Liberation of Auschwitz remembered
The Holocaust must never be repeated. This was the message that reverberated during the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the death camps in Auschwitz, Poland on January 27.
Up to 1.5 million Jews, Polish and Soviet Communists, people with disabilities, Gypsies and homosexuals were put to death by the Nazis in Auschwitz from 1940 to 1944. The Auschwitz death camps were the Nazis' biggest prisons where they detained, experimented on and massacred their perceived enemies. They were run by the SS or the Schutzstaffel, the paramilitary group that served as the Nazis' special police.
In Auschwitz, experiments were conducted to find the quickest way of killing the rounded up captives, most of whom were Jews from Nazi-occupied countries throughout Europe. Through these experiments, the Nazis were able to kill up to 6,000 people each day. The most rapid means of killing was to gather thousands of people inside giant crematoria and bombard them with insecticide. Their bodies were later incinerated.
Upon arrival in Auschwitz, children, the elderly, the sick and the weak were rounded up to be killed. Meanwhile, the able-bodied ones were forced to work in German armaments factories in Poland. When they could no longer work because of illness or physical weakness, they were also killed.
The remaining prisoners were liberated by heroic soldiers of the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945. The Polish government turned the death camps into museums to serve as a reminder that genocide must never be repeated. The SS elements who perpetrated genocide and torture not only in Auschwitz but in all the Nazi-occupied countries of Europe were meted the death penalty as war criminals.
Surviving victims and their families, soldiers of the Red Army who liberated the prisoners, leaders of various governments worldwide, and officials from Germany itself attended the commemoration in Auschwitz. Commemorations were also held elsewhere in Europe such as the United Kingdom, Russia and Greece.
The United Nations likewise commemorated the event for the first time since the end of the war. Speakers during the UN commemoration compared to Auschwitz the brutality and the violations of dignity and human rights being perpetrated in US-occupied countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. They also assailed the carnage taking place in a number of African countries, and especially condemned the killing of Palestinians by Israeli forces. They strongly denounced the continued maltreatment of prisoners held by the US and the UK in Iraq and in Camp Xray, the international prison set up by the US in its military base in Guantanamo, Cuba.
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