Seventy-five years ago today, troops of the Red Army opened up the gate of the notorious Auschwitz concentration & extermination camp. About 7,000 sick and broken prisoners were in the main camp and another 500 were in sub-camps nearby. A mass grave was found containing 600 corpses killed by fleeing Nazis.
After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, an army barracks at Auschwitz became a prisoner of war camp holding political prisoners and eventually Jews from all over Europe.
Of the total 1,300,000 prisoners, about 1,100,000 were slaughtered. The Birkenau crematorium had 46 ovens to incinerate the bodies. Of the 960,000 Jews killed, most (865,000) were gassed on their arrival.
A Red Army soldier was assigned to film what the liberators found in the camp. His original footage and his comments many years later are found here.
(cont'd tomorrow)
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