The story of this place
Established by the SS in 1940 in occupied Oświęcim, Auschwitz grew into a complex of camps where the Nazis murdered at least 1.1 million people, roughly a million of them Jews deported from across Europe. At Birkenau, trains unloaded on a ramp where SS doctors decided with a gesture who would work and who would go straight to the gas chambers. The camp was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945 — a date now marked as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Preserved as a state museum since 1947, its barracks, the ruins of the crematoria, and mountains of confiscated shoes and suitcases stand as the world's most visited testimony to the Holocaust.