Auschwitz: How the Death Camp Became the Center of the Nazi Holocaust

80 years ago Soviet troops liberated the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some of the last survivors will be joined by world leaders on Monday to remember the 1.1 million people who died there.

The remaining survivors are mostly in their 90s and this may be the last year any of them can participate.

In just over four and a half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people in Auschwitz, near the town of Oswiecim in southern occupied Poland.

Auschwitz was at the center of the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe, and nearly one million Jews died there.

Among the others who lost their lives were Poles, Gypsies and Russian prisoners of war.

(When the Red Army cautiously entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, there were only about 7,000 prisoners. The other ten thousand prisoners had taken part in the “death march” when the Nazis retreated to the west.

Italian prisoner Primo Levi was lying in a camp hospital with scarlet fever when the Soviet liberators arrived.

The men cast a “strange look of shame” on the sprawled bodies, the battered huts and the few survivors, he would later write in his Holocaust memoir The Truce.

“They did not greet us, not even a smile; they seemed overwhelmed not only with pity, but with guilt that there should be such a crime.”

“We saw thin, tortured, poor people”, Soldier Ivan Martynushkin told about liberating the death camp, external. “We could tell from their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell.”