The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz

Denis Avey relates his wartime service and how he came to be held prisoner in E715A, a camp for Allied Prisoners of War adjacent to Auschwitz. He describes how he exchanged uniforms with a Jewish inmate of Auschwitz III in order to enter this camp to discover more about conditions there, with a view to reporting these to the authorities after the war.[3] He also relates how he smuggled cigarettes to another Jewish inmate Ernst Lobethal, having obtained these from Lobethal’s sister in Britain. He was convinced that Ernst had died by early 1945, because he could not have survived the death marches when the camp was evacuated. He also said that after the war the authorities were not interested in his story and he kept silence for more than half a century. Eventually he did begin to disclose his story and it came to the attention of the BBC. Rob Broomby was able to trace Lobethal’s sister Susanne and her son had a copy of a video recording which her brother before his death had made for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education in which he describes how a British POW known as 'Ginger' smuggled the cigarettes to him and how these saved his life by enabling him to exchange them for food and to have new soles put on his boots which enabled him to survive the death march.

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