Ich sah das Vernichtungslager – “I Saw the Extermination Camp”, by Konstantin Simonow, published by SWA-Verlag / Verlag der Sowjetischen Militärverwaltung in Deutschland (“the Soviet Military Administration in Germany”). Berlin, 1946 – first edition. An early documentation of the atrocities of the Majdanek camp by the reporter Konstantin Simonov, who was among the first to visit the camp upon its liberation, and met prisoners who had just survived the inferno. Extremely rare. German.
“What I am about to write about is so monstrous and horrifying that its full extent is almost inconceivable. Lawyers, doctors, historians, and politicians will undoubtedly be occupied for a long time investigating these dreadful acts. And only these thorough investigations will reveal the full scope of the crime against humanity committed by the Germans, in all its details. I am far from knowing all the facts and figures: perhaps I have spoken with only a hundred of the witnesses and seen only a tenth of the existing traces of the crime. But a person who has seen this cannot remain silent and cannot wait. I wish to report now, especially today, on the first traces of the crime that have been uncovered, on what I have heard and seen with my own eyes in recent days…” (from the introduction).
Konstantin Simonov, an important Soviet writer and war correspondent. As a military correspondent for the Red Army, he visited the Majdanek camp immediately upon its liberation by the Red Army. Simonov, who toured the entire camp area, describes here in detail for the first time both its physical structure as seen with his own eyes, and the way it operated during the war, based on firsthand testimonies of prisoners – “Let us turn to the testimonies of individual witnesses with whom I spoke. Their testimonies may represent only a hundredth of the evidence that will later form the basis of the commission of inquiry. I spoke with the Russian prisoner-doctor Britchev, a senior physician in the camp’s prisoner-of-war hospital, as well as with a medical assistant in that same hospital, with engineers and civilian workers who were involved in the construction of the camp, and with camp inmates and prisoners of war alike. I also spoke with SS guards… From all these conversations I received a comprehensive picture of life in the extermination camp…”.
Simonov describes how the Majdanek extermination camp was built using Polish and Jewish prisoners of war captured during the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the expansion of the camp in May 1942, the construction of the extermination facilities, and a detailed account of the entire extermination process – the Nazis’ use of Zyklon B gas for mass killing, how more than 250 people were crammed at a time into a chamber measuring 40 square meters, the disinfection of clothing after death, and more. He also provides details about the crematorium for burning the bodies in the camp, from its construction to the various stages during the war in which the Nazis repeatedly attempted to increase the daily capacity for burning corpses by altering the structure to suit their sinister purpose. The systematic starvation of the prisoners, executions by torture, detailed documentation of transports of Jews arriving at the camp from across Europe, why at a certain stage the Nazis decided to replace the regular camp fence with an electric fence (following prisoners’ escape attempts), and how the vast sorting center for prisoners’ clothing operated – Simonov was among the first to see the prisoners’ garments piled in the various sections allocated by the Nazis, heaps of shoes, women’s dresses, men’s suits, toothbrushes, and more.
“I spoke with German prisoners who passed by the crematorium and the graves. They denied any involvement in it. They said it was not they who did it, but the SS. But when I later questioned an SS man who had worked in the camp, he claimed that the mass executions were carried out not by the SS, but by the Gestapo. The Gestapo men, on the other hand, blamed the SS. I do not know which of them burned the people, who simply beat them to death, who snatched their shoes… I do not know who removed the shoes and who sorted the women’s undergarments and the children’s dresses. But when I see this collection of clothing, I think to myself that the nation that produced people capable of all this must bear the full responsibility and the curse for the deeds of its representatives.”
According to what Simonov heard from prisoners who had just been liberated and had experienced the horrors of the camp firsthand, the basic assumption of the SS officers who were in charge of the camp was that everyone who arrived there, whether prisoners of war or civilians, whether Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, Jews, French, Greeks, etc. would sooner or later be killed; no one would leave this camp alive to tell what took place there. This initial assumption determined both the actions of the guards and the methods they used to exterminate the people in this camp. The dead are silent and can no longer speak. They cannot recount details or verify them with documents. No one would have proof, and this, in the view of the Germans, was the most important thing. The “hospital” in the camp was nothing more than a transit station to extermination. Yet the Nazis did not suffice with extermination alone; they ensured that it was carried out in the most shocking ways humanity had ever known in this camp. Toward the end of the booklet, Simonov describes in detail the severe abuses suffered by prisoners in the camp, including the abuses endured by women, who were subjected to repeated humiliations and tortures that are difficult to describe here.
The booklet is accompanied by harsh photos from the camp, including human bones burned in the crematorium, piles of the victims’ shoes, the bodies of prisoners shot into a mass grave, the corpses scattered throughout the camp as they appeared before Simonov’s eyes, and more.
This publication, issued in Berlin in 1946, was also intended for a German audience, as part of the reeducation effort and the presentation of the scale of the crimes to the public in Germany after the war. The fact that the publisher is the “Soviet Military Administration in Germany” indicates its educational character.
Extremely rare. It does not appear in the WorldCat global library catalog.
19 pages + 8 photographs. Tears with minor losses to the cover. Good condition.
