Auschwitz: How the Death Camp became the center of the Nazi Holocaust

It was 80 years ago that the Soviet troops liberated the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some of the latter survivors will join the world leaders on Monday to score 1.1 million people killed there.

The rest of the survivors are already mostly of their 90s, and this may be the last year that each of them can attend.

In just over four and a half years, Nazi Germany systematically kills at least 1.1 million people in Auschwitz, built south of occupied Poland near the city of Osuekim.

Auschwitz was at the center of the Nazi campaign to eliminate the Jewish population of Europe, and nearly one million of those killed there were Jews.

Among the others who lost their lives were Poles, Roma and Russian prisoners of war.

By the time the Red Army cautiously entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, only about 7,000 prisoners remained. Tens of thousands of others have already been forced to leave on foot on Marses of Death when the Nazis withdrew to the West.

The Italian prisoner Primo Levy lay in a bearing hospital with allena fever when the Soviet liberators arrived.

The men threw “strangely embarrassed glances at the scattered bodies, in the battered huts and in us a little still alive”, later he will write in his memoir about the Holocaust at the reconciliation.

“They did not congratulate us or smiled at us; they seemed suppressed not only by compassion, but also by … the sense of guilt that such a crime should exist.”

“We saw enchanted, tortured, impoverished people” Soldier Ivan Martinushkin said the release of the death camp. ExternalS “We can say from their eyes that they are happy to be rescued by this hell.”