Film showing footage of the Auschwitz camp after liberation. This footage was taken by Soviet military film crews.
When Soviet forces liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp complex in January 1945, they found evidence of the crimes committed at the camp by Nazi German authorities. This evidence included warehouses of clothes, suitcases, and other plundered belongings. The Nazis had stolen these items from Jews they had murdered or imprisoned in the camp. The Soviets also found masses of human hair that the Nazi authorities had shorn from people (mostly Jews) prior to their imprisonment or murder.
Before killing women, the Nazis cut off their hair. Masses of hair were packed in bags. Twenty kilos, twenty-two kilos, raw material for German factories. Seven thousand kilograms of hair, 140,000 murdered women. The Fascists traded in death. They made fertilizers of human bones and delivered them to the Strenn firm. They sold hair to factories in the nationalized upholstery industry. Another branch of this same industry, the bandits tore out dentures from corpses' mouths to get hold of gold teeth. All such trophies took up the space of 35 storehouses. Here is one containing spectacles. Even if every tenth inmate wore spectacles, then how many had to be killed to provide this? Clothes and underwear of the dead. Who in Germany was to wear the clothes of the murdered infants? This mass of clothing, this little frock, 514,843 pieces of men's, women's, and children's clothing.
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