The Liberation of Auschwitz: A Soviet Propaganda Hoax
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An article in the Daily Mail of the 27th of January 2020 is headed with this attention-grabbing statement:
“Anne Frank’s stepsister and Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss claims photos of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz are fake because soldiers hadn’t brought cameras, and were taken at other camps.”
Out of all professional news media, only the Daily Mail reported on this Auschwitz survivor’s sensational statements during that episode of Good Morning Britain on the 27th of January 2020.
Here is some detail of what she said, with Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid listening:
Eva Schloss: “And something I wanted to point out to you, you know there are many pictures about the Russians liberating Auschwitz and there’s never any snow, and the snow was honestly that high.
And so I have some connection with the Russian embassy and I was there once and I said: ‘Something puzzles me; those photos are fakes because there’s no snow. And they said, ‘Well, yes, they are not fakes, but when the army came, they didn’t have cameras; they didn’t photograph. So only much later when they realized we should have pictures of it, they took pictures like you see now.’
But this is definitely not in Auschwitz and not the liberation of Auschwitz. There were not that many people with clothes, and children – and no snow.”
Piers Morgan: “Right, fascinating.”
Eva Schloss: “So I think historically we should point this out …”
Piers Morgan: “And get it right, yeah.”
Eva Schloss: “… to get it right.”
So, that’s Eva Schloss on Good Morning Britain, 27th of January 2020.
Eva Schloss there attacked – directly attacked – the claim to authenticity of images and film-footage widely used in Holocaust propaganda. You will see those images, supposedly of the liberation of Auschwitz, all over the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. And you will see the footage in any documentary about the Holocaust. You’ve seen it many, many, many, many times. You see these pathetic looking people crowded at the gate. You see the children in the adult striped uniforms looking grim and sad. And you’ve even seen a crowd of little children being led by women dressed as nuns. Those are scenes staged for Soviet propaganda. Those are – as Eva Schloss has denounced – they’re fake.
And now we have Eva Schloss, as an Auschwitz survivor, who was there when the Red Army arrived, as our authority, as our witness to the fact that those photographs cannot be authentic because there was deep snow on the ground when the Red Army arrived.
But who is Eva Schloss? Eva Schloss – her maiden name was Geiringer, Eva Geiringer – was born in Vienna to a Jewish family that fled before the Second World War to Amsterdam, where they knew Anne Frank and her family. After the war, her mother became the second wife of Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank.
Like the Franks, the Geiringers were rounded up, removed from Amsterdam, and deported from the Netherlands, ultimately arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau in May of 1944. Eva happens to have special knowledge about the so-called liberation of Auschwitz because she and her mother were among the very small number of prisoners that did not choose to evacuate with the SS.
They were still in the camp on the 27th of January 1945, the Daily Mail says, “because she and her mother overslept and were left behind.” So, apparently, if you didn’t want to leave with the SS, all you had to do was get in bed and not get out of bed, and they wouldn’t force you to go with them.
Now, Eva Schloss is being a real loose cannon here, and making waves, and disrupting the narrative.
Well, her mother had already set an example of that. Her mother Fritzi – Elfriede “Fritzi” Geiringer – who remarried and became Fritzi Frank, has some fame in that regard because during a visit from Professor Robert Faurisson, the famous revisionist Frenchman, Professor Robert Faurisson, in the 1970s, where he was interested in interviewing Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, about the Anne Frank diaries …
In particular, he was interested in getting Otto Frank’s signature on something. He wanted Otto Frank to sign absolutely anything so that he would have an example of Otto Frank’s handwriting. And Professor Faurisson could not get Otto Frank to put anything in handwriting – which is very interesting. Professor Faurisson wanted the handwriting sample so that he could compare it to the diary, and Otto Frank was extremely careful not to supply that handwriting sample.
But anyway, while Professor Faurisson was visiting, Fritzi was listening to her second husband, Otto Frank, converse with Professor Faurisson – and she was agreeing with what Professor Faurisson was saying! Professor Faurisson was pointing out impossibilities in the alleged Anne Frank diary. You know, like the fact that a door at the top of a staircase suddenly disappears in a business establishment and nobody has anything to say about it. Or you run a 1940s vacuum cleaner in a so-called secret annex and nobody hears it. Fritzi Frank was saying things like,
“But that’s impossible!”
– to the point that Otto Frank was becoming exasperated with his wife’s comments, and finally blurted out:
“Maul zu!”
– which is German for shut up. Otto Frank told his second wife, Fritzi Frank, to shut up, because she was agreeing with Robert Faurisson.
Like her mother, Eva too, now has surely caused some exasperation to the peddlers of doubtful tales.
Now, it’s inescapable that Eva Schloss is wrong about some things that she said in that interview. This can be determined by consulting her memoir, Eva’s Story, which is co-authored by Eva Schloss and Evelyn Julia Kent.
It seems that she was more careful about what she put into writing, compared to when she’s speaking and trying to satisfy an audience that has certain expectations. She said on Good Morning Britain that inmates at Auschwitz were not given food, drinking water, or clothes. That’s obvious hyperbole.
She must have meant that no special clothes for the winter were supplied, but her own memoir contradicts this. It says that she was issued a heavy man’s overcoat in November of 1944. In the interview, however, she admits that she was not clear about dates while she was in Birkenau, so maybe it was earlier than November. Anyway, the awful SS actually did supply winter clothes for people in Auschwitz, including Eva.
On Good Morning Britain, Eva Schloss talks about waking up with dead people. It is clear from her memoir that the SS made efforts to prevent deaths, but Eva shows no appreciation of this.
When she arrived at Birkenau, she had to stay for a time in a quarantine barracks. Now, what is the point of a quarantine barracks? The point of a quarantine barracks is to prevent new arrivals from spreading diseases to the rest of the population in the camp. But Eva said,
“It seemed ridiculous to take such precautions.”
That’s what she says in her memoir. She didn’t see the point of the quarantine barracks.
The shaving of heads, which a kapo in Auschwitz told her had the purpose of eliminating lice – which means protecting the people in the camp from getting typhus – Eva gratuitously asserts in her memoir, was simply for dehumanization.
“The kapos insisted that having our heads shaved regularly was to control lice. It was in fact a deliberately dehumanizing process that made us look and feel like criminals.”
That’s in chapter 10 of Eva’s Story.
Eva also indicates that she was reluctant to seek medical attention when she believed that she had typhus.
“Any inmate with a high fever was a dangerous bunkfellow. By now the others were beginning to complain that I should not be there.”
– because she was sick.
“’Take her to the hospital block!’ They kept nagging Mutti. But I refused to go. Even though I had not yet faced up to the reality of the gas chambers …”
In other words, she didn’t believe in the gas chambers at that point.
“… I had realized that the hospital block housed the most vulnerable inmates for torture and death. There were many rumors going around, that patients were being experimented on, often in the most painful and disgusting ways.”
After resisting for a time, she gave in to pressure from the other women in her barracks and went to the hospital block where she was successfully treated – and was not tortured.
If anybody at Birkenau died in a bunk as the culmination of an illness, it was most likely because that person had refused to take advantage of the help that was available. And the horrible rumors circulating in the camp about what happened to people in the hospital, of course, were no help.
Eva tells Good Morning Britain that her mother was selected by Dr. Mengele for gassing.
The memoir shows how she was primed to interpret events that way. While in Amsterdam, she had heard about gassings at Auschwitz from the BBC. Upon arriving at Birkenau, a cruel kapo announced that their separately housed male relatives were presently being gassed and cremated, which – Eva says that she did not believe this. And she had verification eventually that her male relatives had not, in fact, been gassed. So, she learned pretty early that reports of people having been gassed were at least not always true.
When, however, there was an impromptu nude examination of women after a shower, and Eva’s mother was taken away, Eva understood this to mean that her mother had been selected to be gassed.
Susanna Reid: “You might be next. You might be sent to the gas chamber.”
Eva Schloss: “Exactly.”
Susanna Reid: “Or work today.”
Eva Schloss: “Well, my mother was actually. Perhaps it was October. You know, we had no idea. She was selected by Mengele to be gassed. We had to parade naked in front of him, and if he thought, you are too thin, you can’t work anymore, you went to the wrong side. And I thought I’d lost her. But, again, through a miracle, she was not lost.”
Susanna Reid: “Well, what was extraordinary was, as you say, you believed that your mother had been selected to go to the gas chamber.”
Eva Schloss: “Well, she was selected, definitely.”
Susanna Reid: “Yes, you thought that she was going to die.”
[break]
Susanna Reid: “So I was just going to refer to the fact that your mother, of course, wasn’t killed, despite your worst fears.”
Eva: “Yeah.”
Susanna Reid: “She survived.”
Two months later, she discovered that her mother was still alive, in a special ward, being treated for scabies, which in German is called Krätze.
There is a chapter in Eva’s Story that seems to be written by Eva’s mother, Fritzi, about what happened after she was “selected by Dr. Mengele.” And the whole episode is given a paranoid interpretation:
“We were taken to a barrack in the middle of a walled courtyard. I knew that the building had been used to house prisoners suffering from Krätze, a highly infectious skin disease. I also knew that it was now used to house those prisoners who had been selected to be gassed.”
That’s from chapter 13 of Eva’s Story, called “Mutti’s Story.” Certain elements of “Mutti’s Story” seem to be clear fiction. Inter alia, Mutti says:
“During the night, the crematorium burned for many hours and flames shot from the chimney into the clear dark sky.”
Now, Fritzi Geiringer Frank certainly did not see flames shooting from the stack of a crematorium, because the length of those stacks makes it physically impossible. Clearly, “Mutti’s Story” has been embellished to conform to standard Holocaust propaganda.
The word Krätze (scabies) thoroughly explains why there was a nude mass inspection by Dr. Mengele, or whichever physician it really was, and why certain individuals – Mutti says that there were about 30 in the ward – were taken away and isolated from other prisoners. The gassing story is completely superfluous, and it’s surprising that Eva Schloss goes around telling interviewers that her mother was “selected to be gassed,” but then was treated for scabies instead. Why doesn’t she just say that she was selected to be treated for scabies?
In fact, Eva’s memoir gives no indication that she had any personal knowledge of anyone having been gassed. Instead, however, of admitting that the paranoid interpretation of events was wrong, Eva Schloss tells the audience of Good Morning Britain that her mother had indeed been selected for gassing, and that it was through a miracle –
“again, through a miracle”
– that this did not happen.
The distortions that we can note in Eva’s account are all in the direction of conformity with the prevailing Holocaust narrative. This will not weigh against Eva’s credibility, however, if she happens to disagree with that narrative on some point, or rejects some supposed evidence for that narrative.
Eva Schloss, on the 27th of January 2020, surprised and amazed Piers Morgan and his co-host on Good Morning Britain by telling them that photographs and films that everybody has seen from Auschwitz are fake. They’re all fake, according to Eva Schloss, who was there in January and February 1945. When and after the Red Army arrived, she was there, and she says the photographs and the films are all fake.
Why does she say that? Because there was deep snow when the Red Army arrived that is not evident in any of those images.
I read her memoir to find out how far she really meant to go by saying that the snow was deep when the Red Army arrived and whether there was perhaps some contradiction. Since her memoir could correct her exaggerations on some other points, like her claim that she wasn’t given winter clothes, or any clothes, I thought that it might also give a more careful account of the presence of snow during the period of the so-called liberation.
Here is how she describes the deep snow on the first of the three days when the SS summoned prisoners to line up for evacuation. This was the 17th through the 19th of January 1945, so 8 to 10 days before the Red Army arrived at any of the Auschwitz complex camps. This is from her memoir.
“Snow lay on the ground. It had transformed the entire compound, shrouding the huts and dirt tracks with a sheet of unblemished white. The land looked like Siberia.”
So, that’s a lot of snow. She also says:
“The temperature was far below zero.”
To get fresh water, Eva and a companion hacked through one-foot-thick ice that covered a pond near the camp’s entrance.
She mentions several additional snowfalls between the departure of the SS and the first appearance of the Red Army on the 27th of January. Now some contingent of the Red Army may have arrived on the 27th of January but they didn’t stay at all. They were there a very short time:
“What were the Russians going to do? They were not having a holiday. You know, they were fighting. So when the first ones came, they just fed us, but went on again.” [Eva Schloss on Good Morning Britain, 27 January 2020]
The day after the first brief presence of the Red Army, she writes:
“New snow had fallen during the night.”
So when the Red Army arrived, there was already snow. And then after they left, new snow fell.
On some day in February, Eva says that two truckloads of German soldiers appeared briefly at the camp. Maybe this was a way to give people still in the camp a chance to leave, because generally speaking, anyone who had been able to travel on the 17th through 19th of January lined up to leave with the Germans. Some maybe had some wound that had to heal up, and maybe more people could walk now.
She specifies that this unit that visited the camp in February was not SS but Wehrmacht. That’s on page 160 of Eva’s Story. We are told that these Wehrmacht soldiers went straight to the hospital block and told everyone in the hospital block to come out and march. From concealment, Eva says that she observed a “line of human wretchedness” marching past, but she doesn’t say how many were still alive, or how many were marched out.
Since Eva has told us that there were “only one or two hundred souls left” in the Birkenau women’s camp, and that 80% were “too ill to move at all and lay waiting for death,” the number of women evacuated by the Wehrmacht on that day in February could hardly have been more than forty.
We are told that many of the women in this group were unable to march very far, and fell down dead by the road, outside the camp, and some of them, we are told, were even shot.
However, it should be kept in mind that Eva had some paranoid fears that she records in her book. She was afraid that these soldiers were going to set fire to the camp, and do some other things that they did not do. So, exaggeration is likely here .
And here’s an interesting fact: Mutti had gotten swept up in this evacuation, but easily escaped from it, and returned to the camp, rejoining Eva and their other accomplices in the camp.
Is that another miracle, like the claim that Mutti was selected to be gassed but was treated for scabies instead, or was Mutti’s easy escape an indication that these soldiers were not really trying to force anyone to go along with them?
In any case it shows how little the Red Army had “liberated Auschwitz” on the 27th of January 1945, if the Wehrmacht could even enter the women’s camp to evacuate survivors sometime in February.
Anyway, on that day, sometime in the middle of February, Eva mentions that her mother “tramped through the snow” to get water. She tramped through the snow to get water, then:
“By the time dusk had come, snow was again falling heavily.”
Lots of snow in the middle of February here.
On her way back from a visit to Auschwitz main camp … Birkenau is a larger camp, but Auschwitz was the first of the camps in the Auschwitz complex, so it’s called the Auschwitz main camp, apparently this happened in late February. On her way back from a visit to Auschwitz main camp, she says that she threw herself into the snow to conceal herself after tracer bullets whizzed past her head. So, the snow was deep enough that she could hide in it. She says that this was “a few weeks” after 19th of January when most inmates had evacuated with the SS.
The next day, she says, “it had snowed hard in the night.” So it seems from Eva’s memoir that the snow covered the ground constantly from late January through all of February 1945, and maybe longer. She never mentions a thaw or a moment during that period when there was no snow.
And for further confirmation, I inquired to a professor of atmospheric science at a major university with whom I’d happened to make contact. He sent me images from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Twentieth Century Reanalysis, and some comments. And those images show that the last ten days of January 1945 at Auschwitz were very cold with average temperatures ranging from -8°C to -3°C, but that during February the average temperatures were between -3°C and +3°, which means that some of the snow may have melted in the daytime, at the warmest part of the daytime, but very likely was replenished at night.
The fact that there was snow in late January when the Red Army arrived is certainly not controversial. You can find this mentioned in memoirs other than Eva Schloss’s.
I’m going to talk a little bit now about a German documentary about Auschwitz that was made in 1985 by Irmgard von zur Mühlen. It’s called The Liberation of Auschwitz. This documentary, The Liberation of Auschwitz, admits that there was snow on the ground when the Red Army arrived.
The question of whether the snow remained throughout the period from the 27th of January to the 28th of February 1945 becomes important, because this movie, The Liberation of Auschwitz, aggregates, we are told, all Soviet footage of that event, claiming that all such footage was taken during that time. If Eva Schloss is correct about the snow, then most Soviet footage and still images supposed to represent what the Red Army discovered at Auschwitz, including a number of very shocking scenes that happened not to include snow, must have been created some significant time after the arrival of the Red Army. And on that basis, their claim to authenticity certainly can be rejected.
A certain amount of fakery was admitted a long time ago, and is documented in Irmgard von zur Mühlen’s 1985 movie. Although the general public remains unaware, it turns out that the revelation that some images of the liberation of Auschwitz are fake is not entirely new. Professor Stuart Leibman, an associate of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, noted in a book published by Northwestern University Press in 2006 that some scenes depicting the liberation of Auschwitz had been staged:
“We know that the Soviets did stage scenes in the camps to construct ideological messages. See, for example, the footage purportedly of the liberation of Auschwitz by the cameraman Vorontsov. These scenes and Vorontsov’s later comments are included in the film by Irmgard von zur Mühlen, The Liberation of Auschwitz 1945,”
– from 1985. And the book in which Professor Leibman wrote this is called Lessons and Legacies, Volume 7, The Holocaust in International Perspective.
In 1985, the Soviet cameraman Alexander Vorontsov said that all barracks scenes from Auschwitz were staged, and he excused the deception this way. (Because Vorontsov spoke Russian, this is in the voice of the narrator.)
“Initially, we did not film the misery inside the barracks. After evacuating the camp on January 19th, the SS cut off the electricity. Because initially our camera crews had no lights, we could not shoot indoors. The prisoners had to be transported as quickly as possible because they were starving to death and almost frozen.”
And we are supposed to assume that the dramatization staged for Soviet Red Army cameras was a faithful representation of reality. But is that a reasonable assumption? Can we really trust Soviet propaganda?
The narrator of Irmgard von zur Mühlen’s film gives us a hint as to when those scenes were staged:
“Only some time later, after the snow had melted, was Vorontsov able to ask some women to re-enter the barracks, in order to show the conditions in which they had lived.”
That wording, “after the snow had melted,” implies not just a break in the snow but the end of the season of snow. It implies that the springtime, more or less, is when scenes were being staged and filmed at Auschwitz. Additional evidence will support this interpretation.
Now, Vorontsov has implied that the staged scene of the elderly women in the barracks at Auschwitz is more or less a faithful representation of the conditions and what was happening there. But the trouble with this is, the Soviet propaganda originally had intended a very different picture of what had happened at Auschwitz. Vorontsov tells us that the original idea of how to dramatize the liberation of Auschwitz was very different.
In the original cinematic vision of the liberation of Auschwitz, it did not occur to the Soviet cinematographers to show emaciated corpses. Instead, they showed healthy-looking prisoners anxiously waiting at the main gate of the camp and cheering when the Red Army arrived to set them free.
“The Soviet cameramen wanted to film the liberation of the camp as they thought it should be shown to the world. When the former prisoners regained their strength, they were used as extras. Vorontsov said that this footage did not look anything like the reality of January 27th and, therefore, was never used.”
The emphasis was not on the prisoners’ suffering, but on happy people expressing gratitude toward the liberating Red Army.
In those scenes, there is no snow on the ground, nor on the roofs of the buildings, which indicates that the film was not made immediately when the Red Army arrived. It also could not have been made in the month after the Red Army arrived. Vorontsov admits this when he says,
“When the former prisoners regained their strength, they were used as extras.”
How long would it have taken the former prisoners to regain their strength? Vorontsov says:
“Of the 7,000 liberated prisoners, some left the camp immediately. Two-hundred and twenty-two died right after liberation, and the rest spent weeks and sometimes months in the hospital ward.”
Vorontsov says: “weeks, and sometimes months.” Now, there is no reason other than Vorontsov’s dubious say-so to believe that former prisoners were used as extras in that scene. Nonetheless, the claim is an admission that the scene was filmed at least several weeks after the 27th of January. If you’re saying that former inmates of the camp were used to film that scene, but it took them weeks or months to regain their strength, then you’re admitting that the scene was filmed much later. You’re implying that the scene was filmed long after the so-called liberation.
Now, according to Eva Schloss’s memoir, the Red Army really did not take a lot of interest in the people in the camp. They gave them food, and they tried to use some of them as helpers for some things, but that’s about it. There wasn’t any big drama or concern about the people in the camp.
Now, Eva Schloss says that eventually the Soviet authorities arranged a general evacuation of the survivors who were still staying at Auschwitz, with only a few people still not well enough to travel. She does not directly give the date of that general evacuation but she says that on the 25th of March the group had been traveling “almost three weeks,” which would mean that the departure from Auschwitz was on the 5th or the 6th or the 7th of March 1945.
It means that until the 5th of March 1945, Eva Schloss was present at the Auschwitz complex to notice if movies were being made, and she tells us today that she did not see any sign of movies being made. She didn’t see any cameras. So, whenever the moviemaking started, it was after the 5th of March 1945.
The reference is on page 178 of Eva’s Story.
If the first visualization of the liberation of Auschwitz was filmed after the 5th of March 1945, then the second version of the event must have been filmed even later. How much later? Well, although the Red Army had arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex on the 27th of January 1945, Soviet propaganda did not immediately give Auschwitz the importance that it has today.
“The Soviet press agency TASS did not inform the world about the scale of crimes committed in Auschwitz until May 7th 1945.” [Narrator, The Liberation of Auschwitz]
That’s four months after the Red Army arrived at the place. Why then, in May 1945, did the Soviet government suddenly decide that it was a good idea to make propaganda about gassings and mass murder at Auschwitz? The beginning of Soviet Auschwitz propaganda may have risen from imitation of British and American camp-liberation propaganda.
More than two months after the Red Army arrived at Auschwitz, the Western Allies captured Buchenwald on the 11th of April, Bergen-Belsen on the 15th of April, Dachau on the 27th of April, and so on. The timing of the beginning of publicity about Auschwitz in May of 1945 suggests that this new Soviet Auschwitz propaganda was an imitation of what Anglo-American propaganda had done with the camps captured by British and American forces in Germany.
The 1945 Soviet propaganda film Auschwitz (Oswięcim) was made from about 20 minutes of selected footage with German-language narration. It begins in a way that is consistent with the assumption that it was inspired by Anglo-American propaganda. It mentions the camps captured by the British and Americans, only to assert the greater importance of Auschwitz.
“Buchenwald. Belsen. Dachau. Majdanek. Oder Treblinka? Mehr als fünf Jahre lang war Europa ein einziges Konzentrationslager. Das schrecklichste von allen war Auschwitz.”
And that translates as:
“Buchenwald. Belsen. Dachau. Majdanek. Or Treblinka? For more than five years, Europe was a massive concentration camp. The most terrifying of all was Auschwitz.”
You know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of Gene Autry’s song, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
You know Dachau and Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen,
A lampshade, a pelvis, two heads that was shrunken;
But do you recall the most famous death camp of all?
The Red Army liberated Auschwitz….
and so on.
That’s what they’re doing here. They’re talking about all this other stuff to say: but this is the really important one! It’s Auschwitz!
See, the way they’ve made this propaganda presupposes the propaganda that’s already been made about those other camps. And the propaganda made about those other camps by Britain and the USA is the reason why they suddenly decided to do this with Auschwitz.
This short 1945 Soviet film, Auschwitz (Oswięcim), includes reckless claims that are contradicted by later information.
The text at the beginning of the film says,
“Dieses Filmdokument bezeugt die grauenhaften Verbrechen der Hitlerregierung in Auschwitz.”
Translates as,
“This film document testifies to the horrific crimes of the Hitler government in Auschwitz.”
The movie is supposed to prove horrific crimes. But what happens to that claim when it is admitted that parts of the movie are dramatizations? In particular, the movie shows the now admittedly staged scene of the women in the Auschwitz barracks. The narrator evokes pity by emphasizing that they were all seemingly harmless elderly women.
“Warum ermorderten die Nazihenker diese armen alten Frauen?”
“Why did the Nazi hangmen murder these poor old women?”
This 1945 Soviet propaganda, of course, gives no indication that the scene was staged. If that had been admitted, then viewers might understand that the elderliness and apparent harmlessness of the women in the barracks there reflects only the director’s choice of casting.
It is also useful to compare this 1945 film Auschwitz (Oswięcim) to Irmgard von zur Mühlen’s 1985 movie The Liberation of Auschwitz.
One particular scene in The Liberation of Auschwitz, the 1985 film, is more clearly fraudulent in Auschwitz (Oswięcim). A pitiable group in striped uniforms crowds at the fence as we are told:
“Und so fand sie die Rote Armee. Die Sowjetkämpfer haben die Deutschen aus Auschwitz vertrieben. Den überlebenen Gefangenen haben sie erklärt: Ihr seid frei, frei für immer! Die Unglücklichen aber konnten es zuerst nicht fassen.”
Translated:
“And this is how the Red Army found them. The Soviet fighters drove the Germans out of Auschwitz. They declared to the surviving prisoners: You are free, free forever! At first however the unfortunates could not believe it.”
And that is quite a famous scene. With the original narration, however, indicating that the scene is supposed to represent the very moment of the arrival of the Red Army at Auschwitz, the fraud becomes indisputable because, as Eva Schloss points out, there should be snow on the ground and there is no snow.
The implication is that this scene, originally represented as reportage from the very day of the liberation of Auschwitz, was filmed at least as late as the spring of 1945. That’s a big contradiction.
Also, we know, as an historical fact, that the Germans were gone eight days before the Red Army arrived. You notice, the 1945 Soviet propaganda film claims:
“The Soviet fighters drove the Germans out of Auschwitz.”
There were no Germans there when the Red Army arrived. They’d been gone for more than a week.
It happens that this very clip was shown on Good Morning Britain shortly before Eva Schloss announced that such scenes were fake.
The clip also appears in Irmgard von zur Mühlen’s film, accompanied by an explanation of its significance that differs entirely from both the 1945 narration and the claim about when all the footage was recorded.
“Even in the spring, the days after liberation were bitter. Cared for by the medical personnel, those suffering from physical and emotional problems remained in the last four hospital blocks till the fall of 1945. Polish doctors and nurses attempted to treat these people, already branded for death.” [Narrator, The Liberation of Auschwitz]
When an entirely different meaning is given to a piece of film-footage that was supposed to be a “film document,” what are you supposed to believe? I believe that Eva Schloss has given us the answer to that question: it’s fake!
It’s fake, and they don’t even bother to keep their lies consistent. If you’d like to compare those two scenes, in Auschwitz (Oswięcim), the scene appears at 4 minutes 40 seconds, and in The Liberation of Auschwitz it appears at 51 minutes and 2 seconds.
Further evidence from Eva’s Story that the images are fake. We are supposed to believe that the Red Army made horrible discoveries when they arrived at Auschwitz and immediately took great interest in the liberated prisoners and their well-being.
The key event signaling this official solicitude is what Irmgard von zur Mühlen’s film The Liberation of Auschwitz presents as the arrival of a “Soviet special commission” on the 29th of January 1945, supposedly two days after the Red Army had arrived.
In fact, according to Eva’s memoir, the behavior of the Red Army during February and late January 1945 does not reflect any sense of importance about Auschwitz-Birkenau. The people there, you know, the former prisoners, were just ignored apart from being given some food. That was the extent of it.
At Birkenau women’s camp, where Eva Schloss was, the Red Army, at least for the first few weeks, did not even bother to establish a permanent presence. Every few days some contingent of the Red Army would arrive and stay for a few hours, leaving behind no garrison, with the result that according to this memoir, Wehrmacht soldiers could visit the camp on one occasion, around mid-February.
At the Auschwitz main camp, the Red Army did seem to have established a permanent presence, but was not very concerned with the civilian inhabitants. It is clear that the sick people were not immediately evacuated from the barracks of the Auschwitz main camp, as Vorontsov claimed in 1985, because they were still there when Eva arrived at the Auschwitz main camp (because she had been at Birkenau).
Sick people from Birkenau, the narrator of the liberation of Auschwitz claims, were in short order moved to the Auschwitz main camp.
“On February 7th, Soviet helpers and Polish Red Cross and local volunteers transferred Birkenau prisoners to the Auschwitz camp, where the sick were housed in brick buildings. First, those most seriously ill were transported on stretchers and horse-drawn carts. Transporting them took over two weeks.”
Eva Schloss would have known about this if it had happened on the date specified, since she was still in the Birkenau women’s camp. But she makes no mention of anything like this. When she and a few others migrated to the Auschwitz main camp, which probably happened in late February, they did it on their own initiative.
Immediately after the now admittedly staged scenes in the Auschwitz barracks, The Liberation of Auschwitz, Irmgard von zur Mühlen’s film, shows us something very reminiscent of Anglo-American camp liberation propaganda: a landscape strewn with human bodies. And we are told:
“Initially, there was no time to bury the dead. There were over 600 bodies on the camp terrain, victims of the last days of the SS terror and those who had died of emaciation after liberation.”
First, how does the proposition that the SS shot several hundred people and left their bodies lying around, more than a week before the Red Army arrived, harmonize with the often repeated claim that they made efforts to hide their crimes? The two claims are incompatible. In addition to the fact that there is no snow in these scenes, we may note that Eva’s Story mentions no “SS terror” at Birkenau, nor any bodies lying around on the ground at Auschwitz main camp. Again, the narrator of the liberation of Auschwitz says that the SS shot 248 people “shortly before liberation,” and we are shown what is supposed to be the burial of a Jewish woman who was among them. And in that scene, there is no snow on the ground, by the way, which means that it happened long after January 27th. Nothing like this is mentioned in Eva Schloss’s memoir.
The Liberation of Auschwitz also represents a nurse who stayed behind and showed Soviet authorities the location of a mass grave. The narrator claims that the ground had thawed by the 7th of February when this mass grave was allegedly excavated. Eva Schloss’s account of the weather for that period includes only cold and snow, and does not mention any nurse that had stayed behind. She explicitly says that all nurses, at least from the Birkenau women’s camp, had gone with the SS.
Eva’s Story also seems to disagree with Irmgard von zur Mühlen’s film about the number of persons liberated. The narrator of The Liberation of Auschwitz states that there were “7,000 liberated prisoners,” of whom some left the camp immediately and 222 died.
The 1945 film states that there were only 2,819 liberated prisoners. That is quite a discrepancy just between these two films.
Eva’s Story seems to bring the number down even lower. In Eva’s Story, we are told that the population of Birkenau women’s camp at the end of January 1945 was tiny:
“Every SS guard and dog had disappeared. All the kapos and most of the hospital patients had left too. Minnie and the nursing staff had also gone. In the whole camp, which had housed tens of thousands, there were now only one or two hundred souls left. Eighty percent of these were too ill to move at all and lay waiting for death.”
When the Soviet decision was made to evacuate civilians from Auschwitz, she observes in her memoir:
“About 150 men and women assembled in the main square.”
Eva says that “several very weak men” were left behind in the Auschwitz main camp, so that we should believe that not many were excluded from that number.
The total number of former inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau who came into the Red Army’s custody, and also survived long enough to be evacuated, would appear to have been, therefore, not much more than these 150.
The figure of 7,000 prisoners remaining in Auschwitz on the 27th of January seems impossible, and even the 2,819 claimed in 1945 seems to be an exaggeration, if the numbers that Eva Schloss gives in her memoir are remotely correct.
If you’ve been listening to this program for the past hour, then you know now that there never was a “liberation of Auschwitz.” It was a Soviet propaganda hoax. Even aside from the doubtfulness of calling any conquest of the Red Army a “liberation,” there never was a liberation of Auschwitz because, contrary to what was claimed in 1945, the Germans were not driven out by the Red Army, but had abandoned Auschwitz more than a week before the Red Army arrived.
The few people still residing in the Auschwitz camp complex on the 27th of January 1945 were there mostly only because they had been unable to walk when the SS left. Those that had left with the SS were not forced to go with them. Of those who had remained, the few who were physically able to leave were free to do so before the Red Army arrived.
The Red Army did not take control of the Auschwitz complex on the 27th of January 1945, or in any way treat it as an important place. Consequently, it was possible for German forces even to re-enter the Birkenau women’s camp in February 1945 and to evacuate women from there.
The number of people remaining in the camp on January 27, 1945, was in the hundreds, not in the thousands. And the Soviet government’s pretense of having taken a great interest in the well-being of those people is a lie.
The Soviet government grossly exaggerated the number of people remaining in the Auschwitz complex on the 27th of January and pretended retroactively, more than four months after the alleged event, to have taken a great interest in those people, in order that they could make propaganda comparable to what Hollywood directors had done at Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and so on. It’s a lie that was created in order to make movie propaganda.
The whole story is a lie.
But those scenes created to support the lie, called the liberation of Auschwitz, have nonetheless continued to be effective in propaganda that has the effect of making unnecessary wars appear justified. It’s not a coincidence that after the United States of America became obsessed with the Holocaust, we started having more and more foreign wars, especially wars related to the interests of the State of Israel.
These wars are disastrous for us, and we need to stop doing these things – and debunking, rejecting Holocaust propaganda, is an important step in stopping these wars.
As we approach the 27th of January – this fake holiday called Holocaust Remembrance Day – be sure to let people around you know that this so-called holiday is founded on a lie. At the very least, tell them that an Auschwitz survivor, a Jewish Auschwitz survivor named Eva Schloss, has said that all scenes supposed to depict the liberation of Auschwitz are fake, and anyone can prove that those scenes are fake simply by observing the lack of snow.
- https://www.bitchute.com/video/ym5myLai6whQ
- https://www.bitchute.com/video/JEzADSULHw06
- https://www.bitchute.com/video/HM4G25l1Wecf
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Bibliographic information about this document: Inconvenient History, 2025, Vol. 17, No. 1; archived at https://archive.org/details/the-liberation-of-auschwitz-a-soviet-propaganda-hoax
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