Auschwitz Then And Now
Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, has come to symbolize the singular horrors of the Holocaust. Seventy years ago, Nazi guards forced around 60,000 surviving prisoners on a “death march” as the Red Army drew closer.
A quarter of them died. When the Soviets liberated the camp on January 27th, 1945, only those the Germans had deemed too weak for the journey remained. Efforts to destroy the buildings, the gas chambers, and the ovens had to be abandoned due to the speed of the Soviet advance. So today, parts of Auschwitz are almost perfectly preserved – a crime scene for more than a million murders.