Liberation of Auschwitz

On 27 January 1945 soldiers of the Soviet 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front entered Auschwitz, the largest German concentration and extermination camp, near Oświęcim in occupied Poland. A few days earlier the SS had driven about 58,000 prisoners west on death marches and blown up the gas chambers and crematoria of Birkenau. The Soviets found some 7,000 sick and starving prisoners left behind, among them hundreds of children, and storerooms full of the victims' clothes, shoes and about seven tonnes of human hair.

At Auschwitz about 1.1 million people were murdered, about one million of them Jews from all over Europe, more than at any other place. Its liberation came too late for nearly all of them and revealed the scale of the crime to the world. Since 2005, 27 January has been International Holocaust Remembrance Day; Israel remembers the Shoah on Yom HaShoah, 27 Nisan.