The liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s concentration camp

Translated by: Catarina Pereira 

Auschwitz-Birkenau’s concentration camp, considered the main concentration camp of Nazi Germany — due to the high number of victims (around one hundred thousand and one million), the centrality of the final solution plan, the cruel medical experiments that were done there, etc, — and the most emblematic symbol of the Holocaust, did on the past 27 of January of 2026, eighty one years since it was liberated. 

The camp was operated from May 1940 to the beginning of 1945, when the Red Army liberated it.  Upon hearing how close the enemy troops were, the SS virtually destroyed all the proof of the crimes they had committed. About sixty thousand survivors were forced to walk a death march to theWodzisław Śląski concentration camp; fithteen thousand people died during the march by exhaustion, or shot because they couldn’t keep up. The survivors that stayed on the Auschwitz concentration camp, that were too sick or weak to walk, were liberated by Soviet troops in January of 1945.

When they arrived at the site, the Soviet troops found a state of devastation and cruelty: bodies still to be buried, survivors made of skin and bone, who didn’t even have the strength to react; blood and excrement on the floor, alongside other horrors.  Immediately, Soviet soldiers established campaign hospitals to treat the state of excessive subnutrition in which these seven thousand five hundred survivors were found.  One of those survivors was a young chemist, Primo Levi, who would end up writing one of the most important books about how this concentration camp worked: If This Is a Man. 

The camp and its liberation left a huge legacy that is remembered to this day through countless memorialists.  In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly declared 27 January, the day on which the camp was liberated, as the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, which has the goal of not letting this dark chapter of human history be forgotten.