Eighty years ago this week Auschwitz is liberated

 

 

The Red Army overran the Auschwitz extermination camp. It still held some 7,500 inmates whom the Germans had not been able to evacuate. Most of the gas chambers and crematoria had been dismantled the previous year to remove evidence  in anticipation of Soviet occupation but one crematorium remained to be blown up. The Soviet troops had been warned in advance of what they might see but the sight of the mounds of corpses and the pitiable state of the survivors still shocked them.

The advance of the Red Army isolated the city of Koenigberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia) in East Prussia trapping about 100,000 troops and 200,000 civilians far behind the new front line. The Soviets were focussed on the advance into Germany and were content to besiege the pocket.

The German passenger ship Wilhelm Gustloff, originally built as a pleasure cruise liner for Nazi Kraft durch Freude holidays was torpedoed and sunk by a Soviet submarine as she sailed from Gdynia in East Prussia with military personnel and civilians being evacuated ahead of the Soviet advance. The ship was hugely overcrowded and there was no accurate record of how many were aboard. It is estimated that some 9,500 people lost their lives in what is still the worst maritime disaster.

The movie Kolberg premiered in Berlin. It depicted an incident in the Napoleonic wars in which a Prussian garrison held off French attacks. It was a personal project of propaganda minister Jospeh Goebbels and a division of troops had been deployed as extras in the production. Somehow a copy was taken into the besieged French port city La Rochelle where it was shown to the garrison.