On Jan. 26, 1945, Soviets troops entered the network of Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz, Poland, freeing the survivors and revealing to the world the horrors perpetrated there. Auschwitz was a group of three major camps and 40 smaller “satellite” camps. At Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, established in October 1941, the SS created a complex of 300 prison barracks, four “bathhouses” where prisoners were gassed, and cremating ovens. When the Red Army arrived, they found 648 corpses and more than 7,000 starving survivors, as well as storehouses filled with hundreds of thousands of women’s dresses, men’s suits, and shoes that the Germans did not have time to burn.
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