🕯 January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. #OTD in 1945, soldiers of the Red Army of the First Ukrainian Front liberated prisoners of one of the most horrible concentration camps – Auschwitz (Oswiecim) – in the course of the Vistula-Oder Offensive.

The infamous death factory was established in 1940 near the city of Oswiecim, Poland, which was renamed Auschwitz after the Nazi occupation. It was one of the Third Reich’s biggest concentration camps.

Initially, Polish political prisoners were kept in the camp. Later, European Jews, Roma and Soviet POWs were sent there as well. According to various estimates, 75 to 90 percent of its inmates were instantly killed or were subjected to inhuman experiments by camp doctors.

Auschwitz II with crematoriums and gas chambers was built in 1941 in the village of Brzezinka (Birkenau in German) just three kilometres from the first camp. In 1942, after the “final solution to the Jewish question” adopted at the Wannsee Conference, this camp was turned into the centre for the annihilation of the European Jews.

In 1944, when the Red Army started the liberation of Europe, the leadership of the death camp rushed to destroy its infrastructure and send inmates westward. About 7,500 people remained in Auschwitz. The Nazis had planned to murder them in a few days.

The Red Army approached Oswiecim after three days of fighting on its outskirts, on the night of January 27, 1945. The prisoners wept with joy on seeing the Soviet liberators. Part of the camp was turned into a recovery hospital.

▪️In total, at least 1.3 million people passed through Auschwitz during its existence, about 1.1 million of them were exterminated.

In the past few years, the memory of this great deed of the Soviet soldiers that liberated the camp’s inmates has been systematically destroyed in a number of European countries.

❕ The accomplishment of the Soviet soldiers that liberated Europe from the Nazi scourge can never be erased.

❕ The tragedy of the Holocaust must never be repeated.