Himmler Halts Gassing: Holocaust Cover-Up Begins

Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust, ordered the SS to halt all gassing operations at concentration camps on January 27, 1945. The directive was not an act of mercy but of self-preservation. With Soviet forces advancing rapidly through Poland and Allied armies pushing into Germany from the west, Himmler calculated that he might negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies—and dead witnesses in extermination camps would complicate that fantasy. By January 1945, the Nazi extermination machine had already murdered approximately six million Jews, along with hundreds of thousands of Roma, disabled persons, political prisoners, and others. The gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest and most efficient killing center, had been dismantled in November 1944 as Soviet troops approached, and the camp''s crematoria were dynamited in a futile effort to destroy evidence. But the killing had continued by other means: forced death marches, starvation, exposure, and shooting. Himmler''s order coincided almost exactly with the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. When Red Army soldiers entered the camp, they found approximately 7,000 emaciated survivors, hundreds of thousands of men''s suits, 837,000 women''s garments, and 7.7 tons of human hair. The full horror of what had occurred was documented by Soviet photographers and film crews, though the world would not fully comprehend the scale of the genocide for months. Himmler''s gamble on negotiation failed completely. His secret peace overtures to the Allies through Swedish intermediary Count Folke Bernadotte were rejected. When Hitler learned of the contact in April 1945, he stripped Himmler of all offices and ordered his arrest. Himmler attempted to flee in disguise after Germany''s surrender but was captured by British forces on May 23, 1945, and bit down on a cyanide capsule before he could be interrogated. The date of Auschwitz''s liberation, January 27, was designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations in 2005.