Auschwitz: How death camp became center of Nazi Holocaust – BBC News, BBC News
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January , Soviet troops cautiously entered Auschwitz.
Primo Levi – one of the most famous survivors – was lying in a camp hospital with scarlet fever when the liberators arrived.
The men cast “strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive”, he would later write.
“They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by … the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist.”
soldier Ivan Martynushkin said of liberating the death camp . “We could tell from their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell.”
In less than four years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. Almost one million were Jews.
Those deported to the camp complex were gassed, starved, worked to death and even killed in medical experiments. The vast majority died in the Auschwitz II death camp – known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Six million Jewish people died in the Holocaust – the Nazi campaign to eradicate Europe’s Jewish population. Auschwitz was at the center of that genocide.
When the Nazis came to power in They began to strip Jewish people of all property, freedoms and rights under the law. After the German invasion and occupation of Poland in , the Nazis started deporting Jewish people from Germany and Austria to Poland, where they created ghettos to separate them from the rest of the population.
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