Warbird Information Exchange

Tomorrow several of Europe's leaders will visit Auschwitz to remember and reflect on the day that Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by the Red Army.

The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau—as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Located in German-occupied Poland, Auschwitz consisted of three camps including a killing center. The camps were opened over the course of nearly two years, 1940-1942. Auschwitz closed in January 1945 with its liberation by the Soviet army.

Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million died. The death toll includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 other Europeans. Those not gassed died of starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during so-called medical experiments.

We are near, Lord,
near and at hand.
Handled already, Lord,
clawed and clawing as though
the body of each of us were
your body, Lord.
Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.

Don’t try to convince yourself
That this can be forgiven.
Don’t try to convince yourself
That in the most beautiful
buildings raised,
This evil can be forgotten.
See, already the face of the world
Is crooked, monkey-wrinkled.
Hear, already one can’t
comprehend
The other’s tongue.
Behold, higher and higher they build
The tower of devastation.
Go and see
If the face of the world reveals
A single sign of gentle yiddishkayt.
Read the books and gape:
Erased are
All the letters of mercy
All the letters of the book.

Aerial Photographs of Auschwitz

"Aerial photographs of Auschwitz taken by the Allied Air Forces during World War II were first exposed in 1978 by Dino Brugioni and Robert Poirer, two aerial photo-analysts who worked for the CIA. Using historical research material, they re-analyzed aerial photographs housed in the Defense Intelligence Agency Archives in Washington. Yad Vashem was able to acquire copies of some of these photographs in 1980 with Elie Wiesel’s help, and when former US president Carter visited Israel in that same year, he brought copies of the original film reels. The Allied Air Forces came to the Auschwitz area because of the important war industry located in this region of Upper Silesia (Polish territory which was annexed to the Third Reich in 1939). In early 1944, there were intelligence reports of a giant fuel and artificial rubber factory in Monowitz. On 4 April 1944, a Mosquito plane from 60 Photo Recon Squadron of the South African Air Force flew out of Foggia base in Southern Italy to photograph the factory. It was the IG Farben factory at Monowitz, only 4km from Birkenau. In order to ensure complete coverage of the target, it was common practice to start the camera rolling ahead of time, and stop it slightly over time. As a result, the Auschwitz camp was photographed for the first time. During that same period, the Allies had commenced planning a comprehensive attack on the German fuel industry, and the Monowitz factory was high up on the list of targets. On 31 May, a second plane from 60 Squadron was sent to the area. This time, it also took three photographs of Birkenau from an altitude of 26,000ft, although the photo-analysts did not identify the camp. The photographs from this sortie show us the camp as it looked 3 days after the arrival of the deportation documented in the Auschwitz Album.

For various operational reasons, the bombing of the Monowitz factory was delayed but the Allied air forces continued to gather intelligence information about this factory and other installations in the area. The South African Mosquito planes photographed the factory and parts of the camp complex on 26 June, 25 August and 8 September.

Meanwhile, the US Army Air force also started carrying out sorties in the area. The first American sortie to the Auschwitz area was carried out on 8 July by an F-5 Lightning plane from the 5th Photographic Reconnaissance Group of the 15th US Air force, operating from Bari. The information gathered in this sortie and in the British sorties, was used to plan the first bombing mission of the Monowitz factory on 20 August, in which the factory was damaged, but was not destroyed. The second bombing mission was carried out on 13 September, and the photographs taken during the bombing by B-24 bombers of the 464th Bombardment Group include a photograph showing bombs being dropped over Birkenau. Afterwards, further sorties were carried out to estimate the damage, and the Germans’ progress with its repair. The 5th Photographic Reconnaissance Group’s Lightning planes also flew over the Auschwitz area on 29 November, 21 December, and finally on 14 January 1945 – only two weeks before the liberation of the camp by the Soviet Army.

It should be noted that the photo analysts never realized the significance of Birkenau, although Camp III, which was next to the IG Farben factory was identified as a concentration camp."


B-24 bombers of the 464th Bombardment Group. You'll notice bombs dropping in the upper middle of this photo.


An aerial reconnaissance photograph showing Auschwitz III (Monowitz) and the IG Farben 'Buna' plant May 31 1944.


An aerial reconnaissance photograph showing Auschwitz-Birkenau up above IG Farben 'Buna' plant May 31 1944.


Auschwitz left Crematorium 2&3 and on the right Crematorium 4&5.



Author Seymour Joseph wrote this poem in 1955, after his visit to Auschwitz.

This ground has kept its secret.
As a sheet covers a corpse so time and grass
have conspired to mask the crimes committed here.
The earthen mouth that devoured the dead
is now green-blanketed with daisy patches.
Yet we know. We know from the rusting
barbed wire fences, the squalid barracks,
the brick wall chipped with bullet holes,
the showers, the ovens, a mountain of shoes:
men’s shoes, women’s shoes, children’s shoes,
work shoes, dress shoes, black, brown, white,
worn and new.
Outside the flowers and sweetened breeze
belie what went before.
Our guide, older than his years, when bidding us goodbye
his eyes welled up with tears
and through his quivering lips he said,
“No more of this, no more.”

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“Knowing what’s right, doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right.”

Thanks for this, Mark. Good of you.

Very interesting Mark. Thanks. Never forget

_________________
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone!

Thank you Mark, a very important subject.

Although I appreciate the kind words as always, I wish this thread never needed to be posted.

The knowledge that I have and the research I have done regarding the history of humans inhumane treatment of other humans has left me heart broken and filled with sorrow that has scarred me all my life. Not one day goes by that I do not spend time thinking about human suffering.

Of all my years being a student of history and of all the countless tragic events I have spent countless hours studying, nothing grips my soul more than the loss of innocent human beings at such an enormous scale that the Second World War produced.

I've watched the series below so many times I can almost recite the whole series by memory. For any of you young people who haven't heard of it or seen it, I encourage you to look the series up on youtube or somewhere else and watch it. It's about as good a WWII series as you'll find.

The World at War (TV Series 1973–1976)
A groundbreaking 26-part documentary series narrated by the actor Laurence Olivier about the deadliest conflict in history, World War II




................................Never forget ....

_________________
“Knowing what’s right, doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right.”

Lest we forget.
Like many of you, I'd bet, I've always wondered what the allies really knew about these places. It's known that a few people escaped from them and got back to the allies to witness the horror of these Nazi-run camps. I've always suspected the Allies didn't really get the scope of this, as it must have been tough to think any supposedly 'civilized' people could do something this vast and horrific. It would have been easy to think the stories were worse than they were, to motivate the Allies into liberating specific places quicker.
Prior to the larger camps being liberated, how could the rank and file Allied soldier think this was even going on?
I have talked with GI vets who have all told me, to a man, that they had no clue until they either saw it for themselves or talked with a friend they trusted who'd seen it in person. A few vets told me they assumed it was propaganda (in most cases, because they just didn't think it was even possible to get an entire nation behind something like that) and they were just as shocked as any civilians to find out the scope of what the Nazis did.
I need to look into if there are any good books that go into what the Allied chain of command really knew about the Holocaust before these camps were liberated.

Keep in mind, "concentration camp" was a common term for places other than this. After the horrors were discovered in these camps, that term then exclusively applied to the places like this (much like "D-Day" used to mean the first day of any invasion, but after June 6, 1944, it meant only the Normandy landings).

You and me, both, Mark.
But as time goes by and memories fade, people are going to forget.
Heck, they're doing so already.
In November I did a presentation to a high school group about war correspondents in WW2 and to my shock, found a few of them really had never even heard of this. Yeah, they knew the word, and they knew 'something' happened to people the Germans didn't like, but that was the depth of their understanding. They had no idea of the numbers, how large of an area they'd come from to be killed, and the various groups that made up the numbers (a few of them only seemed angry at the concept when I told them homosexuals were among those slaughtered in the Holocaust).
Scarier still, I'll never forget the reaction of a group of men in Belgium several years ago when discussing the "Gypsy problem," when one said, "If [Hitler] had started and stopped [the Holocaust] with the Gypsies, there's be a statue of the man in every town in Europe today."
To this day, that sends a cold chill up my spine...

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Life member, 91st BG Memorial Association
Owner, 1944 Willys MB #366014
Former REMF (US Army, O3)

^ Well said ...

Below is sadly an example of warped loyalty to the bitter end.

"I know this is off-topic but I feel the need of sharing this negative heritage of WW2. This guy is Mr. Kohler, he was a member of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. Think he was 17 or 18 in 1944 when he fought in Normandy, so he was about 6 when Hitler came to power. Through his youth he was indoctrinated by the Nazi ideas ...... but .... the second photo shows him in 2016, wearing a beret sporting a large SS Death's Head skull. Proof that he hadn't learn anything in the years after 1945. If he had any sympathy for the victims of the Nazi regime he wouldn't show this sign which caused so much havoc and fear .... sad that such people are around."

_________________
“Knowing what’s right, doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right.”