Auschwitz: How death camp became centre of Nazi Holocaust
Eighty years ago, Soviet troops liberated the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and on January 27 world leaders will join some of the last survivors to commemorate the 1.1 million people murdered there.
Most of the remaining survivors are now in their 90s and this may be the last year any of them can participate.
In just four and a half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, a concentration camp located near the town of Auschwitz in occupied southern Poland.
Auschwitz was the center of the Nazi campaign to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population, and nearly a million of the dead there were Jews.
Others killed included Polish, Roma and Russian prisoners of war.
(When the Red Army tiptoed into Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, only about 7,000 prisoners remained. As the Nazis retreated westward, tens of thousands had been forced to leave on foot, embarking on ” Death March”.
Italian prisoner Primo Levi was lying in the camp hospital suffering from scarlet fever when the Soviet liberators arrived.
He later wrote in his Holocaust memoir, “Truce,” that the men “looked with strange embarrassment at the scattered bodies, the shabby hut, and the few of us who were still alive.”
“They did not greet us or smile; they seemed suppressed not just by compassion but guilt that … this crime should exist.”
"We saw haggard, tortured, impoverished people," Soldier Ivan Martinushkin talks about liberating the death camps, external. “We could tell by the look in their eyes that they were happy to be rescued from this hell.”
