The horrors of
THE horror of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the world’s most notorious death camp, is captured in pictures released yesterday.
Chilling images emerged just days before the world falls silent to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday.
Purpose-built railways ferried hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to the Nazi extermination camp near Oswiecim, in occupied Poland, during the Second World War.
Starving, cold and crushed into airless cattle trucks, they arrived at the “Gate of Death” where they were stripped of their possessions before being gassed to death.
Photographs show piles of hair combs, brushes and reading glasses confiscated by guards.
Another image from the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum shows leather suitcases belonging prisoners in the mountain of plundered luggage.
Caged young children reveal camp numbers tattooed on their arms, while a row of emaciated men stand expressionless inside the barbed wire fence.
It is thought 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz and 1.1 million perished there, including 960,000 Jews, 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma people, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and up to 15,000 other Europeans.
Prisoners who were not exterminated in gas chambers died of starvation, exhaustion, disease, or were individually executed, beaten to death or killed during medical experiments, as part of what the Third Reich called the Final Solution.
The camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945.
The day is now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.