On January 27th 1945 the Russian army liberated Auschwitz death camp near Krakow in Poland. It was estimated that the Nazis had murdered an estimate of 2,000,000 people where 1,500,000 were Jewish.
Auschwitz which is also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau was opened in 1940 and was the largest of the Nazi concentration and death camps. Auschwitz initially served as a detention centre for political prisoners but later evolved into a network of camps where Jewish people and other perceived enemies of the Nazi state were exterminated or tortured and in some cases were subject to horrific medical experiments.
Hitler who was the chancellor of Germany implemented a policy that came to be known as the “Final Solution.” Hitler was determined not just to isolate Jews in Germany and countries taken over by the Nazis but subject them to dehumanizing regulations and acts of violence.
He believed that the elimination of every Jew, artist, educators, Romas, communists, homosexuals, the mentally and physically handicapped and others deemed unfit for survival in Nazi Germany were vital to fix the ‘issue’
Hitler ordered the construction of death camps different to concentration camps, which had existed in Germany since 1933 and were detention centres for Jews, political prisoners and other perceived enemies of the Nazi state, death camps existed for the sole purpose of killing Jews and others in what we know now as the Holocaust.
