2020: The 75th anniversary of the Liberation of Prisoners from Auschwitz

Haunting pictures of Auschwitz have been released to mark the 75th anniversary of the Nazi death camp’s liberation.

Images made available by the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum show the unloading ramp and ‘Gate of Death’ at the camp in occupied Poland as well as emaciated prisoners and piles of clothes.

The Nazi’s largest death camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945, and the day is commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day worldwide. Over the next week, world leaders will gather twice to mark the anniversary.

KL Auschwitz-Birkenau was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by the Third Reich near Oswiecim in occupied Poland during World War II, and a central site in the Nazis’ planned Holocaust, sometimes referred to as Shoa.

It is estimated that 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz, and 1.1 million died there including 960,000 Jews, 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma people, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 other Europeans.

Prisoners who were not gassed in chambers died of starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, beatings or were killed during medical experiments.

Since 1947, the site houses a memorial and museum that also offers guided tours and an education centre to deepen the peoples’ knowledge about the mass atrocities committed at the Nazi camps.

Piles of shoes and clothes pictured in 1945 that belonged to people brought to Auschwitz in Oswiecim, Poland, for extermination during the Holocaust carried out during WWII

That there will be two competing ceremonies – one in Jerusalem on Thursday and the other at the Auschwitz site in southern Poland on January 27 – underlines how politically charged World War II remains as nationalist governments in Russia and Poland seek to use their own interpretation of the past for contemporary political gain.

Leaders at both sites, joined by elderly survivors, will pay tribute to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, wiping out a third of world Jewry.  

Commemorations say the memorials risk being overshadowed by a bitter dispute between Poland – where Nazi German occupiers operated Auschwitz and other infamous camps – and Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union.

Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz in 1945, but the country had also signed a nonaggression accord with the Nazis shortly before the war began in 1939, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It contained a secret protocol in which the totalitarian powers agreed to carve up Eastern Europe.

Two years later, Germany turned on Kremlin leader Josef Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, bringing the Soviets into the war on the side of the Allies.

Millions of Red Army soldiers lost their lives in the eventual defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

When the Soviet Red Army liberated the Auschwitz death camp in German-occupied Poland, the Germans had already fled westward, leaving behind the bodies of prisoners who had been shot and thousands of sick and starving survivors.

The Soviet troops also found gas chambers and crematoria that the Germans had blown up before fleeing in an attempt to hide evidence of their mass killings.

But the genocide was too massive to hide. Today, the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau endures as the leading symbol of the terror of the Holocaust.

Piles of belongings left behind by the camp’s victims are preserved by the Auschwitz-Birkenau foundation.

The inventory comprises 3,800 suitcases, more than 88 pounds of eyeglasses, 379 striped uniforms, 246 prayer shawls and more than 12,000 pots and pans brought to the camp by victims who believed they would eventually be resettled.

Its iconic status is such that every year it registers a record number of visitors – 2.3 million last year alone.

In 1942, SS authorities established a compound in Auschwitz-Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II, to incarcerate female prisoners. Among the first inmates were prisoners whom the SS transferred from Ravensbrück in northern Germany, which was opened in 1939.

During the early period of the existence of the women’s camp, children born there were put to death, regardless of their ethnicity, without being entered in the camp records.

From mid-1943, non-Jewish newborns were allowed to live and several days after birth, they were noted in the records and they were assigned camp numbers.

Children born to Jewish women were put to death until November 1944, when the mass extermination of the Jews was halted.

Available documents indicate that at least 700 children were born in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Today, the survivors are mostly their 80s and 90s, some now living in Germany, Poland, Sweden, Russia, the United States and Israel.

Auschwitz was the most notorious in a system of concentration and extermination camps that Nazi Germany built across Europe.

It was operated in occupied Poland, home to Europe’s largest Jewish population, and at the heart of a railway network that allowed the Nazis to easily transport Jews there from elsewhere across the continent.

During the Holocaust the old and infirm were quickly shuttled to their death, often through the iconic watchtower entrance to Birkenau, while those still deemed well enough to serve the Nazi war machine were shepherded through the pathway to the main gate with the message ‘Arbeit macht Frei’ (‘Work sets free’ in English) written across the top.

They were tattooed, hosed down, sheared of their hair and put to slave labour. Provided little clothing or food, prisoners were rammed into cramped barracks locked in behind barbed wire fences.

Most withered away before ending up in the crematoria or marched off to their deaths elsewhere as the allies closed in and liberated the camp.