Holocaust Memorial Day

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MSN News

What time to light a candle for Holocaust Memorial Day 2022 today and the meaning behind the tribute

Alex Finnis

Jan. 27 2022

Every year on 27 January the victims and the families of the Holocaust are remembered in the UK on what has become Holocaust Memorial Day.

Six million Jewish people were killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust during the Second World War, along with millions from other persecuted groups.

Holocaust Memorial Day also remembers people killed in genocides that followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

Why is Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January?

The date was chosen because on 27 January 1945, the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Soviet Union.

At least 1.1 million people are known to have been killed at Auschwitz, in Poland. It was the largest Nazi death camp, and consisted of more than 40 concentration and extermination camps.

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NEVER FORGET

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"Film Everything! Because someday some son of a bitch is going to say this never happened."

General Dwight Eisenhower

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And he was right.

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The Death Marches: The Final Spasm of the Nazi Genocide

Stories from the survivors of the Nazis’ evacuation of prisoners from Auschwitz

Mel Laytner

January 26, 2022

On Jan. 18, 1945—just 10 days before the Red Army liberated Auschwitz—the SS sent 56,000 prisoners on a series of death marches. The evacuations became part of a cascading mudslide of mayhem and murder that killed as many as 250,000 concentration camp inmates and POWS in the last four months of the war. Unlike the Nazi extermination program itself, this outcome was not planned or premeditated. Rather, it was largely the result of murderous inertia, bureaucratic bungling, and confusion. The Auschwitz prisoners followed a number of routes, all of them through one of Europe’s severest winters ever recorded. This is the story of one march by one camp: Blechhammer, the largest exclusively Jewish slave labor camp in the Auschwitz system, and the second largest subcamp overall. All quotes are from published testimonials, memoirs, news reports, and personal interviews.

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Buchenwald was liberated on April 11, 1945, by Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army. By then, more than 5,000 prisoners had died, most of starvation, dysentery, though hundreds were also shot. For tens of thousands more in camps across the shrinking Reich, successive death marches continued for nearly a month more, until the Nazi regime itself was declared dead.

 

This article was adapted from the author’s investigative memoir, What They Didn’t Burn, which tracks down a Nazi paper trail that uncovers his father’s Holocaust secrets.