Soviet doctors and Red Cross representatives among the Osventsim (Auschwitz) death camp prisoners, soon after the camp was liberated by the Red Army in early February 1945/Gateway To Russia, rbth.com
On a brisk January day in 1945, a Soviet Polkovnik, commanding the lead regiment of the Soviet 100th Division, approached the armored car of Lieutenant General Ivan L. Kuryshkin. The 100th was called the Siberian Division for the geographical origin of the unit and the battle-hardened makeup of most of its men. Kuryshkin commanded the 100th Division and had been pushing them hard through southern Poland, bypassing Kraków and continuing through the industrial region of Upper Silesia. The division’s goal as part of the 60th Army Group was a huge Soviet crossing of the Oder River, the last barrier before the Soviets would lay siege to Berlin.
On that unpaved Polish road, Kuryshkin returned the junior officer’s salute. The officer reported that in this part of Poland they were meeting less resistance from the Nazis and the road ahead was mostly clear. The officer pointed nervously ahead of them and said there was a camp just over the next rise that Kuryshkin needed to see.
Kuryshkin’s vehicle moved out and was accompanied by over a thousand of his men. They moved quickly, right up to the barbed wire main gate where the vehicle halted under the sign, Arbeit Macht Frei“. Its translation meant “Work Sets You Free.”
Kuryshkin could see with his own eyes the sign was a horrible lie.
There were 7,000 emaciated human skeletons staring at Kuryshkin’s men from behind the fences. Soviet soldiers, especially Kuryshkin’s Siberians, were tough and resilient. They were used to the brutality of war against the Germans on the Eastern Front, but Kuryshkin thought Auschwitz was an inhumane horror all its own. The conditions were decrepit and overcrowded, there was insufficient clothing even against the Polish winter.
Thousands of emaciated survivors had endured the unimaginable. Among the Jewish, gypsy and Slavic prisoners were Soviet POWs captured earlier by the Germans. Auschwitz’s camp guards were German SS men. The Russians hated every SS man long before they saw Auschwitz. The Russian POWs were walking skeletons like their fellow prisoners. Had the German guards remained at the camp when the Soviets arrived, Kuryshkin’s men would have shot the Germans quickly and without mercy.
Behind the barbed wire at Auschwitz, amidst the horrors and the silence of death, the Soviet soldiers discovered a pitiful group of approximately 200 children. Two of them, the youngest among them, were Eva Mozes Kor and her twin sister, Miriam. The two girls, no more than 11 years old, had been prisoners at Auschwitz for a year. Their journey into this pit of inhumanity had begun in Romania. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, the ruthless “selection” process tore them from their mother. Her fate was sealed by a callous gesture from a Nazi officer who pointed towards the gas chambers and crematoriums. Eva and Miriam never saw her again.
An SS guard, observing the twins, made note to point them out to Dr. Josef Mengele, the camp doctor, who would become infamous for his twisted and inhuman experiments on twins. The fate of these two innocent children was now sealed. The unimaginable began.
Among the experiments were blood draws and injections. Copious quantities of blood were drawn from one arm while unknown substances were injected into the other. One such injection made Eva gravely ill, experiencing high fever, severe swelling, and body rashes. Mengele’s prognosis was that Eva would die within two weeks. He was wrong.
Among Mengele’s weirdest and most cruel experiments were cross blood transfusions between male and female twins in an attempt to change their sexes. He mixed the blood types of twins, believing that the genetic or biological effects of such transfusions could produce alterations in physical characteristics, perhaps changing gender traits. Often performed without anesthesia, immense pain resulted, also death. Genital mutilation was also part of Mengele’s experiments. But this monstrous butcher of Auschwitz was grotesquely fascinated with the eyes of of his doomed victims—excising them from their dead bodies and displaying them like a nightmarish butterfly collection upon the walls of his “clinic.” Worse, these experiments were conducted without any scientific foundation and were purely motivated by the Nazis’ twisted views on racial and genetic engineering.
In the few short years of the war, six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Of the 1.3 million inmates murdered at Auschwitz, 90% were Jews, meaning one sixth of all the Jews in Germany’s great attempt at genocide were murdered at the Auschwitz camp between May 1940 until its liberation on January 27, 1945.
In the brief, dark years of the world war, six million Jews fell victim to the Holocaust—a stark testament to human cruelty. At Auschwitz, the numbers are even more harrowing: of the 1.3 million inmates who were methodically murdered there, 90% were Jews. In other words, one-sixth of all the Jewish lives lost in Nazi Germany’s calculated campaign of genocide were taken at that infamous camp between May 1940 and its liberation on January 27, 1945.
However, before Kuryshkin’s division arrived at Auschwitz, Mengele and his fellow Nazis had fled. While after the war the Nazi hunters scoured the globe in search of him, Mengele found refuge in South America, mostly in Brazil. There, he lived in rural areas undisturbed until his death in 1979, never once being accountable for the sick brutality he inflicted. Other high-ranking Nazis were tried at Nuremberg, some hanged, others executed by firing squad. Many others were sent to prison but served relatively short sentences.
Unfortunately, Mengele’s ghastly experiments were not unique to Auschwitz. In a project headed by Canadian-born psychiatrist and medical monster Aubrey Levin during the 1970s to 1980s, the South African Defense Force forced lesbian and gay military personnel to undergo “sex-change” operations. This was part of Levin’s program to purge homosexuality from the South African army. Most victims were 16 to 24-year-old white males drafted into the army during the South African Border War. Later sentenced by Canada for sex assault against South African soldiers, an estimated 900 forced sexual reassignment operations may have been performed between 1971 and 1989 at military hospitals. The end of apartheid in 1996 changed South African policy dramatically towards LGBTQ+ individuals, enshrining protections for gays and lesbians in their post-apartheid constitution.
Joseph Stalin and later during in the Brezhnev era used psychiatric institutions (psikhushkas) for political repression. While there is no documented evidence of systematic gender-change experiments, the Soviet state engaged in severe psychiatric and medical abuses. Homosexuality was criminalized and the Soviets forced gay men to undergo castration as part of their “rehabilitation.” LGBTQ+ individuals were often sent to labor camps.
These events, like the Holocaust, demonstrate how governments can turn against specific populations.
Since the first decade of the 21st century, and in more isolated examples since World War II, there has been in America an increased focus on transgender youth and their health needs, especially regarding hormone blocking treatments, counseling, and, in some cases, sexual alteration surgeries. The great debate is whether such treatments and surgeries should come after a young person reaches adulthood and can decide whether to transgender, or whether parents should be able to decide such procedures for their minor children.
The topic is highly debated and has led to differing opinions among medical professionals, parents, and lawmakers, with policies and approaches continuing to evolve. As of January 2025, a total of 26 U.S. states enacted laws banning or severely restricting gender-affirming care for minors, including hormone therapy and surgeries. In United States v. Skrmetti pending before the U. S. Supreme Court, the issue is whether a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming medical care for minors under 18 is constitutional.
Our 2024 legislature attempted to include Kansas as in the list of states banning such procedures, but the legislation was vetoed, and the veto was not overridden. With stronger GOP numbers in the 2025 legislature, the effort to ban such procedures for minors will again be made.
During the Biden Administration, even had the Democrat Congress wanted to, Biden didn’t have the numbers to prohibit a ban of such gender assignment procedures by individual states. The Trump Administration may take different directions, given that Trump, by presidential order, already has declared that it is government policy there are only two genders, and transgender personnel are not to be part of our military.
Following the war, Eva Mozes Kor made an extraordinary journey. In 1950, she emigrated to Israel, where she served with distinction in the Israeli Defense Forces during the 1956 Suez Crisis, rising to the rank of Sergeant Major. Afterward, she married an American, raised two children, and later made her home in Indiana. It was there, in the later years of her life, that she took an unprecedented step—publicly extending radical forgiveness to the Nazis, including those responsible for the heinous medical experiments. Through her work, she dedicated herself to educating others about the Holocaust, sharing a powerful message of forgiveness and peace.
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Ron Smith – Special to The Informer
Dean Halliday Smith is a fifth generation Kansan, a retired attorney, a grandfather several times over, a Vietnam veteran, and a civil war historian. Territorial Kansas, the Civil War, and the post-Civil War west are his subjects of interest. Manhattan KS graduate, graduated Kansas Wesleyan in ’73. Worked on Governor John Carlin’s staff in 1980-81. Lobbied for the Kansas Bar Association for 14 years. His small farm is near where the historic Santa Fe Trail converged on the “Pawnee Fork” along the west route of the SFT.
