Two days after the infamous concentration camp in Auschwitz was liberated, General Lieutenant Konstantin Kraynyukov was able to put down into a terse telegram some initial details of the camp itself and what it held. But before launching into descriptions, he felt rightly compelled to sum up his thoughts on what he had seen in four short words: “A heinous death camp.”
The telegram was sent to Georgy Malenkov, then the Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union, second in command to Stalin himself. No doubt unaware of the depths of the horrors held in the newly-liberated camp, Malenkov still felt the weight of the news was sufficient enough to forward it to Stalin less than 90 minutes after the telegram was received.
Here at TranslatingHistory we’ve gotten our hands on a number of documents related to the Red Army liberation of Auschwitz, and will be providing translations over the coming weeks. The translated telegram, in the meantime, is provided below.
TELEGRAM
To Moscow, Comrade MALENKOV
The Auschwitz area of concentration camps has been liberated. A heinous death camp. There are five camps in Auschwitz. Four of them contained people from all over Europe, and the fifth camp was a prison where people were imprisoned for all sorts of offenses against the camp administration.
Each camp is a huge area surrounded by a fence made of several rows of barbed wire, above which high-voltage electric wires run. Behind these fences are countless wooden barracks. Endless crowds of people, liberated by the Red Army, are walking out of this death camp. Among them are Hungarians, Italians, French, Czechoslovakians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Romanians, Danes, and Belgians. They all look extremely weary, gray-haired old men and young men, mothers with infants and teenagers, almost all half-naked.
There are many of our Soviet citizens here, residents of the Leningrad, Kalinin, Vitebsk, Tula, Moscow Oblasts, and from all of the regions of Soviet Ukraine. Many of them are crippled, bearing signs of torture, signs of Nazi atrocities.
According to the preliminary testimony from prisoners, hundreds of thousands of people in Auschwitz were tortured, burned, and shot.
* I request a disposition to dispatch representatives of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of Fascist Atrocities.
MEMBER OF THE MILITARY COUNCIL OF THE 1st UKRAINIAN FRONT
GENERAL LIEUTENANT KRAYNYUKOV
29 January 1945
Received 0530 30 January 1945 Forwarded 0700 30 January 1945
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