Soviet troops liberate the Auschwitz concentration camp
On this day · 27 January 1945
When the Red Army reached the gates, it found a few thousand survivors too ill to march — and the machinery of more than a million murders.
On January 27, 1945, soldiers of the Soviet Red Army entered the Auschwitz complex — Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz — in German-occupied Poland and liberated the roughly 7,000 prisoners left behind, most of them sick and dying. Days earlier, the SS had forced tens of thousands of others westward on brutal death marches.
The scale of what they uncovered was staggering. Of at least 1.3 million people deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, camp authorities murdered about 1.1 million — around a million of them Jews — making it the deadliest site of the Holocaust.
The Soviet army enters Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz and liberates around 7,000 prisoners, most of whom are ill and dying.
In 2005 the United Nations designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, so that the date now anchors commemoration far beyond the place itself.
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