The Liberation of Auschwitz—Where More Than One Million Jews Were Killed—Took Place on This Day in 1945

When the Red Army liberated the Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945, the soldiers encountered unimaginable horrors, including mass graves, the smoldering remains of gas chambers and prisoners starving to death.

Liberating camps wasn’t a specific objective of Allied troops. However, Soviet, American, British and Canadian soldiers found themselves freeing thousands of prisoners as they moved across Europe toward the end of World War II. This included Auschwitz, located in southern Poland. A complex of more than 40 subcamps, it was the largest of all the Nazi camps.

Concentration camps and extermination centers were part of the Nazi “Final Solution,” a plan for the genocide of anyone its leaders defined as Jewish. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis and their Allies established more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites throughout German-occupied Europe between 1933 and 1945.

Approximately 1.3 million people (mostly Jews) were sent to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945. Over those years, 1.1 million of them—men, women and children—lost their lives, making Auschwitz the site of the largest mass murder in human history. Among the dead were 960,000 Jews, 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners and about 15,000 people of other nationalities.

The Days of Liberation | Holocaust Education | USHMM

In August 1944, more than 135,000 prisoners had been spread across the Auschwitz complex. But when the Red Army arrived in early 1945, the majority of these prisoners were gone—rushed out of the camps on death marches designed in part to prevent large numbers of prisoners from being rescued by the Allies.

During the death marches, nearly 60,000 Auschwitz prisoners walked toward train stations in either Gliwice (a 30-mile distance) or Wodzislaw (a 35-mile distance). From there, they were transported to other camps. Facing freezing temperatures, starvation and threats from the armed guards who accompanied them on the march, as many as 15,000 prisoners died en route. Another 7,000, the majority seriously ill, were left behind in the Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monowitz camps.

Once they arrived at Auschwitz, the Red Army and the Polish Red Cross worked to provide food and medical care to the emaciated survivors. Upon seeing Auschwitz, Soviet General Vasily Petrenko, commander of the 107th Infantry Division, reportedly remarked, “I, who saw people dying every day, was shocked by the Nazis’ indescribable hatred toward the inmates who had turned into living skeletons.”

By June 1945, about 300 survivors who were still too weak to be moved remained at the camp. Auschwitz continued to be used as a prison for the rest of the war, holding Poles who had declared ethnic German status and German prisoners of war who performed forced labor at the camp. World War II officially came to an end on September 2, 1945.

Over the following decades, Auschwitz survivors such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl and Elie Wiesel wrote about their experiences within the camp.

In 1947, prompted by the stewardship of former prisoners who wanted the world to know about Nazi crimes at Auschwitz, Poland founded the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the site of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It serves as a memorial to the 1.1 million people who died there.

“Sometimes instead of focusing on the end, we need to look at how it got there,” Steven Luckert, senior program curator at the Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, told Smithsonian magazine in 2020. “What was it that led Nazi Germany to create such a symbol of inhumanity, a place of infamy? In a matter of a few short years, it transformed a sleepy Silesian town into the greatest site of mass killing the world has ever known.”

The United Nations and the European Union have honored January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day since 2005.