TODAY IN HISTORY -1945 - The liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Red Army: The Auschwitz concentration camp was the largest of the German concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II–Birkenau (the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp), Auschwitz III–Monowitz, and 45 satellite camps. Auschwitz II–Birkenau was designated by SS Heinrich Himmler, Germany’s Minister of the Interior, as the place of the “final solution of the Jewish question in Europe,” and from early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp’s gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe. The camp’s first commandant, Rudolf Hoss, testified at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died there (2.5 million gassed, and 500,000 from disease and starvation). Today the accepted figure is 1.3 million — around 90% of them Jewish. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, some 400 Jehovah’s Witnesses and tens of thousands of others. Those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious disease, suicides, or medical experiments.
Posted on: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 12:40:10 +0000
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