Primo Levi - one of the most famous survivors - was lying in a camp hospital with scarlet fever when the liberators arrived.
.jpg)
The men cast "strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive", he would later write.
"They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by... the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist."
"We saw emaciated, tortured, impoverished people," soldier Ivan Martynushkin said of liberating the death camp. "We could tell from their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell."
In just over four-and-a-half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. Almost one million were Jews.
Those deported to the camp complex were gassed, starved, worked to death and even killed in medical experiments. The vast majority were murdered in the complex of gas chambers at Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp.
Six million Jewish people died in the Holocaust - the Nazi campaign to eradicate Europe's Jewish population. Auschwitz was at the center of that genocide.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they began to strip Jewish people of all property, freedoms and rights under the law. After the German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, the Nazis began deporting Jewish people from the Third Reich to parts of Poland, where they created ghettos to separate them from the rest of the population.
In 1941, during the German invasion of the USSR, the Nazis began their campaign of extermination in earnest. Nazis spoke about their invasion as a race war between Germany and Jewish people, as well as the Slavic population and the Roma.