Liberation of Auschwitz
Soviet troops reached Auschwitz on 27 January 1945 and found about 7,000 people still alive. The camp complex in southern Poland had been the largest of the killing centres: a main camp, the extermination site at Birkenau with four gas chamber and crematorium buildings, and a labour camp at Monowitz working for IG Farben's synthetic rubber plant, with dozens of subcamps. At least 1.1 million people were murdered there, some 960,000 of them Jews, along with Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and others. The SS had begun destroying the evidence months earlier. The gassing stopped in November 1944, the crematoria were dynamited in January, and files were burned. Then, between 17 and 21 January, some 56,000 prisoners were marched west in temperatures around minus twenty, and thousands were shot on the roads or died of exposure — the death marches, which killed a large share of those who had survived the camp itself. Those left behind were the ones too ill to walk. The 322nd Rifle Division arrived six days later and found the survivors, several thousand corpses, and warehouses holding some 370,000 men's suits, 837,000 women's garments and seven tonnes of human hair. The Soviet report was published and made little impact at the time; Belsen's liberation by British troops in April, filmed and photographed, is what reached western opinion. The date was made International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations in 2005. Primo Levi was among those left behind, too ill to march, and wrote the account that became the standard one. Rudolf Höss, the camp's commandant, was hanged beside his own house in 1947.
- Year: 1945 CE
- Category: Political
