Auschwitz: Untold Stories of Resistance, Horror, and Heroism

Auschwitz. Few places on earth conjure up more images of death, horror, and pure agony than the Nazis' most infamous concentration camp. Here's what no one ever told you about it. A Polish cavalry officer named Witold Pilecki walked into a crowd of people in Warsaw. They were being rounded up by German officers in preparation to be sent to Auschwitz, and he went voluntarily, as part of the resistance.

He smuggled out a series of reports on what was really going on inside the camp. Documents made their way to the outside world in 1940, 1941, and 1942, and, after his escape in 1943, he wrote more. The result is an eyewitness account of the horrors, starting with the public executions of some of the camp's Polish prisoners, who were sometimes shot and sometimes left to the elements. Later, Pilecki saw the focus shift to Jewish prisoners, writing: "Over a thousand a day from the new transports were gassed.

The corpses were burnt in the new crematoria." While fighting typhus and surviving beatings, Pilecki organized a resistance network within the camp, in addition to sending messages. The first message read: "Bomb Auschwitz." Pilecki escaped in 1943 and lived to see the end of the war and the liberation of the camp.

However, his commitment to the idea of a free and independent Poland was seen as problematic. In 1947, he was arrested by the Communist leadership, tortured, and declared an enemy of the state. He was executed the following year. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, around 23,000 Roma were sent to Auschwitz, The Roma rebellion and 21,000 died there. But they were also part of an insanely brave rebellion.

Most Roma were held in a section of Auschwitz called Zigeunerlager, a sort of holding center for entire families. It was established in 1942, then in 1944, it was decided that everyone in the camp was going to be executed, for the simple reason that the space was needed for more prisoners. At the time, there were around 6,000 Roma there.

One day after they were warned that their executions were imminent, around 600 armed themselves with hammers and shovels, barricaded themselves in their barracks, and told the Nazis that if they wanted to take them to the gas chambers, they'd better come in and get them. The date was May 16, 1944, and here's the incredible thing: according to the Council of Europe, they sort of won — at least, temporarily.

Romani Resistance and the Tragic Fate of Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz

No one died that day, as had been planned. Instead, half the Roma prisoners were transferred to other camps. For the remaining half, the respite was merely a stay of execution. They were sent to the gas chambers a few months later. May 16 is now remembered as Romani Resistance Day for their attempts to stop the Nazis.

Sonderkommandos The Sonderkommando were selected from among the healthiest men who were sent to Auschwitz. Some were promised their own survival, while others were told they could protect their families by working for the Nazis. They discovered very quickly that neither promise would be kept. Sonderkommando were selected because of their strength. Part of their job was to lie to prisoners so they would stay calm while they escorted them to the gas chambers. Afterward, they removed the bodies.

They would sort through clothes, collect valuables, extract any gold teeth, and carry the dead to the crematorium. Then, when the ashes began to pile up, they shoveled it into a nearby river. Every few months, the Sonderkommando would be executed, and new prisoners took their Sonderkommando revolt place.

By the time this had happened a few times, people knew what they were in for, so the 12th Sonderkommando decided to take some Nazis with them. Prisoners Roza Robota and sisters Ester and Hanka Wajcblum worked at the munitions factory where they — along with some co-conspirators — started smuggling gunpowder to the Sonderkommando. "They used this gunpowder and manufactured little hand grenades." On October 7, 1944, Polish prisoners in Crematorium 1 grabbed a particularly sadistic guard and stuffed him in an oven.

The workers at the other three crematoriums soon joined in. The gunpowder was taken to Crematorium 4. There, in a suicide mission, the Sonderkommando detonated the ovens; that crematorium would never be used again.

When the Nazis regained control of the situation, 200 Sonderkommando were immediately executed; their bodies were disposed of by the 13th Sonderkommando. The women involved were discovered and tortured but never gave up the names of living conspirators. They were hanged in early January 1945. "But they were instrumental in saving tens of thousands of Jews who would have been gassed and burned in Crematorium Number Four." The twins and the Angel of Death Whenever new prisoners arrived at Auschwitz,

Dr. Mengele's Twin Experiments and the Horrors of Block 10 at Auschwitz

Dr. Josef Mengele was on the train platform, waiting and watching. Among the things he was looking for were identical twins. "He demanded to know if we were twins, and my mother didn't know what to say. She asked if that was good." Records indicate that Mengele experimented on 732 pairs of twins at Auschwitz, although some estimates place the number at around 1,500. Some of his subjects survived, and many later gave testimony about what was done to them.

And it's pretty horrible. Some twins remembered being given injections that were supposed to change a person's eye color, while others were deliberately infected with a variety of diseases and substances. Twins would be measured and documented, and their reactions — sometimes to things like surgery without anesthetic and forced sterilization — would be recorded.

Often, one twin would be used as a control subject, while the other was experimented on. When that twin died, the other was killed and they were both autopsied, all with one goal in mind: to find new ways to advance the development of Hitler's master race. "You make twins with German women?" "That's the goal." Block 10 Even though the only doctor you may have heard about was Josef Mengele, he wasn't the only one performing medical experiments at Auschwitz.

Carl Clauberg was working alongside Mengele in the area known as Block 10, and he was interested in finding an efficient way to sterilize large groups of people. "Block Ten's main purpose was a secondary genocide, or, in other words, killing the unborn." Among his methods was a non-surgical procedure that introduced chemical irritants into the female reproductive organs.

The inflammation it triggered caused swelling and sterility; it also caused quite a bit of death. Dr. Horst Schumann was working on the same project, only his methods involved exposing patients to X-rays to try to find just the right amount of radiation to sterilize without burning. This technique was deemed "unsatisfactory," as there were too many casualties. Dr. Johann Paul Kremer was starving prisoners to see what happened as people wasted away.

And Dr. August Hirt took the opportunity to collect Jewish skeletons, in the hopes of taking measurements that would confirm Jewish individuals were biologically different and therefore inferior to Aryans. Block 11 was a punishment block reserved for prisoners suspected of things like Block 11 sabotage. Prisoners caught trying to escape were condemned to death by starvation, and sent here to die in the aptly-named "dark cells." There were also so-called "standing cells," with floor space of less than a square meter where air entered through a single five-centimeter square vent.

The Grim Reality of Block 11 and Fredy Hirsch's Heroic Efforts at Auschwitz

As many as four prisoners at a time would be locked in that small space. Some were sent there for weeks at a time — usually just at night, though, as they were required to work during the day. Block 11 was right next to block 10 – and they made up another infamous portion of Auschwitz: a place known as The Death Wall. Flogging was done in the courtyard, and prisoners were executed against the wall. The man who saved children Fredy Hirsch could have escaped.

His mother, brother, and stepfather headed to Bolivia after Hitler's rise to power. He stayed behind in Germany - and then ended up in Czechoslovakia. and it was there that he began his life’s work: saving children. Hirsch was charming, and he used his personality to keep the Nazi guards at bay and keep his focus on the children. At first, he worked with the children in the Jewish ghettos: he made sure they had personal hygiene items, and that they continued their education and got daily exercise.

In 1943, he was caught facilitating communication between Jewish children in Terezin and the outside world: he was sent to Auschwitz. Once there, he established the children's blocks, where kids would spend their days before returning to their parents in the barracks at night. In secret, he oversaw their continuing education and arranged for life-saving measures.

Because of Hirsch, roll-call was done indoors instead of outside in the rain and snow, and he secured a steady supply of extra food: packages that came into the camp addressed to people who were already dead were redirected to the children. By the beginning of 1944, he was caring for hundreds, but this also coincided with his 6 month anniversary at Auschwitz.

Prisoners chosen for “special treatment” would be eliminated after six months. Hirsch had a few choices: join Auschwitz's underground resistance, lead a revolt, or try and escape. They gave him an hour to decide: when the hour was up, his body was discovered. No one is sure what happened to him, he either took his own life, or a Jewish doctor facilitated his passing.

Before his death, he appointed two successors to make sure his work protecting the children of Auschwitz continued. The brothel It's well-known that concentration camp prisoners who were healthy enough to work were forced to do so, but it wasn't until fairly recently that another part of the Nazis' forced labor scheme came to light: Heinrich Himmler's reward plan. According to the Ravensbrück center, Himmler decided female prisoners could be turned into sex workers.

Post-Liberation Challenges: The Aftermath of Auschwitz and the Plight of Survivors

There were a few things likely at play here. For one, Himmler believed he could prevent homosexuality by making women available, and secondly, according to Reuters, he thought prisoners would work harder if they were promised a trip to the brothel at the end of the day. At the Auschwitz brothel, 21 women worked at the same time — some, it was believed, volunteered, while others were escorted there, only to realize where they were when their first "client" was shown in.

The women who have spoken about their time working in a Nazi brothel described how they were forced to see as many as 10 men in a span of two hours. Some of the men, they said, just wanted to talk to a friendly person. Liberation and Beyond On January 27, 1945, the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front became the first Allied troops to enter Auschwitz, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum says that around 7,000 prisoners were waiting for them.

The first thing we noticed is the turret was not aimed at us." They were free. But thousands of others were still in hell. The Nazis knew the Soviet Army was coming, so they tried to move around 56,000 prisoners deeper into German territory, where they could still use them as forced laborers. We know it happened, but according to The New York Times, there was so much chaos and confusion that this is one of the least documented aspects of the Holocaust. We do know that only those thought strong enough to survive were taken.

Still, it's estimated that around 15,000 people died during the death marches from Auschwitz alone. Some were shot as they passed through villages. After the death march had passed, the dead were collected and given a proper burial. Memorials mark the places where groups were executed. But for many others, nothing remains. Bombing Auschwitz When Witold Pilecki escaped and told the outside world what horrors were happening at Auschwitz, he begged the Allies to bomb the camp to put an end to the Nazi genocide. But Auschwitz was never bombed. Why? It's complicated.

According to The Guardian, Pilecki wasn't alone: representatives of the Jewish community also petitioned the US War Department, asking them to bomb the camp. But the US declined. They claimed it would require precision bombing that was beyond their capabilities, and that the camp was well beyond the reach of their bombers. They said their air forces were needed elsewhere, and the mission posed too much of a danger to American troops. "Isn't this a thing for our Soviet allies anyway? Being much closer to the intended target than us, I mean?" According to the Jewish Virtual Library, however, there was another reason: the inevitability of civilian casualties.

The question came up again and again, and in 1944, the answer was still "No." But what about those who were in the camp? The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that some survivors recalled hearing nearby bombs, and remembered the hope it gave them, saying, "We were no longer afraid of death; at any rate, not of that death. Every bomb that exploded filled us with joy."

Aspect	Details
Introduction	Auschwitz: Infamous Nazi concentration camp synonymous with death, horror, and unimaginable suffering.
Witold Pilecki's Infiltration	Polish cavalry officers voluntarily infiltrated Auschwitz (1940-1943) to gather intelligence for the resistance. Smuggled out reports detailing executions, gas chambers, and resistance efforts; escaped in 1943 but was later executed by Communist authorities in 1948 for anti-state activities.
Roma Resistance at Auschwitz	In Zigeunerlager, Roma prisoners staged a brave rebellion (May 16, 1944), barricading themselves against imminent execution; although half were transferred, the rest were later gassed, commemorated as Romani Resistance Day.
Sonderkommando Operations	Selected from healthy prisoners to work in Auschwitz; deceived into believing they would be spared or protect their families. Tasked with guiding victims to gas chambers, disposing of bodies, and salvaging valuables; revolts led to temporary disruption, with reprisals including executions of hundreds.
Women's Resistance	Roza Robota and others smuggled gunpowder to Sonderkommando; initiated Crematorium 4 explosion (October 7, 1944), halting its use; faced torture and execution, recognized for saving Jewish lives.
Josef Mengele and Twins	Infamous for medical experiments on twins (732 pairs); sought genetic data and tested various procedures including surgeries without anesthesia, deliberate infections, and sterilization experiments.
Other Medical Atrocities	Block 10: Dr. Carl Clauberg's sterilization experiments; Dr. Horst Schumann's X-ray sterilization attempts; Dr. Johann Paul Kremer's starvation studies; Dr. August Hirt's collection of Jewish skeletons. Block 11: Punishment block for sabotage and escape attempts, featuring "Death Wall" executions and inhumane solitary confinement cells.
Fredy Hirsch's Heroism	Fredy Hirsch stayed behind to protect Jewish children; organized education and provided extra food, shielded them from harsh conditions until he died in Auschwitz.
Nazi Brothel	Heinrich Himmler established brothels for male prisoners, believing it would discourage homosexuality and motivate forced laborers; women were coerced into prostitution, serving multiple clients daily.
Liberation and Death Marches	Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet forces (January 27, 1945); around 7,000 survivors were greeted; Nazis attempted to evacuate the remaining 56,000 prisoners; death marches ensued, resulting in around 15,000 deaths from exhaustion, shootings, and exposure.
Failed Bombing Attempts	Witold Pilecki and the Jewish community requested the Allied bombing of Auschwitz; the Allies declined citing precision challenges, distance, and risk to troops; bombing never occurred, although nearby bombings brought temporary hope to prisoners.

FAQS about Auschwitz

What was Auschwitz?

Auschwitz was the largest complex of concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany during World War II. Located in German-occupied Poland, it consisted of Auschwitz I (the main camp), Auschwitz II-Birkenau (the extermination camp), and Auschwitz III-Monowitz (a labor camp).

Who was Witold Pilecki and what did he do?

Witold Pilecki was a Polish cavalry officer who volunteered to be imprisoned at Auschwitz to gather intelligence for the Polish resistance. He smuggled out detailed reports about the atrocities occurring there, which reached the Allies in 1940-1942. After escaping in 1943, he continued to expose Nazi crimes but was later arrested by the Communist regime and executed in 1948.

What was the Romani resistance at Auschwitz?

In 1944, Romani prisoners at Auschwitz, facing imminent extermination, staged a rebellion in the Zigeunerlager (Gypsy Family Camp). Armed with improvised weapons, they resisted Nazi guards and temporarily halted their execution plans, although many were eventually killed in later months.

Who were the Sonderkommandos?

Sonderkommandos were Jewish prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz. They were promised better treatment but were ultimately executed every few months to keep the operation secret. In 1944, Sonderkommandos staged a revolt, destroying one of the crematoria.

What role did Josef Mengele play at Auschwitz?

Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death," conducted cruel medical experiments at Auschwitz, particularly on twins. He sought to advance Nazi racial theories through his experiments, which included surgeries without anesthesia and deadly infections.

What was Block 10 at Auschwitz?

Block 10 at Auschwitz housed medical experiments conducted by Dr. Carl Clauberg and others. It was notorious for experiments aimed at sterilizing prisoners, including through chemical irritants and X-rays, part of the Nazi's eugenics program.

Who was Fredy Hirsch and what did he do at Auschwitz?

Fredy Hirsch was a Jewish prisoner known for his efforts to protect children at Auschwitz. He organized educational activities and provided extra food for children in the camp. Hirsch eventually died at Auschwitz after involvement in resistance activities.

Why wasn't Auschwitz bombed during World War II?

Despite appeals and requests, Auschwitz was never bombed by Allied forces during World War II. Reasons included the camp's remote location, the difficulty of precision bombing at the time, and concerns over civilian casualties.

What happened during the liberation of Auschwitz?

Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945. They encountered around 7,000 prisoners who had survived the brutal conditions. Liberation marked the end of systematic extermination at the camp but did not immediately end the suffering of survivors.

How many people died at Auschwitz?

Estimates vary, but approximately 1.1 to 1.3 million people, primarily Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. This included victims of gas chambers, forced labor, medical experiments, and harsh living conditions.

What is the legacy of Auschwitz?

Auschwitz has become a symbol of the Holocaust's atrocities and serves as a memorial and museum to educate future generations about the horrors of genocide. It remains a solemn reminder of the importance of remembering and preventing such atrocities in the future.