Sixty years since the liberation of Auschwitz

He was arrested on September 19, 1940, only three months after the concentration camp was opened. After being tortured he was transferred to Auschwitz. He as able to get reports out almost immediately and, from October 1940 until April 1943, he and other members of the Polish resistance supplied the British with details of the nature of the camps.

There were several concentration camps at Auschwitz. The first was a forced labour camp that provided slave labour for German businesses. The second was a death camp. It existed solely to murder prisoners, mostly Jewish. The second camp was constructed in 1941 and the process of murder on an industrial scale began in the spring of 1942.

Pilecki managed to smuggle out many reports during this time. The Allies knew about the extermination camps at Auschwitz as they were being built. Over one million people were killed in Auschwitz.

Pilecki and other soldiers interned at the camps organized a vast network called the Union of Military Organizations (ZOW). By the spring of 1942 they had over 1,000 members among the inmates. They worked to improve morale, provide news from outside the camp and build a network to prepare for an uprising in the camp. The uprising depended on an airdrop of weapons by the Allies or other armed support.

The weapons and support were never provided.

In 1943, Pilecki managed to escape to present his report and make a request for aid in person. His report detailing the nature of the camps and the numbers of people being murdered daily was forwarded to London.

Nothing was done.

Pilecki also helped in the organization of an uprising in Warsaw in August, 1944. He was captured as that uprising was crushed and spent the rest of the war in other prisoner of war camps.

His final fate was to be executed by the Stalinist regime in Poland after the war in 1948.

The Allies did nothing about the death camps but their response to the weapons research by the Nazi regime was quite different.

The first human-created object in space was a test flight of a military rocket designed to carry high explosives into the midst of a city. Two of the men responsible for this project, German Army General Dornberger and SS Major Werner von Braun, would go on to become heroes of the American space program.

Their rocket, called the V-2, is the only weapons program that killed more people in its production than it did in its use. It is credited with killing 9,000 residents of London.

The V-2 was produced with slave labour provided from the network of concentration camps. More than 20,000 inmates were killed during its production.

Many died from overwork, malnutrition, disease and accidents. Many were hanged as examples for the other inmates. Those accused of sabotage, and those working with them at the time, were hanged from cranes above the work area, where they would slowly strangle to death. The bodies were left hanging for several days.

As was the case of the Auschwitz camps, the Allies learned of the existence of the rocket program almost as soon as it started.

Again, the Polish resistance helped to provide the information.

There the resemblance ends, because the Allies bombed the research and testing facilities several times, and each time the Germans re-built them elsewhere, only to have them bombed again.

A test rocket from a site in Poland was recovered by the Polish resistance and turned over to the British. The major research facility in Germany at Peenemünde was also revealed to the British through the Polish resistance who got the information from Polish workers at the site.

In August 1943 a bombing raid killed over 700 staff at the site. Other production and launching sites were bombed as soon as the Allies learned of them.

As a result, the German government moved the rocket production facilities to an underground mine near Nordhausen. The mine was part of the Mittelbau-Dora slave labour camp complex. The mine tunnels were expanded, and the weapons were built, mostly by slave labour. Some parts of the production process were so deadly that workers would only last two weeks before the poisonous chemicals they worked with killed them. Von Braun is known to have visited the slave works on several occasions.

When they realized that the Germans were losing the war, von Braun and Dornberger gathered many of their fellow rocket scientists, buried literally tonnes of documents for safe keeping and rushed to surrender to the Americans.

They were welcomed with open arms to help with the American space weapons programs. Over the next two decades, Major von Braun helped to develop the rockets that were built to drop hydrogen bombs on cities, and powered the rockets that sent men to the Moon. General Dornberger worked both for the government and private industry to develop space-planes, like the modern space shuttle, that would have been used as bombers. This project never came to fruition, but the research was used in developing the space shuttle. Both men worked tirelessly to ensure that space travel would be used as a method to fight wars. Von Braun did change his mind by the mid 60s and began to speak publicly against trying to fight wars in space.

As we watch the world’s leaders shed crocodile tears over the fate of the millions who died in the Nazi program of genocide against Jews, we should remember that their predecessors of 60 years ago knew about the camps and did nothing to help the inmates. And when the war ended they welcomed war criminals to aid them in building weapons for a nuclear war against Russia.

There is much more about Witold Pilecki, Auschwitz, and the V-2 rocket at www.wikipedia.org. A very good book on the military reasoning behind the American space program is Arming the Heavens, by Jack Manno, 1984.