A HERO soldier decided the only way to find out the true horrors of Auschwitz was to see for himself – so he volunteered to infiltrate the concentration camp.
Polish officer Witold Pilecki reported back to the Allies about the brutality he witnessed – but his incredible bravery was not acted on many believed his reports were too horrific to be true.
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Pilecki was a soldier in the Polish cavalry when his country was invaded by the Germans in 1939.
When the Nazis started their brutal occupation, he joined the underground resistance.
Nazis began to round up anyone they considered a threat and sent them to Auschwitz.
The resistance was horrified to hear about the torture and beatings that took place.
The Poles, who were still fighting, decided that someone needed to be sent to organize resistance and to tell the world about the unimaginable horrors.
Cavalry officer Pilecki, a staunch patriot, and a devout Catholic, offered to leave his family for what appeared to be a suicide mission.
He plotted to be arrested in Warsaw by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz.
And yesterday was the 81st anniversary of his brave plan as his incredible story is told in the book “The Volunteer” by Jack Fairweather
“What Pilecki witnessed in the camp was absolutely unprecedented in human history,” Fairweather told Time.
“He had to figure out what the Nazis were doing with each new step they made towards developing a death factory.
“He couldn’t always grasp the scale of the murder unfolding before him.”
After arriving at the camp and becoming inmate 4859, he began documenting the horrors he saw there and creating a resistance organisation.
His organisation discovered that Auschwitz was being constructed gas chambers for the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust by 1942.
The gigantic machinery of the camp spewing out dead bodies has claimed many of my friends
Witold Pilecki
His reports from the camp were sent to the Allies using a courier system that the Polish resistance operated throughout occupied Europe.
Pilecki began to devise a bold plan to liberate Auschwitz.
These included one where the RAF would bomb Auschwitz’s walls and another in the which Polish paratroopers from Britain would fly in.
“The gigantic machinery of the camp spewing out dead bodies has claimed many of my friends,” Later, he wrote.
“We have sent messages to the outside world which were then transmitted back by foreign radio stations. Consequently the camp guards are very angry right now.”
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Auschwitz – the factory of death
The largest of the Nazi death camps was the scene of the most appalling mass murder in human history.
During the Holocaust over a million people – the vast majority of them Jews – lost their lives at the sprawling complex
The concentration camp was constructed in the suburbs of the Polish city Oświęcim, near the modern nation’s southern border, in 1940.
After annexed that area of Poland in the early stages of World War Two. The Nazi regime needed somewhere to hold Polish political prisoners.
The construction of Auschwitz II Birkenau in Brzezinka, three kilometres away, began in October 1941.
It was in Birkenau, which held 90,000 prisoners by 1944, that the first gas chamber to murder Jews was made operational in March 1942.
When mass killings were at their highest, up to 6,000 Jews per day were gassed with Zyklon B (a cyanide-based pesticide).
The gas chambers were not the only place where people died. Many others died from starvation and forced labour, as well as the infectious diseases spread through the camps.
Life at Auschwitz was appalling – a true hell on earth.
The SS guards kept the prisoners in a crowded, unhygienic and inhumane environment, where they were constantly threatened with torture or punishment.
Inmates were also subject to cruel, sometimes fatal, medical experiments by twisted doctors like Josef Mengele.
His reports were sent to the Allies via a courier system, which was used throughout occupied Europe by the Polish resistance.
Pilecki began to devise a bold plan to liberate Auschwitz.
These included one where the RAF would bomb Auschwitz’s walls and another in the which Polish paratroopers from Britain would fly in.
“The gigantic machinery of the camp spewing out dead bodies has claimed many of my friends,” He wrote later.
“We have sent messages to the outside world which were then transmitted back by foreign radio stations.
“Consequently the camp guards are very angry right now.”
But in 1943 it became clear that the Allies weren’t going to liberate the camp and he and two others escaped at 2am, with the Gestapo in hot pursuit.
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After his escape Mr Pilecki was captured fighting in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and spent the rest of the conflict in a prisoner-of-war camp.
He joined the Free Polish troops in Italy in July 1945, where he was able to return to Poland to gather intelligence about the Soviet takeover.
He was taken into custody and tortured by the Soviet-installed Polish Communist Regime after the war.
He was then subject to a mock trial for espionage, and executed in 1948.
Paying tribute, the Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, said Pilecki was “an example of inexplicable goodness at a time of inexplicable evil”.
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