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January 27, 1945
The Red Army liberates Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland. Approximately 84,000 survivors are discovered by the Russians in the vast killing complex that includes several satellite camps.
The concentration camp was not a Nazi invention -- the British used them during the Second Boer War in South Africa, the Spanish established camps in Cuba during the 1890s, Soviet labor camps (gulags) existed in the 1920s and the Americans imprisoned thousands of Japanese-Americans in so-called internment camps during World War II -- but the Nazi variant evolved into something altogether different. The two original Nazi concentration camps at Dachau and Oranienburg functioned much as their predecessors had, existing mainly as penal camps for political opponents, other enemies of the regime and common criminals.
The camps that came later -- Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau -- were not concentration camps at all, but extermination camps. While inmates were often used as slave laborers, their ultimate reason for being there was to die. The Nazis employed what amounted to assembly-line technology in their relentless pursuit of exterminating the Jews of Europe.
The largest of these camps was the killing complex at Auschwitz-Birkenau, near the Polish town of Oswiecim. It was also the most technologically advanced extermination camp in the Nazi system, employing large gas chambers for mass killing and ovens for disposal. The camp opened in May 1940, originally to house Polish prisoners of war and resistance members. By 1942 it had been greatly expanded and was the model of Nazi efficiency: 20,000 people a day were being killed at the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp.
By the time the Red Army arrived, 1.1 million people -- 90 percent of them Jews -- had been murdered at Auschwitz.
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