HELL ON EARTH

Chilling colourised pics capture Auschwitz horrors that revealed true evil of Hitler’s regime – 75years after liberation

Rebecca Husselbee

Published: 19:24, 27 Jan 2020
Updated: 13:42, 3 Feb 2020

CHILLING colourised photographs of prisoners at Auschwitz capture the true horrors of the Nazi's 75 years after the camp's liberation.

The harrowing images show skeletal Auschwitz inmates, discarded bodies and haunting images of belongings such as false teeth and glasses snatched on arrival from those arriving at the camp.

Sadness and a skeletal frame - this was often all that was left of victims of the holocaustCredit: Mediadrumimages/Tom Marshall

Many of those killed at the camp were children, with 23,000 under the age of 18 being sent there between 1940 and 1945Credit: Mediadrumimages/Tom Marshall

Many were subjected to cruel beatings before finally being sent to the gas chambers to dieCredit: Mediadrumimages/Tom Marshall

The pictures shed harrowing light on the reality of the notorious camp - as Russain soldiers were horrified by what they found at the site when they got there.

In an attempt to cover up the shocking truth at Auschwitz, SS soldiers who knew that the enemy were fast approaching, blew up the gas chambers to hide the mass killings carried out there.

On January 1945, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, ordered the evacuation of all camps including Auschwitz, telling commanders, "The Führer holds you personally responsible for... making sure that not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy."

On January 17, 58,000 prisoners were "death marched" out of the camp with many being shot or left to die along the way due to freezing cold weather conditions.

Russain soldiers arrived on January 27 to find the terrible scene, with bodies left on railway carriages, human remains and prisoners left behind starving to death.

An emaciated 18-year-old Russian girl looks into the camera lens during the liberation of Dachau concentration camp in 1945. Dachau was the first German concentration camp, opened in 1933Credit: Mediadrumimages/Tom Marshall

More evocative shots show the first group of British men who went into the liberated campCredit: Mediadrumimages/Tom Marshall

Young Jewish refugee, rescued from a concentration camp, resting up in a hospital bed in Malmo southern Sweden in 1945Credit: Mediadrumimages/Tom Marshall

Istvan Reiner, aged 4, smiles for a studio portrait, shortly before being murdered at Auschwitz concentration campCredit: Mediadrumimages/Tom Marshall

Czeslawa Kwoka was just 14 when she was killed by Nazi doctors who gave her a fatal injection to the heartCredit: Mediadrumimages/Tom Marshall

Auschwitz concentration camp was constructed in the suburbs of the Polish city Oświęcim, near the modern nation's southern border, in 1940.

Above the gates, like other Nazi death camps, was the famous motto "Arbeit macht frei" – "Work brings freedom".

I was sent to Auschwitz at 12 where my mother and seven siblings were gassed

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1.1million Jews, Romani people, ethnic Poles, Soviet citizens, Soviet prisoners of war, political opponents, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses were killed at the camp over five years, mostly using gas chambers before burning their bodies.

Inmates were first taken to the main camp, a former army barracks, in 1940, before the second extermination camp, Auschwitz Birkenau, was set up with a labour camp to staff a local chemical factory as well as several gas chambers to cope with the huge increase in prisoners.