First Proof of the Holocaust
from magazine "World War II"

Unknown to the world at this time, January 1942, the Russian soldiers liberated the Ukranian city of Kerch where they found unprecedented, the bodies of 7,000 Jews who had been recently murdered, and piled into an anti-tank ditch.  This was termed to be the first of what was to be mind numbing repetitive scenes of pure mass murder. From this time on, Soviet photographers and journalists were mandated to record the documentation of enemy atrocities of the “Nazi Beast”.
 

Again on July 24, 1944, the Soviets liberated the city of Lublin in Poland, where a camp named Majdanek was located.  Here it took researchers and journalists three weeks to make sense of what had happened here.
 

Yet after reading about these staggering crimes of the past for 2 ½ years, the Soviet people, and their western allies – were not prepared for Majdanek.
 

Once gas chambers and crematoria were built in 1942 through the end of 1943,  Jews were deported by the trainload to Majdenek, sent into innocent looking showers, which were quickly converted to dispensing Zyklon-B gas, and the bodies disposed of through the crematoria. Never to be seen or heard of again !!
 

On November 3^rd 1943, Special Police and SS units shot and killed 18,000 Jews, just outside of the Camp,  in an operation called “Operation Harvest Festival”, the Holocaust’s largest, single day, single site massacre. The bodies were buried in pits or cremated, and their ashes consigned to these pits also. Shortly before the arrival of Soviet troops, investigators estimated that 400,000 Jews and  1.5 million other human beings were murdered at Majdanek. 

In the ensuing days, the Soviet published photos along with their stories, and these stories were received with reservation. Too gruesome to believe this, if it were true, some Soviet papers refused to publish this material, as they thought that it was Army Propaganda.  Nor would they disseminate this material over the International News networks, as the editors throughout Europe and America felt likewise that it was just Propaganda published by the Russian Army. Western journalists struggled to convince their editors and readers that these initial accounts were true.

Soviet Troops continued to push the Axis forces westward.  Budapest and Warsaw fell and were  liberated  in late January 1945, Vienna in April, and, after a searing battle that killed upwards of 350,000 people, Berlin fell in early May 1945.  By that time the Soviets had reached all six of the extermination camps.  The swift advance of the Soviets in July 1944, had prompted Majdanek’s administration to flee after destroying any evidence of its primary function, but the other Camps liberated that July – Belzec,  Sobibor, and Treblinka, had been razed, so as to leave little trace of what had occurred there. On 25 January 1945, the Soviet troops reached a fifth Camp, Chelmno, which had also been dismantled, leaving only Auschwitz as the only other extermination Camp which was found intact.
 

Auschwicz had something Majdenek mostly lacked:  Survivors.  Where Majdenek had a few hundred prisoners, Auschwitz had thousands of Prisoners, and these were then marched on ‘death marches’ to Buchenwald,  Ravensbruk or Bergen-Belsen.
 

Through the voices of these Survivors, from Auschwicz, and Majdenek eventually came these synonymous stories of the fate of the millions of Jews that had perished before them, under the administration of the Nazi regime. 

The Anniversary of Auschwicz’s Liberation is now “International Holocaust Remembrance Day”. 

Yet the liberation of Auschwicz in January 1943,  did not fully convince Westerners that Germany had built and operated facilities, explicitly for the industrial scale murder to eliminate all of the Jews of the world.
 

It was not until the discovery of Buchenwald, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen on 16 April 1945, that the Allies became convinced that Majdanek,  Auschwicz,  Belzec, Sobibor,  Chelmno and Treblinka were also giant murder factories.
 

“May We Never Forget These Atrocities”