Auschwitz — the most important memorial site in the world, never to be forgotten
Oświęcim is a small Polish town known internationally by its German name: Auschwitz. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, preserves the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp complex, where 1.1 million people — primarily Jews, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet POWs, and others — were murdered between 1940 and 1945. Auschwitz I (the main camp) and Auschwitz II-Birkenau (the extermination camp with its iconic gatehouse) are 3km apart. The museum's preservation of the physical evidence — gas chambers, crematoria, vast warehouses of victims' belongings —…
Auschwitz was established by the Nazis in 1940 in occupied Poland, initially to imprison Polish political prisoners. By 1942 it had been transformed into the center of the Holocaust's industrialized mass murder — the 'Final Solution' decided at the Wannsee Conference. Deportation trains arrived from across Nazi-occupied Europe. The camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on 27 January 1945 — International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Nuremberg Trials and subsequent trials used Auschwitz as central evidence for genocide as an international crime. UNESCO inscribed Auschwitz in 1979, unusual…