Liberation of Auschwitz, January 27, 1945

| By Gale Staff |

As someone who has sat through more than my share of movies about the Holocaust, I used to wonder why every year brought more and more of them. In the last several years, however, I’ve started to think maybe we need more reminders of that horrific scar on the twentieth century. The growing amount of disinformation in social media and the willful neglect of the causes and effects of the Holocaust have led to a situation where a recent poll found that 20 percent of Americans under the age of thirty believe that the Holocaust is a myth.

Given the growing demonization of people who are different and the rise of hate crimes and antisemitism, it’s ever more important that educators remind students that not only was the Holocaust not a myth but that the possibility of another mass atrocity might not be as remote as it seems. The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, is a particularly appropriate occasion. Teachers and librarians will find numerous resources in Gale In Context: World History to assist them.

Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in southern Poland, has come to be seen as the symbol of the Holocaust. It was opened in 1940, soon after Germany invaded Poland, and it was initially designed to hold Polish political prisoners. In 1941, however, Heinrich Himmler ordered an enlargement of the camp, which was known as Birkenau. Soon, gas chambers were added, and Auschwitz-Birkenau became part of the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” their plan to murder the Jewish people in Europe.

Auschwitz was hardly the only Nazi extermination camp. One of the things I remember most from my visit to the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany, was the map that showed how extensive the Nazi camp system was. But Auschwitz was the most lethal death camp, with one million Jewish people killed there in just three years. The Germans experimented with various ways of killing its prisoners, endeavoring to find the most efficient means possible. Eventually they chose gas chambers using Zyklon B, a form of cyanide.

Regardless of the brutality and the atrocities committed, a disturbingly high number of people in the twenty-first century have embraced the belief that the Holocaust never happened. Holocaust deniers sprouted up as early as 1945, but their number has grown over time. The most extreme of them claim that there were no extermination camps at all and that the Nazis never made any plans to deliberately murder the Jewish people of Europe. Others have argued that some Jewish people were killed during World War II, but it was far fewer than the five to six million people that died in the Holocaust. Still others simply claim that the Holocaust was no different than other mass killings in history and that the Nazis shouldn’t be singled out.

This makes it incumbent on educators to teach their students about what happened during the Holocaust. A common (and useful) approach is to learn about Anne Frank, but that only conveys one small part of the Holocaust. The personal remembrances of Holocaust survivors are often more vivid about its terror. Similarly, learning about Elie Wiesel and reading his landmark book Night can be particularly powerful for high school and college students. By the time the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz, the vast majority of Jewish prisoners there had been transferred to other camps, many of them dying on the way. The Nazis attempted to hide the evidence of their crimes by tearing down many of the buildings at Auschwitz, but enough remained. Furthermore, some prisoners avoided being transferred, and they appear in famous photos the Soviets took on that day, a testimony to the horrors of the Holocaust, an event that must never be forgotten or minimized.