World War II Day by Day

Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland · January 27, 1945

In the months following the Red Army’s entry into the aban­doned Nazi death camp at Majdanek on the out­skirts of Lublin, Poland, where more than 79,000 people had been killed, the growing list of liber­ated camps (the Nazis had over 40 death camps) char­ac­ter­ized by mounds of corpses and ema­ci­ated sur­vivors revealed the es­sence of Nazi evil and hor­ror.

At 3 p.m. on this date, January 27, 1945, 80 years ago, Soviet troops reached Auschwitz-Bir­ke­nau (Polish, Oświęcim), 40 miles/­64 km west of Cra­cow (Kra­ków) in South­ern Poland, the largest and argu­ably most dia­bol­ical and infa­mous of the Nazi con­cen­tra­tion and death camps. There they found 648 corpses and 7,000 sur­vi­vors—1,200 at the Auschwitz main camp (there were 45 sub­camps) and 5,800 at Bir­ke­nau, the larger of the 2 camps less than 2 miles/­3.2 km away. (Most of the people trans­ported to Auschwitz actually never entered the main camp, but just crossed it on their way to the Bir­ke­nau gas cham­bers.) In the rush to greet their res­cuers, some in­mates died on the 13‑foot/­4‑meter‑high elec­tric fences that sur­rounded the camps. More sur­vi­vors would have been found (esti­mated at roughly 60,000) had Auschwitz-Bir­ke­nau not been hastily eva­cu­ated by SS camp guards, who forced-marched inmates to other camps out­side the Red Army’s reach such as Bergen-Belsen (33 miles/­53 km north­east of Hann­over), Dachau (10 miles/­16 km north­west of Munich), and Sachsen­hausen (21 miles/­34 km north of Berlin). Approx­i­mately 15,000 pri­soners died on these death marches before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Estab­lished under Reichs­fuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler in 1940 at an aban­doned Polish milit­ary base and ex­panded by camp com­man­dant Rudolf Hoess (Höss, pro­nounced “hearse”), Auschwitz orig­i­nally housed Soviet POWs, but it also pro­cessed homo­sexuals, Roma (Gypsies), Jeho­vah’s Wit­nesses, people with dis­abil­i­ties, and others deemed unde­si­rable, espe­cially Jews, as well as those rounded up under Nacht und Nebel, the Nazis’ “dis­appear­ance” cam­paign. Of the 3 mil­lion Polish Jews killed during the Third Reich, over 1 mil­lion were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a figure repre­senting 75 per­cent of the nearly 1.3 mil­lion people impri­soned at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945. Toward the end of the war, as many as 10,000 peo­ple were gassed daily at the Birkenau complex.

A July 2, 1947, act of the Polish parliament estab­lished the Auschwitz-Bir­ke­nau State Museum on the grounds of the 2 extant parts of the camp, Au­schwitz I (the Stamm­lager, or main camp) and Auschwitz II-Birke­nau (the Vernichtungs­lager, or ex­ter­mi­na­tion camp). Today’s date, Janu­ary 27, the 80th anni­ver­sary of Auschwitz’s lib­er­a­tion, is com­mem­orated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Concentration/Death Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 1940 to January 1945

Above: Routes to the major death (extermination) camps (signified by hard-to-see skull and crossbones in black box) in Germany, Poland, Belarus, and Croatia. The estimated total number of people killed in the camps is over 3 mil­lion: Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland), 1,100,000; Bełżec (Poland), 600,000; Chełmno (Poland), 320,000; Majdanek (Poland), 360,000; Sobibór (Poland), 250,000; Treblinka (Poland), 700,000–800,000; Maly Trostenets (Belarus), 65,000; and Jasenovac (Croatia), 85,000–600,000.

Left: Photo of Birkenau (the extermination camp at Auschwitz) following the camp’s libera­tion on Janu­ary 27, 1945. In the fore­ground is the un­loading ramp (the so-called Judenrampe) and in the dis­tance Birke­nau’s main gate called the “Gate of Death.” Auschwitz-Bir­ke­nau was the site where an esti­mated 1.1 mil­lion people, around 90 per­cent of them Jews, were killed in Bir­ke­nau’s gas cham­bers or by clubs and hatchets, shootings, hang­ings (usually during roll-call), dis­ease (both natural [e.g., typhus] and medically inflicted), physical exhaustion, malnutrition, and starvation.

Right: Beginning on January 27, 1945, almost 9,000 prisoners in Auschwitz I (main camp), Auschwitz II-Birkenau (exter­mi­nation camp), and Mono­witz-Buna (Mono­wice, or Auschwitz III), whom the Nazis judged unfit to join the SS forced evac­u­a­tion march, were liber­ated by Soviet troops, a day com­memo­rated around the world as Inter­national Holo­caust Remem­brance Day. Over 230 Soviet sol­diers died while liber­ating the camps, satel­lite camps, and the nearby town of Oświęcim. In 1947 Poland founded a museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II. Millions of visitors (nearly 2 million in 2024, down from 2.3 mil­lion in 2019) have passed through the iron entrance gate to Auschwitz crowned with the notoriously cynical inscrip­tion, ARBEIT MACHT FREI (“Work Sets You Free”). The arched inscription—designed and made by camp inmates—became the central symbol for the prisoners’ ordeal.

Left: Hungarian Jews on the Judenrampe after disembarking from transport trains. Being directed rechts! (to the right) meant camp labor. Sent links! (to the left) meant the gas chambers at Birkenau.

Right: Hungarian Jewish mothers, children, elderly, and infirm sent links (left) after “selection,” May 1944. They would be murdered in gas chambers soon thereafter.

Left: Survivors at the camp liberated by the Red Army in January 1945. Army medics and order­lies gave the first orga­nized help to sur­vivors. Two Soviet field hospi­tals soon arrived and began caring for more than 4,500 ex-prisoners from more than 20 coun­tries, most of them Jews. Numer­ous Polish volun­teers from Oświęcim and the vicinity, as well as other parts of the coun­try, also arrived to help. Most of the volun­teers belonged to the Polish Red Cross. Liber­ated pri­soners who were in rela­tively good phy­sical condi­tion left Auschwitz imme­di­ately. Most of the patients in the hospital did the same within 3 to 4 months.

Right: Wearing adult-size prisoner jackets, child survivors of Auschwitz stand behind a barbed wire fence on the day of their libe­ration by the Red Army. The majority of the libe­rated child pri­soners left Auschwitz in separate groups in February and March 1945, with most of them going to chari­table institutions or children’s homes. Only a fortunate few were reunited with their parents.

Documentary: Concentration/Death Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1940–1945. WARNING: Content will disturb some viewers