ON JANUARY 27 1945, Soviet soldiers liberated the 7,500 prisoners remaining alive in the massive complex of camps that constituted Auschwitz in southern Poland: the main camp, (Auschwitz I); the death camp, Birkenau (Auschwitz II); the slave labour camp, Monowitz (Auschwitz III); and seven Auschwitz sub-camps. Besides Auschwitz, there were six other killing centres across Poland, and other methods of murdering people en masse were used across a much wider region. These included mobile gas vans, mass shooting and forcing Jews into buildings then setting fire to them. 

The single word “Auschwitz” has come to be used as shorthand for the entire Nazi project, a totalitarian empire based on a pernicious racial theory, ultra-nationalism and the dismantling of democracy. The anniversary of its liberation has been designated Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) since 2000, when representatives of 46 governments around the world met in Stockholm to discuss Holocaust education, remembrance and research, culminating in a declaration committing all of them to preserving the memory of those who were murdered in the Holocaust.

The Nazis pitilessly persecuted many groups, including black, gay and Slavic people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, trade unionists, communists, Freemasons and so-called “asocials,” who suffered incarceration, mistreatment, starvation and slavery. But they singled out the Jews and the Gypsies (Roma and Sinti) for extermination. The industrial-scale murder of these two peoples had its origins in Aktion T4, the euthanasia programme that started in 1939, experimenting with techniques for mass killing on disabled people in order to eliminate what the Nazis called “life unworthy of life.”