On Jan. 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers who had survived years of fierce combat against German forces entered a sprawling complex of barracks and barbed wire in southern Poland known as Auschwitz. What they found there would define how the world remembers the Holocaust.
Today marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 81st anniversary of that liberation. Commemorations are taking place at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial in Poland, at the United Nations headquarters in New York and at memorial sites around the world.
The 2026 theme is "Holocaust Remembrance for Dignity and Human Rights."
The Nazi regime murdered six million Jews during the Holocaust, representing one-third of all Jewish people worldwide. The Nazis also killed millions of others.
Historians estimate more than three million Soviet prisoners of war died in German captivity. Nearly two million non-Jewish Polish civilians were murdered. Between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma were killed. At least 250,000 people with disabilities were murdered under Nazi euthanasia programs as were many others.
Auschwitz was the largest Nazi killing center. Approximately 1.1 million people died there, nearly one million of them Jews.
The Liberation of Auschwitz
Lt. Gen. Vasily Petrenko, commander of the Soviet 107th Infantry Division, was a combat veteran accustomed to death on the Eastern Front.
"I who saw people dying every day was shocked by the Nazis' indescribable hatred toward the inmates who had turned into living skeletons," Petrenko later said. "It was in Auschwitz that I found out about the fate of the Jews."
The liberators found approximately 7,000 prisoners, most gravely ill. In the days before the Soviet advance, SS officers had forced nearly 60,000 inmates onto death marches westward. Thousands died along the way. Those left behind were too weak to walk.
Among them was 10-year-old Eva Mozes Kor. She and her twin sister Miriam had survived the medical experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele.
"On a white snowy day, January 27th, 1945, four days before my 11th birthday, Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviets and we were free," Kor later said. "We were alive. We had survived. We had triumphed over unbelievable evil."
Soviet soldiers discovered 600 corpses, seven tons of human hair, 370,000 men's suits and more than 837,000 articles of women's clothing. It was evidence of murder on an industrial scale.
Due to Nazi racial beliefs against Eastern Europeans, most of the Nazi extermination camps fell in the path of the Soviet army as it advanced to Berlin. In the following months, Soviet troops would liberate numerous camps and uncover countless examples of Nazi brutality.
American and British Troops Encounter the Camps
As Soviet forces advanced from the east, American and British troops pushing from the west encountered more camps in the spring of 1945.
Months later on April 11, American soldiers liberated Buchenwald. Four days later, British forces from the 11th Armoured Division entered Bergen-Belsen, finding approximately 55,000 prisoners and 13,000 unburied corpses. More than 13,000 additional inmates would die in the weeks after liberation, too weakened to recover.
American soldiers from the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions reached Dachau on April 29. Tech. Sgt. James Creasman, a public affairs NCO with the 42nd Infantry Division, witnessed what combat-hardened infantrymen encountered there.
"Riflemen, accustomed to witnessing death, had no stomach for rooms stacked almost ceiling high with tangled human bodies adjoining the cremation furnaces, looking like some maniac's woodpile," Creasman wrote.
Before the end of the war, Western Allied troops would liberate several concentration and work camps. While not as large as the camps in Eastern Europe, Allied forces uncovered and documented mountains of evidence that would later be put to use at the Nuremburg Trials.
Photographs and film footage from the liberated camps shocked the Allied nations. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered documentation of the atrocities, knowing future generations might not believe it happened.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
For 60 years after the war, Holocaust commemorations remained largely national affairs. Israel observed Yom HaShoah on the Hebrew calendar. Germany began marking Jan. 27 in 1996. Britain and other countries established their own memorial days.
The push for an international observance came from Israel. On Jan. 24, 2005, the United Nations General Assembly held a special session marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Nine months later, on Nov. 1, 2005, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 60/7.
The resolution designated Jan. 27 as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.
The resolution urges member nations to develop educational programs about Holocaust history to prevent future genocide. It explicitly rejects Holocaust denial. It calls for the preservation of Nazi death camps, concentration camps and forced labor camps as memorial sites. It established the United Nations Outreach Programme on Holocaust Remembrance and Education, now in its 21st year.
The resolution also honored those who put a stop to Nazi atrocities. Its text specifically commends "the courage and dedication shown by the soldiers who liberated the concentration camps."
The Last Witnesses
Approximately 196,600 Jewish Holocaust survivors remain alive worldwide, down from 220,000 a year ago. Their median age is 87. Within the next decade, 70 percent of them will be gone.
On Tuesday, 95-year-old survivor Mala Tribich addressed the British Cabinet in London.
"Soon, there will be no eyewitnesses left," Tribich told them. "That is why I ask you today not just to listen, but to become my witness."
One of the few men who can still remember what the liberators witnessed is Ivan Martynushkin. He was a 21-year-old lieutenant in the Soviet 322nd Infantry Division when his unit approached Auschwitz. He just turned 102 nine days ago. Since the death of David Dushman in 2021, Martynushkin is believed to be the last surviving liberator of Auschwitz.
"We saw emaciated people, very thin, tired, with blackened skin," Martynushkin later recalled. "You could see happiness in their eyes. They understood that their liberation had come, that they were free."
Martynushkin has spoken often about what moved him that day.
"I felt compassion and pity understanding how these people's fate unfolded," he said. "Because I could have ended up in the same situation. I fought in the Soviet army. I could have been taken prisoner and they could have also thrown me into the camp."
Eighty-one years later, the day Soviet soldiers fought their way into Auschwitz has become a day the entire world is asked to remember.
As the resolution notes, the Holocaust "will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice."
