When the Soviets arrived in Silesia at the end of 1944, they formulated a battle plan to cross and hold the Oder River not later than the end of January 1945. Despite the Allies certainly being aware of the presence of Nazi concentration camps in southern Poland, when Stalin was shown the battle plans by General Ivan Konev, he pointed to the region and simply said: "for the gold".

Vassili Petrenko, a colonel at the time, commented in his memoirs on the discovery of Auschwitz which happened on the 27th January. He believed that had Stalin pointed at the battle plan and said "horror" instead of "gold" and ordered the liberation of the camps as a priority, then thousands of Jews who were killed in the days before liberation would have been saved. Silesia's natural resources and industrial power were prioritised by Stalin, whose antisemitism meant he did not identify liberation of the Nazi concentration as a priority, more as a byproduct.