Soviet troops open the gates and find 7,000 dying survivors
What happened
As Soviet forces approached in mid-January 1945, the SS forced nearly 60,000 Auschwitz prisoners onto death marches west, shooting stragglers as thousands more prisoners had already been killed inside the camp in the preceding days. When the Red Army entered Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz on 27 January, they found only around 7,000 prisoners left behind, most severely ill or dying. Between 1940 and 1945, the SS and police had deported at least 1.3 million people to the Auschwitz complex; camp authorities murdered 1.1 million of them, roughly one million of whom were Jews, the overwhelming majority sent directly to the gas chambers on arrival without ever being registered as prisoners at all.
Why it matters
January 27 is now observed worldwide as International Holocaust Remembrance Day precisely because Auschwitz's liberation, however incomplete and however late, was the moment the physical machinery of the genocide, the barracks, the ramps, the gas chambers, became undeniable, no longer something that could be described only in survivor testimony.
How we know
Soviet military liberation reports from January 1945, camp registration records the SS did not manage to fully destroy before fleeing, and the physical camp infrastructure itself, still standing, together allow historians to document deportation and murder totals with unusual precision for a Nazi camp.
Sources
- Holocaust Encyclopedia, US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Soviet Forces Liberate Auschwitz · Reputable sourceencyclopedia.ushmm.org · The domain "encyclopedia.ushmm.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Part of a timelineWorld War II59 events · From a staged skirmish at a bridge outside Beijing to a charter signed in San Francisco, the deadliest conflict in history, every event sourced.View all →