‘No One Believed What We Had Seen’: British Soldiers Who Witnessed Mass Murder in Auschwitz

Abstract

The Auschwitz extermination camp is synonymous with the Holocaust. Countless books and films have been made about its horrors and over one million people visit its site every year.1 It is a lesser known fact, though, that hundreds of British men were imprisoned on its outskirts in camp E715, a site designated for POWs.2 This was originally located in Auschwitz III, next to the Monowitz concentration camp and approximately two miles east of the gas chambers. In 1944, the camp was relocated by a short distance to be in closer proximity to the IG Farben plant that was engaged in the production of synthetic oil and rubber as part of the German war effort. The British soldiers held within this complex were thus in a unique position to observe Nazi crimes, and to try and ease the suffering of individual concentration camp prisoners by providing them with food and cigarettes. Some of these men would become key witnesses in the 1947–8 IG Farben trial at Nuremberg, helping to document industry’s use of slave labour during the Second World War. The British public, however, remained largely unaware of the POWs’ connections with Auschwitz and it is only relatively recently that details of their plight have started to receive greater media and academic attention. Drawing upon post-war affidavits, together with the author’s own interviews with three POW survivors, this chapter sheds new light on their experiences.3 In the process, it offers a compelling example of why the Holocaust can be considered very much a part of Britain’s own national history.