germany, but in Stalinist Soviet Union, Tolkachev was denounced and persecuted by the authorities as a "bourgeois nationalist."
"Petrenko understood that the authorities were deliberately silencing the tragedy of the Jews because they were Jews, and wrote about this in his book," concludes Dr. Falkov. "He lamented that no order was given to reach the camp earlier to save those who could have been saved. Petrenko understood the reason why he and his Red Army comrades were not sent to liberate Auschwitz and attributed the blame to the antisemitic policy of the Soviet Union."
