The Red Army Liberates Auschwitz-Birkenau ~ January 27, 1945

1945 – World War II: The Red Army liberates the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

Auschwitz (Konzentrationslager Auschwitz) was a network of concentration camps built and operated in occupied Poland by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. It was the largest of the German concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I (the Stammlager or main camp); Auschwitz II-Birkenau (the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp); Auschwitz III-Monowitz, also known as Buna, a labor camp; and 45 satellite camps.

Auschwitz is the German name for Oświęcim, the town the camps were located in and around; it was renamed by the Germans after they invaded Poland in September 1939. Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka (birch tree), refers to a small Polish village nearby that was mostly destroyed by the Germans to make way for the camp.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau was designated by Heinrich Himmler, Germany's Minister of the Interior, as the locus of the "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe." From spring 1942 until the fall of 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over Nazi-occupied Europe. The camp's first commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified after the war at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died there, a figure since revised to 1.1 million, around 90 percent of them Jews. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and tens of thousands of other nationalities.Those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, lack of disease control, individual executions, and purported medical experiments.

On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a day commemorated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 1947, Poland founded a museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, which by 1994 had seen 22 million visitors—700,000 annually—pass through the iron gates crowned with the infamous motto, Arbeit macht frei ("work makes you free").

Image & text:wikipeida.com

The metal Arbeit macht frei motto was stolen about a year ago from the gate at Auschwitz. It was recovered a few months later, after having been cut into three pieces. It is now being or has already been restored.

The irony is that many German Jews decided not to leave Germany in the 30's because they felt that Nazi rhetoric was just a ploy to gain political power, and not a genuine strategy for action. After all, Germany and German culture was the land of Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven and especially Mozart!