January 27 - Holocaust Remembrance Day

This Day in History: 27 January 2020

 

27 January 1945

 

75 years ago, today, Soviet troops began to enter the Auschwitz concentration camp, and thus started to free the survivors of the horrendous network of the camps, marking this event as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This action revealed to the world the atrocities that had been committed at these concentration camps throughout the Second World War. Auschwitz, in Poland, was actually a group of camps, that had been designated I, II and III, in addition to 40 smaller satellite camps. At Birkenau, at Auschwitz II, which had been established in October 1941, relatively around the start of the war, the SS, the special Nazi police force, had created a intricate, orchestrated killing ground that consisted of 300 prison barracks, four "bathhouses" used to gas prisoners, corpse cellars, and cremating ovens. As well as this, dreadful numbers of prisoners were also experimented on for medical purposes, carried out by camp doctor, Josef Mengele, nicknamed the "Angel of Death".

 

Since mid-January 1945, the Soviet Red Army had been advancing deeper into Poland, after having liberated Warsaw and Krakow. They began, afterwards, to head for Auschwitz, but the German Gestapo, the secret Nazi police, anticipated the Soviets arrival. In an attempt to destroy the evidence of their crimes, the Gestapo initiated a murder spree in the camps, shooting the sick prisoners and exploding the crematoria. The Red Army finally managed to break through, and there they encountered 648 corpses, and more than 7,000 starving survivors of the camp. They also discovered 6 storehouses filled with hundreds of thousands of dresses belonging to women, as well as men's suits and shoes, that the Germans did not have the time to burn.

 

Want to find out more about the liberation of Auschwitz that occurred near the end of the Second World War? Click here to listen to a podcast commemorating the 75^th anniversary, or click here to read more on what happened during the Soviet rescue. Or, click here to watch the ceremony marking the anniversary.