80 years from Auschwitz

Today is the 80th anniversary from the closing of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. A complex of over 40 concentration camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland saw approximately 1,100,000 victims of the Holocaust. For the first two years, the majority of inmates were Polish. Prisoners were beaten, tortured, and executed for the most trivial of reasons. The first gassings of Soviet and Polish prisoners, took place in a Block of Auschwitz I around August 1941. Construction of Auschwitz II began the following month, and from 1942 until late 1944 freight trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to its gas chambers. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million were murdered. The number of victims includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 others. Those not gassed were murdered via starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments. At least 802 prisoners tried to escape, 144 successfully. After the Holocaust ended, only 789 guards or personnel (no more than 15 percent) ever stood trial. Several were executed, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss. As the Soviet Red Army approached Auschwitz in January 1945, toward the end of the war, Soviet troops entered the camp on 27 January 1945, a day commemorated since 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.