The Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz, was established in occupied Poland by order of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on April 27, 1940. Under it, the former barracks in the city of Auschwitz were allocated. In world practice, it is customary to use the German name “Auschwitz”, and not the Polish “Auschwitz”, since it was the German name that was used by the Nazi administration.

Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet (Russian) Army on January 27, 1945 under the leadership of Marshal Ivan Konev.

The exact number of deaths in the concentration camp is still unknown. In 1946, at the Nuremberg trials, they talked about 2.8 million people. Modern historians lean towards 1.5 million. And 90 percent of the victims are Jews. The first prisoners (728 residents of the city of Tarnów) were brought here in June 1940. The concentration camp was designed for ten thousand people, but it was decided to expand it by building Auschwitz-2 (Birkenau) a few kilometers away in October 1941, and a year later – Auschwitz-3 (Monowitz).

In the first two years, people were shot and buried in large mass graves – several hundred each. Then two crematoria were built. In one of them, the Nazis installed mining furnaces. At a temperature of 800 degrees, the corpses burned in a matter of minutes. People were herded into a special room under the pretext of sanitation, stripped naked and killed with high-voltage current. Then the floors parted and the bodies fell onto the conveyor leading to the ovens.

When sorting Jews, Gypsies and other “non-Aryans” were immediately taken away for “disinfection”. They ordered me to undress and go to the “shower room”. It’s actually a gas chamber. Through a special hole in the roof, the executioner poured “Cyclone B” – an adsorbent based on cyanide. The terrible technology made it possible to kill up to two thousand people a day.

During the liberation of Auschwitz, there were about 7.5 thousand people in it. Employees of the Soviet therapeutic hospital arrived at the camp to take care of those who managed to get out of hell. However, many died in the first weeks after liberation.