Official Auschwitz Records 1940-1944

Another avenue for confirmation exists in the wartime radio intercepts which are known to have been made. British wartime intelligence was eavesdropping on the radio traffic as Auschwitz (and other camps) sent regular reports to the relevant government department in Berlin. These messages were either in plain text or a low-level encrypt and consisted of lists of numbers corresponding to the various prisoner categories.

The following derives from the prisoner records of Auschwitz camp from May 1940 through December 1944 in the Glücks complete Concentration Camp microfilm records now located in the Russian Central Archives, Central State Archives No. 187603, Rolls 281–286, as follows:

Roll 281, 1940: Frames 107–869
Roll 282, 1940–41: Frames 001–875
Roll 283, 1941–42: Frames 001–872
Roll 284 1942–43: Frames 003–862
Roll 285, 1943–44: Frames 019–852
Roll 286, 1945: Frames 001–329.

The Russian microfilms cover all of the concentration camp records from 1935–1945 and the Auschwitz records were compiled from these. Note, however, that each months reportage covers all the camps and there is no such thing as an “Auschwitz file” or a “Bergen-Belsen” or “Mauthausen file.” The Auschwitz material is included in, let us say, the July 1942 file along with other camp entries and compilations.

Figures for some months are unavailable and the summaries given include only the known numbers. In particular, it is not known whether the “ – ” entries represent zero or the statistic is missing.

When the SS evacuated the Auschwitz work camp complex on 15 January 1945, they left a large number of prisoners behind. Many of these were too old or too sick to travel and they were left in their barracks, guarded by a Polish militia that had been raised earlier by Hans Frank. With the approach of the Soviet army in early 1945, these Polish guards indiscriminately attacked the barracks, with the prisoners inside, using hand grenades and machine guns.

The violent animosity of the Catholic Poles to their huge Jewish community is well known. When the Russians invaded Poland, one of the greatest fears of the Polish leadership and the government was that the 500,000 Jewish residents of Warsaw’s Nalevski district would rise up against them in support of the advancing Bolshevik armies. Many Polish Jews fled after the failure of the Russian attack and a number of those left behind were promptly slaughtered by Poles when the central government collapsed after the German invasion of 1939.

Although exact figures of the dead among the remaining Auschwitz inmates in 1945 are not available, several existing Soviet military reports put the death toll between 7,000 and 10,000. Former members of the Polish militia have subsequently claimed that many of the dead were shot down by Russian troops as they attempted to leave the liberated camp. The Russians did not like Jews either, remembering their savagery against them during the salad days of Josef Stalin.

The truth of the matter will probably never be known but at least this atrocity cannot be blamed on the Germans, who were hundreds of miles away at the time.