The Liberation of Auschwitz Birkenau and What the Red Army Found in January 1945
- Anna Avis
- 7 hours ago
- 8 min read
A moment of arrival into silence and the long work of understanding what had been found
On the afternoon of 27th January, 1945, four Soviet soldiers on horseback slowed as they approached a stretch of barbed wire on the outskirts of a vast camp complex in southern Poland. They were not advancing towards a strategic military target, nor were they prepared for what lay beyond the wire. According to one of the men watching from inside the camp, they stopped, exchanged a few quiet words, and stared.
That witness was Primo Levi, imprisoned since February 1944 in Monowitz, one of the three main camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. In his Holocaust memoir The Truce, Levi described the moment with restraint and precision, resisting any sense of triumph or emotional release.
“The first Russian patrol came in sight of the camp about midday on 27 January 1945,” he wrote.“They were four young soldiers on horseback, who advanced along the road that marked the limits of the camp, cautiously holding their sten-guns. When they reached the barbed wire, they stopped to look, exchanging a few timid words, and throwing strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive.”
Levi was struck by the soldiers’ visible unease. Liberation, in that moment, was not marked by cheers or embraces. It arrived quietly, uncertainly, and without ceremony.
“They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funeral scene.”
This hesitant encounter marked the liberation of Auschwitz Birkenau, a place that has since become the most recognisable symbol of the Holocaust. Yet liberation was not an ending. It was the beginning of a slow and difficult reckoning with what had been uncovered.
Auschwitz before January 1945
Between 1940 and 1945, Nazi Germany deported approximately 1.3 million people to Auschwitz. Around 1.1 million were murdered, the vast majority of them Jews. Auschwitz was not a single camp but a complex of more than forty sub camps, including Auschwitz I, Birkenau, and Monowitz, spread across occupied Poland.
By August 1944, at the height of its operation, more than 135,000 prisoners were held across the complex. Birkenau functioned as the primary killing centre, while Monowitz supplied forced labour to German industry. The scale was industrial, administrative, and methodical.
This context matters when considering what the Red Army found in January 1945. Auschwitz was not discovered intact. It was discovered in collapse.
A discovery not planned
The Soviet soldiers who entered Auschwitz belonged to the Red Army, advancing westward as part of the Vistula Oder Offensive, launched earlier that month. Auschwitz itself was not a planned objective. The camp lay directly in the path of the Soviet advance through southern Poland.
As historian Alexandre Bande has explained, Auschwitz was encountered rather than targeted.
“They were contingents from the first Ukrainian front. The Red Army stumbled upon this site by chance. Going into Auschwitz wasn’t a war goal. You can imagine these people's astonishment as they discovered one concentration camp after another.”
Other camps in the Baltic region had already been liberated in early to mid 1944, and more would be uncovered as the Red Army continued westward until Germany’s surrender in May 1945. Auschwitz, however, would come to occupy a unique place in post war memory.
Evacuation and the death marches
Just days before the Soviet advance reached the camp, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz. On 17th January, 1945, German authorities forced nearly 60,000 prisoners out of the complex. Adolf Hitler had ordered that no prisoner was to fall alive into enemy hands.
Men, women, and children were marched westward in the depths of winter, dressed in rags, many without shoes. These evacuations became known as the death marches.
“We left in columns of 500. We walked for practically three days and three nights,”Raphaël Esrail, deported by convoy no. 67, recalled in 2020.
What remained with him was not movement but stillness.
“What I remember most, and can't forget, are those men and women on the side of the road who had died. They'd been shot in the head by an SS man, or had to walk barefoot for hours. They had fallen as if in prayer, their legs frozen.”
Another survivor from the same convoy, Léa Schwartzmann, later described the march in equally stark terms.
“I never expected this. The death marches were harrowing. The snow was red with blood. We were surrounded every 50 metres by the SS.”
Many of those marched out of Auschwitz were sent to camps such as Gross Rosen or Ravensbrück by train after reaching towns including Wodzisław Śląski and Gleiwitz. Thousands did not survive the journey.
What was left behind
When Soviet troops reached Auschwitz on 27th January, 1945, the SS had already fled. There was no formal handover, no moment of surrender. For many survivors, there was no clear instant of liberation at all.
Approximately 7,000 prisoners had been left behind. Most were seriously ill. Many were children under the age of 15 or middle aged adults deemed too weak to march.
Red Army units from the 322nd Rifle Division entered the camp at around 15:00. Fighting had taken place in the surrounding area, and the cost was not insignificant. 231 Soviet soldiers were killed in battles around Auschwitz, Monowitz, Birkenau, the town of Oświęcim, and the nearby village of Brzezinka.
Inside the camp, soldiers found evidence of mass murder that the Nazis had failed to erase. There were 600 corpses lying unburied. Storehouses contained 370,000 men’s suits, 837,000 articles of women’s clothing, and seven tonnes of human hair.
“When they arrived at the barracks where the bags full of hair were stored, they understood that these were human remains. But it took them some time to understand the reality of the murders of hundreds of thousands of people,” Bande said.
Shock among hardened soldiers
Even for men accustomed to daily death, Auschwitz represented something beyond experience. General Vasily Petrenko, commander of the 107th Infantry Division, later recalled his reaction.
“I who saw people dying every day was shocked by the Nazis' indescribable hatred toward the inmates who had turned into living skeletons. I read about the Nazis' treatment of Jews in various leaflets, but there was nothing about the Nazis' treatment of women, children, and old men. It was in Auschwitz that I found out about the fate of the Jews.”
Yet early Soviet newspaper reports often avoided mentioning Jews explicitly. Articles in publications such as Pravda framed Nazi crimes in general terms, reflecting Soviet propaganda priorities rather than the specific nature of the genocide.
Recording and reconstructing
Photographers attached to the Red Army began documenting the camp almost immediately. They filmed the barracks, the dead, and the survivors.
“The first series of images taken in the immediate aftermath were of poor quality, due to the lighting conditions and the equipment used,” Bande explained.
Later photographs, more familiar today, were staged reconstructions.
“You can see prisoners falling into the arms of soldiers, but these are reconstructions. They were made in the weeks that followed. The idea was not to dwell on the suffering of the prisoners, but to highlight the heroism of the soldiers of the glorious Red Army.”
These images shaped how Auschwitz entered public consciousness, blending documentation with political messaging.
Liberation did not end suffering
Medical care began at once, assisted by the Polish Red Cross. Red Army hospitals treated approximately 4,500 survivors, many of whom were critically malnourished.
Albert Grinholtz, deported on convoy no. 4, later described the first food offered by Soviet soldiers.
“The soldiers, shocked by our starvation and skeletal bodies, immediately prepared soup in a wheelbarrow. (…) Closing my eyes, I remember this scene, the first bit of nourishment after so much deprivation and suffering. It caused many casualties among our comrades, who were unable to resist so much food, it was too rich.”
Even after liberation, death continued. As late as June 1945, around 300 survivors remained at Auschwitz, too weak to be moved.
After Auschwitz
In the months following the war, Auschwitz was not immediately preserved as a memorial. The Soviets used parts of the camp to detain German prisoners of war and Poles accused of collaboration. Locals dismantled barracks for building materials. Trials and executions were held on the site, including that of Rudolf Höss, executed there in 1947.
That same year, the Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum was established to protect the site and ensure that knowledge of the crimes committed there would be passed down.
A place of memory
Eighty years on, Auschwitz Birkenau remains both a physical location and a moral reference point. In 2024, the site received 1.83 million visitors.
“It's a symbol, especially in France, because the majority of Jewish deportees died there, but also because it's one of the best preserved sites,” Bande explained.“It's more difficult attracting hundreds of thousands of tourists to a simple monument or memorial.”
Auschwitz does not offer closure. What it offers is scale, evidence, and confrontation.
“Auschwitz allows us to show the magnitude of the atrocities.”
The four soldiers who paused at the wire on 27th January, 1945 could not have known how central this place would become to global memory. They only knew that what lay before them defied expectation.
Liberation did not resolve Auschwitz. It made it impossible to ignore.
