Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and January 27 was chosen because on this date in 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, where they found about seven thousand surviving prisoners in the camp, including 700 children.

It was the end of one of the worst horrors in human history, which lasted for 689 days and killed more than a million people, mostly Jews.

Auschwitz was actually part of a complex of camps built by the Nazis in occupied Poland with the intention of exterminating all Jews in Europe. It was one of the fixed ideas of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, which ran through all his crimes.

Auschwitz was a direct result of Nazi ideology, which placed nation and race above all else and considered a certain number of peoples not only less valuable, but also a threat to "Aryan racial purity". Therefore, Auschwitz was the realization of the ideas of Nazism.

Auschwitz is also characterized by the fact that the Nazis devised a system of mass killing with poison gas, and many prisoners in this concentration camp were sent directly from the trains coming from all over Europe to the gas chambers, where they were poisoned. After that, their bodies were burned in specially built crematoriums.

The first killings of this kind at Auschwitz took place in August 1941, when the effectiveness of poison gas was tested on Polish and Soviet prisoners, and the whole thing soon grew to proportions that even today cannot be fully comprehended. From 1942 to the end of 1944, 1,3 million people were taken to Auschwitz, of whom 1,1 million were killed. Most Jews (about 960 thousand) and Poles (74 thousand), Roma (21 thousand), Soviet prisoners (15 thousand), etc.

Industrial mass murder, unfortunately, is not the only horror of Auschwitz, but only the biggest. In the camp, monstrous experiments were carried out on people led by the infamous doctor Josef Mengele, all kinds of torture and humiliation were carried out, it was hell on earth.

The crimes were also committed with the participation and help of a large number of ordinary Germans, most of whom were not bloodthirsty monsters like Mengele, but were convinced that they were only "following orders" and carrying out their tasks for the good of the German nation and the Third Reich.

It was preceded by the complete dehumanization of Jews and anyone else the Nazis deemed less valuable, so the death machine called Auschwitz could operate with terrifying efficiency. Only 789 people, about 15 percent of those who participated in the operation of the camp, ended up on trial for their role in the atrocities at Auschwitz, and warden Rudolf Höss was sentenced to death.

At the entrance to Auschwitz stands the cynical inscription "Arbeit macht frei", that is, "Work sets you free", which was intended to suggest that it was a labor camp. The Nazis still tried to hide that they were committing mass genocide, so it took a long time for the news of Auschwitz to reach the Allies, who, as experts comment, "were not very successful in trying to stop or at least slow down the industrial killing of Jews." . Even today they are blamed because, for example, they did not bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz.

Unfortunately, even today there are people who deny the Holocaust or find justification for the crimes of the Nazis and their allies, and many studies show that young people know less and less about what really happened in Auschwitz. "May it never happen again" is a phrase often heard at commemorations for the Holocaust and the evil of Nazism.