http://www.etherit.co.uk/month/0/27.htm
January 27th, 1945 (SATURDAY)
UNITED KINGDOM: U 1172 Sunk in St George´s Channel, in position 52.24N, 05.42W, by depth charges from the British frigates HMS Tyler, Keats and Bligh. 52 dead (all hands lost). (Alex Gordon)
Corvette HMCS Long Branch departed Londonderry for Halifax, Nova Scotia.
FRANCE: German gains in the Ardennes are eliminated.
Lyons: Charles Maurras, the leader of Action Français, is sentenced to life imprisonment for collaborating with the Nazis.
GERMANY: U-3028 is commissioned.
POLAND: KL (Konzentrationslager) Auschwitz liberated by Soviet troops. (Jason Leech)
Auschwitz-Birkenau: At midday, the four young Soviet cavalrymen, guns at the ready, came cautiously down the road that surrounded the camp. Looking through the barbed wire, they saw living skeletons moving slowly in a landscape of corpses sprawled in the snow, punctuated by broken-down and burnt huts. The Red Army had stumbled upon the Nazis’ biggest extermination camp.
As the booming Russian artillery came nearer, the Nazis attempted to conceal the traces of their hideous mass murder. They have burnt most of the camp’s carefully maintained records. Nine days ago they evacuated the 20,000 prisoners with the most chance of survival. Those who were too weak to walk out of the camp were shot dead. The rest have been dispersed to other camps further west. Anyone falling behind on the long march to their new destination was shot and thrown into a ditch.
Meanwhile the SS blew up the crematoria and gas chambers, and set fire to the clothing stores, destroying 29 of the camp’s 35 warehouses. In the remainder, the Russians have found huge piles of suits, dresses, children’s clothing, shoes, carpets, shaving brushes, spectacles and false teeth. Enormous numbers of suitcases bear hotel labels from all over Europe; trade marks on clothing show that the victims came from countries as far apart as Hungary and the Netherlands.
The Germans left only a few hundred inmates behind in the camp’s hospital block, most of them sick with diptheria, scarlet fever or typhus. In the last few days they have led a twilight existence roaming the unguarded camp, a ragged hollow-eyed, feverish horde, rifling the deserted and burnt huts for fuel and food. They have peered out through the fog at the Wehrmacht tanks and lorries retreating around them, and tentatively breached the wire to gather potatoes. Now, they regard the young Red Army troops with a jaundiced stare: can the nightmare really be over? Or is there more to come?
(From the Memoirs of Yakov Vinnichenko in the Guardian, Tuesday January 25, 2005)
At about 4am on January 27 we approached Oswiecim (Auschwitz). It is a small town on the Sola river. We didn’t even know there was a concentration camp there.
The Germans had far better weapons than us, and their rations were excellent, not like the gruel we had. Sometimes we didn’t even get that and went hungry for days. The Germans also had warm clothing, but we looked like riffraff by 1945: our clothes were threadbare, and we had no decent boots or blankets. It was mild for January. There was no snow, which we needed to melt in our pots to get water.
We won that war with our bodies. We would lose seven of our men for each German. It was tough in Auschwitz, too. The Germans deployed artillery and submachine guns outside the camp. They shot at us from the watchtowers and barracks. The fight raged for about five hours, and we lost many men. Then they pulled back.
When we entered the camp, we gasped: barbed wire everywhere, everyone in striped clothes and caps. The prisoners could barely walk: they looked like shadows or ghosts, they were so skinny. Some could not even move, others were supported by friends. They tried to talk to us, but we could not understand them: there were people from different countries, including many Jews from France, Poland and even Palestine. At the time of our assault there were 7-10,000 people in the camp - I learned after the war that the Germans had earlier shipped hundreds of thousands of prisoners to Germany and continued to use them for forced labour. But those left behind were barely alive.
At first, when they saw us, they could not believe they were free. But when they understood, some began to laugh, others broke down crying. Many tried to kiss us, but they looked so horrible that we kept away so as not to catch some bug. Many asked for food, but we didn’t have any. Our support units arrived the next day and got busy with the prisoners, feeding and washing them. But we only stayed for a couple of hours. It was a horrible scene. We went into a filthy women’s barrack, with bunks in tiers and bloodstains on some of them.
The Germans had not expected everything would move so fast: we carried out the operation very quickly. They hadn’t had time to blow up anything or plant mines. There was a huge construction site next to the camp: prisoners were building a chemicals plant. There were not just camp inmates working there, but also tens of thousands of civilians shipped from the USSR.
The grim barracks stood in rows and, from a distance, looked like a factory - and it was a real factory of death. I saw a great deal in the war, but nothing so horrible or awesome as that camp. The experience gave us a new energy and determination to put an end to the abomination of nazism. Our men did not spare their lives - we knew our cause was just. In a few days we moved on to the west, and I was again gravely wounded, now on German territory, at a place called Lonau.
(Jim Davies)
EASTERN FRONT: The Soviet Army reaches Memel in Lithuania.
Marshal Konev has virtually severed the vital industrial area of Upper Silesia from the rest of the Reich. At the same time, according to German reports, Marshal Zhukov has outflanked Poznan and his forward patrols have reached Bentschen, only 100 miles from Berlin. In the north Marshal Rokossovsky has burst through to the Baltic and cut off East Prussia. About two-thirds of the province has now been captured. Konigsberg, to the north, has been practically cut off and Danzig is threatened. Rokossovsky had to move fast to beat off a desperate final German counter-attack to try to break out to the Vistula.
Meanwhile in Berlin the Volkssturm, consisting largely of old men and schoolboys, is to fight on. The streets are being cleared of refugees to make way for reinforcements. German radio is preparing the people for disaster: “This is our last chance. Victory or destruction is the slogan guiding the fate of the German people.”
BURMA: The Ledo Road from Burma to China is finally opened.
ULITHI: USAAF General Curtis LeMay meets with Admirals Spruance and Mitscher for a conference to discuss the projected American invasion of Iwo Jima.
LeMay secured the approval of Nimitz and Harmon for the following supporting operations: 1) picketboat searches on D minus 8 and D minus 5; 2) weather-strike missions by three B-29s operating individually against Tokyo on three nights beginning D minus 4/3 and against Nagoya on three nights beginning D Plus 3/4; 3) major strikes against a primary target in the Tokyo area on D Plus 4; and 4) a diversionary raid against Nagoya on D minus 2.”
CANADA: Corvette HMCS Woodstock paid off Esquimalt for conversion to loop layer.
U.S.A.: Liberty magazine cover has a portrait of Captain Thomas H. “Tommy” Wakeman as the face of Army Air Force.
Starting today 40 Consolidated B-32A-5, -10 and -15 aircraft are delivered as unarmed TB-32-CF crew trainers.
Commissioning of USS Higbee, first US Navy ship named after a USN woman.
Destroyers USS Meredith and O’Hare laid down.
Destroyer escort USS Hanna commissioned.
Destroyer USS Stormes commissioned.
Had the Times Sports page taken comments, you would probably have read several like this:
These new owners of the Yankees are going to have a tough time keeping the tradition going, what with all those World Series Championships won by Ruth and Gehrig. Those guys are gone now, so where will they find players of that caliber?
It appears “The Battle of the Bulge” is over. Is there a particular date when it was considered over?