Liberation of Auschwitz
On 27 January 1945, soldiers of the Soviet 60th Army advancing into southern Poland reached the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex and found approximately 7,000 survivors, most of them gravely ill. The SS had begun evacuating the camp on 17 January, forcing 56,000–60,000 prisoners — those deemed capable of walking — westward on foot in winter conditions toward camps in Germany and Austria. Tens of thousands died on these death marches; those who could not keep pace were shot by their guards. The SS also destroyed crematoria and evidence of the gas chambers before withdrawing. The images and testimony gathered by Soviet forces at Auschwitz, and subsequently documented by Polish investigators and the War Crimes Commission, became the primary evidentiary foundation for the Holocaust's industrial scale. The Nuremberg prosecutors drew heavily on Auschwitz documentation; Rudolf Hoss, the commandant, testified at Nuremberg and in the Polish postwar trials. The date of liberation — 27 January — was designated by the United Nations in 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, chosen because Auschwitz carries the most complete documentary record of any extermination site and its liberation is the moment the scale of the crime became visible to the outside world.
- Year: 1945 CE
- Category: Political
