(ANALYSIS) Monday marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Over 1 million people were murdered there, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and people of other nationalities.
Auschwitz was the biggest Nazi camp. The camp was founded in early 1940 in response to the growing number of arrests and the overcrowding of prisons and other institutions across Europe.
The first prisoners were Poles. However, in 1942, Auschwitz was turned from a concentration camp into a death camp (extermination camp) for the purposes of “Endlösung der Judenfrage” (the final solution to the Jewish question). Over the years of its existence, the camp significantly expanded to become a complex consisting of three parts: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Auschwitz III-Monowitz. Ultimately, over a million people lost their lives in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex before Soviet troops liberated the few survivors on Jan. 27, 1945.
In 2005, the U.N. General Assembly designated Jan. 27 as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust to use the memory to educate and prevent. The resolution establishing the day urged member states to “develop educational programs that will inculcate future generations with the lessons of the Holocaust in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide.”
The resolution further condemned all manifestations of “religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief, wherever they occur,” among others.
This year’s theme for the commemoration is “Holocaust Remembrance and Education for Dignity and Human Rights.” As emphasized by the U.N., the theme reflects “the critical relevance of Holocaust remembrance for the present, where the dignity and human rights of our fellow global citizens are under daily attack. The Holocaust shows what happens when hatred, dehumanization and apathy win.”
The horrific atrocities of the war and the Holocaust shocked the conscience of humanity and resulted in the establishment of the United Nations, steps towards justice and accountability including at Nuremberg, and the codification of genocide and solidifying the duties to prevent and punish the crime (in the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide), among others.