International Day of Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps

Concentration camps - the word evokes the horrors of the Hitler regime, which set up thousands of these incarceration sites and factories of death. There, large numbers of people were imprisoned on political, social, racial, religious and other grounds. They were widespread throughout Nazi Germany and the territories occupied by the Third Reich. As a rule, they held anti-fascists, primarily communists, social democrats and trade unionists, as well as persons persecuted on racial, religious, social and other grounds.

The liberation of the Nazi concentration camps was a significant development in world history, and every year on April 11 this event and its legacy for humanity is commemorated.

Take a look at Sputnik's photo gallery dedicated to the International Day of the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps:

1 / 12

Museum exhibition in the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland.

Go to the mediabank

2 / 12

The Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. A burial for dead inmates of the Auschwitz concentration camp, liberated by the Red Army.

Go to the mediabank

3 / 12

This monument is dedicated to children killed in a concentration camp, and located on the territory of the memorial "Concentration Camp Krasny" in Simferopol.

Go to the mediabank

4 / 12

A barbed wire fence encloses the memorial site of the former Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp near Weimar, Eastern Germany.

5 / 12

A picture taken in October 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp showing Nazi officials forced by British authorities to exhume and then properly rebury the bodies of 100 executed political deportees after the liberation of the camp by allied troops.

6 / 12

A sign indicating the Sobibor train station near the death camp.

Go to the mediabank

7 / 12

The XX Summer Olympic Games in Munich, August 26 - September 10, 1972. The USSR Olympic team visited the Dachau Nazi concentration camp and paid tribute to all the dead prisoners.

8 / 12

A Macedonian soldier carries an urn with the ashes of Macedonian Jews who died in the Nazi concentration camp of Treblinka during WWII during the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Center in Skopje on March 10, 2011. The Holocaust Memorial Center, located in what once was Skopje's Jewish district, is the world’s fourth of its kind, preceded by those in Jerusalem, Berlin and Washington.

9 / 12

Monument to the victims of the Holocaust - the memorial to the victims of the "Death March" in the village of Yantarny, Kaliningrad region, where a memorial rally is held in memory of the Holocaust and the victims of the Palmniken massacre. The rally's participants followed the route along which the Nazis convoyed the prisoners of concentration camps in East Prussia to the Baltic Sea in the village of Palmniken (nowadays Yantarny) at the end of January 1945. Those who remained alive after the Death March were driven into the icy waters of the Baltic Sea and shot.

Go to the mediabank

10 / 12

Photos of people burned in the Majdanek concentration camp in 1944.

11 / 12

Memorial to the victims of fascism "The Road of Suffering" with symbolic concrete statues on the site of the Nazi concentration camp that was here during World War II (near the town of Salaspils, Latvia). The memorial was opened in 1967.

12 / 12

Formerly electrified barbed wires are seen on the walls of the World War II concentration camp of Mauthausen.

World Marks International Day of Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps