At 3 p.m. on Saturday, January 27, 1945, the 332 Red Army (Soviet) Rifle division arrived at the gates of hell near a small town in Poland called Oswiecim in Polish, or Auschwitz in German. The term Auschwitz no longer refers to a town but to a darkness in human history when humanity ceased to exist.
Auschwitz was a complex of about 40 Nazi concentration camps of which Auschwitz — also known as Birkenau — was designed for one purpose and that was to help implement the “final solution” or the murder of all Jews in eastern Europe and then eventually in the entire world. Jews were murdered in many ways: being worked to death, starvation, mobile killing units or Einsatzgruppen, “medical experiments,” and mass killings on an “industrial scale” in gas chambers using poison gas of varying kinds. Auschwitz used Zyklon B.
World War II started on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. At the time, Poland was home to the largest number of Jews of any country, more than 3.3 million Jews or about 10 percent of the Polish population. By end of the war in Europe, VE (Victory in Europe) Day, on May 8, 1945, more than 90 percent of the Jews in Poland had been murdered, most in the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz.