Lesson 12: Liberation of the Camps

Question 1

• The process of evacuating camps

Answer 1

Concentration Camps continued to be used until the last minute
* Still hoped that the Allied advance could be halted
* Loss of troops + resources → Jewish labor incredibly important
* Large numbers of Hungarian Jews sent to camps in 1944

‘Healthy’ prisoners forced to walk to camps still under control
* Long death marches in freezing weather with little food. Many who were ill or fell were shot and left behind → 15,000
deaths
* Many guards remained to burn warehouses + camp buildings to hide their horrendous crimes

Question 2

• Purpose of evacuating camps

Answer 2

3 Purposes: not want jews to fall in hands of allies as will reveal “ horror truth” of G, maintain armament production, believed could use Jews to negotiate as holding them hostage in return for the Nazi regime to continue in the West

Question 3

Discoveries at liberation of Auschwitz

Answer 3

Germans began to destroy evidence of their crimes

27th Jan: 9000 prisoners at Auschwitz liberated
* At first the camp appeared abandoned, soldiers soon realised they were filled people left to die.
* The survivors greeted the soldiers as their liberators.
* No food, fuel or water left for the prisoners
* Most prisoners = weak, malnourished + ill
* Warehouses full of goods stolen from Jewish inmates
* 40km of eyeglasses, 100s of prosthetic limbs, 12000 pots + pans
* 44,000 pairs of shoes, 3800 suitcases, children’s clothes + toys

Question 4

• Discoveries at liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

Answer 4

• Nothing could have prepared them for what they found; 60,000 in critical conditions starving, sick and brutalised prisoners.
• Thousands of corpses were laying unburied.
• Belsen did not have gas chambers and did not conduct mass executions as were done at Auschwitz and others, but by the end
  of the war it was suffering from a terrible epidemic of typhus and was as deadly as any other camp.
• Many died after liberation due to disease and from the re-introduction of food.

over 500 people died each day as a result of the extremely poor sanitation and widespread

Question 5

• Struggles of Jewish people after liberation.

Answer 5

small percentage of inmates who survived resembled skeletons because of the forced labor and the lack of food,
compounded by months and years of cruel abuse and torment.

• In the first five days following liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 14,000 persons died; another 14,000 succumbed in the following weeks

too weak to recover and digest food resulting in many camp survivors dying. Half of the prisoners
discovered alive in Auschwitz died within a few days of being freed.

rebuilding their lives after the Holocaust was scary. Many tried to return home after liberation
in order to search for missing children, family, their previous community and property

Some returned home feared for their lives again. In Poland more than 1,000 Jews were killed during the first year after
liberation. The postwar pogroms were carried out not by Nazis but by the local populations in various countries. The
largest of these occurred in the town of Kielce in 1946 when Polish rioters killed at least 42 Jews and beat many others.