
Rote Fahne, Austria: 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp
We hereby publish an unofficial translation of an article by the Rote Fahne, Austria:
Featured Image: Soviet soldiers and liberated prisoners in January 1945; Source: Rote Fahne
80 years ago today, on January 27, 1945, the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp (then in occupied Poland) was liberated by the Soviet Red Army. In Auschwitz, the Nazis carried out industrial mass murder of around 1.1 to 1.5 million people – Jews, anti-fascists, communists, Roma and Sinti, … mainly from Poland, Germany, France, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Romania, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz remains a symbol of the victory of the anti-fascist, democratic and revolutionary forces against German fascism.
In the Auschwitz concentration camp there was also an illegal resistance organized by the prisoners, which initially mainly formed from the various nationalities in the camp. Among them was an Austrian resistance group that was founded in 1942. In 1943 the so-called “Auschwitz Combat Group” was organized as an international resistance group, mainly through the union of Austrian and Polish resistance fighters. Part of the international leadership of the Auschwitz Combat Group was the Austrian communist Ernst Burger, who was hanged on December 30, 1944, together with two other Austrian anti-fascists in front of 15,000 prisoners at the roll call square because of his resistance activities. Also part of this combat group was the Viennese communist and member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Austria, Alfred Klahr, whose theoretical work on the question of the Austrian nation formed an essential basis for the anti-fascist and national liberation struggle in Austria. With the help of the Auschwitz combat group, Alfred Klahr was able to successfully escape from the concentration camp on June 15, 1944, together with a Polish prisoner – but was caught by an SS patrol in Warsaw and executed.
The numerous names of the resistance in the Auschwitz concentration camp, as well as the anti-fascists and resistance fighters who fought outside the camps, should be kept alive as a venerable memory. Their memory must today encourage us to defend the social and democratic rights of the people, to promote their unification and to resist the destruction of these rights by those in power.


“Kampfgruppe Auschwitz”: The Austrian resistance fighters Alfred Klahr and Ernst Burger. Source: Alfred Klahr Society