80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz: International Holocaust Remembrance Day reminds us of the horrors of the Nazi genocide

Auschwitz took the lives of more than 1.1 million people, of whom approximately one million were Jews. The victims also included Poles, prisoners of war (POWs) from the Soviet Union, Roma and members of many other nationalities.

The Nazi camp of Auschwitz, established in 1940 near the occupied Polish town of Oświęcim, gradually grew into an extensive complex of three main camps: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II–Birkenau and Auschwitz III–Monowitz. Birkenau became the biggest location of the annihilation of Jews in Europe, while in Monowitz the Nazis set up a labor camp where prisoners worked for German firms in slave conditions.

In September 1941, the murderous effects of Zyklon B, a material normally used for exterminating animals, were initially tested in the first gas chambers in Auschwitz I. Later another four large gas chambers were installed in Birkenau where as many as 6,000 human beings could be murdered daily.

In late March 1942, transports of Jewish and other people began flowing into Auschwitz from the Nazi-occupied countries. Several hundred thousand Hungarian Jews became the victims of the biggest, final wave of such deportations in mid-1944.

From October 1942 to October 1944, more than 46,000 prisoners from the ghetto in Theresienstadt in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were also deported to Auschwitz. Romani people were also sent to Auschwitz from the concentration camp in Lety u Písku.

After a transport arrived at the ramp in Birkenau, what was called the “selection” took place, during which SS officers decided who would be taken for use as labor (i.e., for “Vernichtung durch Arbeit” – annihilation through labor) and who would be sent straight to the gas chambers. Those places were disguised as showers to convince the victims they were being disinfected before going to work.

The sign reading “Arbeit macht frei!” – “Work sets you free!” – over the main gate of the camp complex was an example of Nazi cynicism. One of the saddest chapters in the camp’s history was the pseudo-medical experiments the Nazis performed on the prisoners.

Josef Mengele, who ran those pseudo-experiments, became especially infamous and notorious as the “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz. The biggest massacre of Czechoslovak citizens in Auschwitz was the murder of 3,792 Jewish children, men and women who were sent there from what was called the “Family Camp of Theresienstadt”, starting on the night from 8-9 March 1944.

Thousands of Roma from Bohemia and Moravia died from 2-3 August 1944 when the Nazis liquidated what was called the “Gypsy Camp” in Birkenau. According to data from the Auschwitz Museum, more than 1.1 million people perished in the camp, one million of whom were Jewish.

Among the victims were as many as 75,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet POWs and thousands of other people from all over Europe. Approximately 50,000 Czechoslovak citizens were deported there, of whom just about 6,000 survived.

According to the website holocaust.cz, a total of 667 such prisoners escaped Auschwitz, but 270 of them were apprehended near the camp and executed immediately. The best-known case of escape is that of two Jews from Slovakia, Alfred Wetzler and Walter Rosenberg (who started using the name Rudolf Vrba after the war), who were the first to inform the world in detail of the horrors they had survived.

In January 1945, face to face with the advancing Red Army, the SS command ordered the camp evacuated. About 58,000 prisoners were forced to go on death marches.

Those left behind – who were frequently ill and starving – were liberated on 27 January 1945. The Red Army found 7,650 surviving prisoners there.

Camp commanders Rudolf Höss and Arthur Liebehenschel were sentenced to death by a Polish court and executed in 1947 along with 22 former guards. Another 22 Germans were convicted of crimes committed in Auschwitz between 1963 and 1966 in Frankfurt.