Soldiers of the Red Army's 60th Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp complex in occupied Poland, finding around 7,000 emaciated prisoners the fleeing SS had left behind, along with mountains of corpses, warehouses of stolen belongings, and gas chambers. An estimated 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, had been murdered there since 1940. The date is now observed worldwide as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
By the time Soviet troops arrived, the SS had already forced roughly 60,000 prisoners on a death march westward days earlier, desperate to hide evidence and avoid capture, many dying in the snow along the way. Those left behind at Auschwitz were the sickest and weakest, deemed unable to walk, and soldiers found children, the elderly, and the dying among the barracks, alongside storerooms containing hundreds of thousands of men's suits, women's dresses, and 7.7 tons of human hair.
Soviet war correspondent and photographer footage of the camp, along with later testimony, became some of the first hard evidence presented to a disbelieving world of the scale of the Holocaust. Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish chemist and writer who survived the camp, later wrote of that liberation day with a strange numbness rather than joy, describing survivors too broken by suffering to feel triumph.
In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and ceremonies are now held annually at the site itself, where survivors, dwindling each year, return to bear witness alongside world leaders. The camp, preserved as a museum since 1947, receives over two million visitors annually.
Key people: Primo Levi