On 27 January 1945, soldiers from the 322nd Infantry Division of the 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp, located near the Polish town of Oświęcim, with the three camp areas Auschwitz I (main camp), Auschwitz II (Birkenau extermination camp), and Auschwitz III (Monowitz labour camp). There they encountered around 7,000 surviving prisoners, many of whom were children. They had been left behind by the SS as ‘unfit to march’. In response to the approach of the Red Army as part of the Vistula-Oder offensive that began on 12 January 1945, the SS had begun to gradually clear and dissolve the camp complex and its 47 satellite camps. Not least in order to destroy any evidence of the atrocities they had committed and to prevent the surviving prisoners from falling into the hands of the Allies as witnesses. Between 17 and 23 January 1945, around 56,000 prisoners deemed ‘fit to march’ were sent on the ‘death marches’ towards Germany, in the course of which around 10,000 prisoners perished. The fact that the Soviet soldiers came across any survivors at all was probably due to the rapid advance of the Red Army, which prevented the planned killing of the prisoners deemed ‘unfit to march’ due to the time pressure of the transport.
Between 1940 and 1945, a total of around 1.3 million people were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp (main camp, Birkenau, Monowitz) and its 47 satellite camps. These included around 1.1 million Jews, around 140,000 Poles, over 20,000 Sinti* and Roma* people, as well as more than 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war and more than 10,000 prisoners of other nationalities. However, it is difficult to give exact figures, as not all the prisoners deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp were registered.
The Birkenau extermination camp, built in 1941 with a total of six gas chambers and four crematoria, served the sole purpose of ensuring the systematic and industrialised collective extermination of European Jews and other groups persecuted by the Nazi regime, such as Sinti* and Roma*. On the night of 2 to 3 August 1944, i.e., almost six months before the actual evacuation of the extermination camp, the SS forcibly liquidated the so-called ‘Gypsy camp’ in camp section ‘B II e’ and murdered the 4,300 or so Sinti* and Roma* people remaining in the gas chambers. Scientific research assumes that a total of around 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz. Of the 960,000 murdered Jews, who were by far the largest group of victims, around 865,000 were murdered in the gas chambers immediately following their arrival.
The remembrance of Auschwitz as an unprecedented symbol of extermination plays a central role in commemorations of the Shoah (‘catastrophe’), the genocide of the European Jews, and the Porajmos (‘devouring’), the genocide of the European Sinti* and Roma*. In 2006, 14 June was declared National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camps as part of the Polish culture of remembrance: on 14 June 1940, the first 728 Polish prisoners were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, including Polish soldiers, members of the resistance, students, schoolchildren and some Polish Jews.
The initiative to establish 27 January as a national day of remembrance of the victims of National Socialism can be traced back to Ignatz Bubis. As 9 November in Germany has both complex and ambivalent historical connotations, the then President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany advocated a national day of remembrance based on a ‘European date’ from 1994 onwards. Although his initiative was not uncontroversial, especially among survivor groups, it ultimately found broad political support in the Bundestag. At the request of the Bundestag, on 3 January 1996, then Federal President Prof Dr Roman Herzog proclaimed 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, as the official German day of remembrance of the victims of National Socialism.
At the initiative of the State of Israel, the United Nations declared 27 January the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust in 2005 on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in UN Resolution 60/7, which also particularly emphasised Holocaust education.
