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The corpses of prisoners killed just prior to the evacuation of Auschwitz-Birkenau tumble out of a shed into the snow when it is opened after the liberation.

Photograph | Photograph Number: 58413
The corpses of prisoners killed just prior to the evacuation of Auschwitz-Birkenau tumble out of a shed into the snow when it is opened after the liberation. Original caption: "A store of "human fuel", handily by the ovens. The shed was full of bodies piled up to the ceiling. When the doors were opened, some cadavers tumbled out."

The corpses of prisoners killed just prior to the evacuation of Auschwitz-Birkenau tumble out of a shed into the snow when it is opened after the liberation.

Original caption: "A store of "human fuel", handily by the ovens. The shed was full of bodies piled up to the ceiling. When the doors were opened, some cadavers tumbled out."

Date
January 1945
Locale
Auschwitz, [Upper Silesia] Poland
Variant Locale
Brzezinka
Birkenau
Auschwitz III
Monowitz
Auschwitz II
Photo Designation
KILLING CENTERS -- Auschwitz -- LIBERATION -- Victims/Burial -- General
Photo Credit
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Mark Chrzanowski

About This Photograph

Event History
One of a set of 32 still photographs from motion picture film taken by Henryk Makarewicz (of Nova Huta, Poland) who was a film cameraman in the Polish Berling Army when it entered the liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in mid-January 1945. According to a memo written in 1962 by the director of the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kazimierz Smolen, soon after the collection was purchased from the photographer, Makarewicz was instructed to film the various sections of the camp, including funeral pyres and crematoria ruins. The cameraman used 24 x 35mm. motion picture film and made the stills from the film at the end of January 1945.

[Source: "Protokol," State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Syg.F/43-74 (4 April 1962).]

See "Auschwitz Main Camp" in Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Volume 1 Part A. "Auschwitz"
See Also https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005189.
See Also https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005131.

Keywords and Subjects

Rights and Restrictions

Photo Source
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Provenance: Mark Chrzanowski
Source Record ID: Collections: 2006.174
 
Record last modified: 2003-07-21 00:00:00
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1144238