60 Years Since the Nightmare's End [View All]

[Sequoia]

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Never Forget
n The largest Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was established on the basis of an order issued by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler on April 27, 1940. After its expansion in 1941, the lager included the main camp Stammlager Auschwitz, the women's camp Birkenau, the Monowitz camp and more than 40 smaller camps.

According to incomplete documentation, about 1.5 million people were killed in the camp, 90 percent of them Jews. Auschwitz was also the site of methodical Nazi extermination of members of Polish underground organizations, social and political activists and intellectuals as well as Soviet prisoners-of-war. Many deaths can be traced to slave labor exploited by several German corporations; prisoners were decimated by hunger, beatings, torture and pseudomedical experiments conducted by German doctors led by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. There were also regular executions. From the spring of 1942, Zyklon B gas was used to kill prisoners, whose bodies were later incinerated.

In January 1945, the Nazis evacuated the camp, as a result of which thousands of prisoners died during the "March of Death." Jan. 27 Soviet troops entered the camp area, finding about 7,000 prisoners including several hundred children.

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