International Day of Liberation of Prisoners of Nazi Concentration Camps
On April 11, the world marks the International Day of Liberation of Prisoners of Nazi Concentration Camps.
It was on this day in 1945 that the prisoners at Buchenwald, one of the Third Reich’s largest concentration camps, started an uprising and heroically held the camp until the arrival of the 3rd US Army. An important role was played by battle-hardened Soviet POWs, who had established a well-organised underground resistance network.
Before and during World War II, the Nazis had created an extensive system of "death factories" both in Germany and in Nazi-occupied territories, where millions of POWs and civilians from the USSR and Europe were imprisoned under inhuman conditions. They were used for hard labour or in some cases as expendable material in heinous medical experiments. They were burned in crematoria and killed in gas chambers.
The liberations began on July 3, 1944, when the Red Army saved prisoners from death at the Majdanek camp near Lublin in Poland, exposing to the world the monstrous scale of Nazi crimes. Later, Soviet forces liberated prisoners at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz, Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, Rawensbruck and many other "death camps."
The concentration camp system was finally eliminated after the rout of Nazism, with the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg condemning it as a crime against humanity.
