The liberation of Auschwitz: sixty years ago this month, advancing Allied troops came face to face with the horrors of the Nazi death camps.

• Author: Berger, Joseph
• Position: Times Past

Sixty years ago, on Jan. 27, 1945, Russian soldiers pursuing the fleeing German armies near one of the anonymous towns of Poland came upon a gruesome scene.

Thousands of people--mostly European Jews but also Gypsies and other non-Jews the Nazis disdained as subhuman--had been reduced to emaciated skeletons while working as slave laborers in a complex of concentration camps outside the town of Auschwitz, 180 miles southwest of Warsaw.

Here and there, in the gray snow, were heaps of corpses--thousands of them. As the Russians were to learn, these bodies would normally have been disposed of in cremation ovens, just as the Nazis had done with hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children they slaughtered in methodical fashion in poison-gas chambers. But the Germans had spirited the ovens away to hide evidence of their crimes and of the murders of 1.1 million people at Auschwitz alone.

6 MILLION JEWS

Auschwitz has since come to stand for the horrors of the Nazi regime and for genocide itself. There were almost 9 million Jews in the European countries under some degree of German control during World War II and the Nazis killed 6 million, two out of every three. In Poland alone, 3.3 million Jews were killed, more than 90 percent of the country's Jewish population. The numbers testify to how close Adolf Hitler came to achieving his "Final Solution" to what he called the Jewish problem: complete eradication of Europe's Jews once the usefulness of Jewish labor for his war machine was exhausted.

COLLECTIVE MURDER

There have been other genocides before and since. Between 1915 and 1923, the Ottoman government in Turkey killed at least 1 million Christian Armenians through massacres or brutal marches. In the 1970s, the Communist government of Pol Pot in Cambodia murdered 1.7 million of its own people. And in just four months in 1994, 800,000 Rwandans were killed, most of them Tutsis massacred by Hutus.

But the collective murder captured in the word Auschwitz eclipses all of these genocides because of the Nazis' systematic efficiency. The Germans built 1,634 concentration camps and more than 900 labor camps, all of which resulted in thousands of deaths from starvation and overwork. But six--Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Belzec, all in occupied Poland, where the local population was considered less sympathetic to the Jews' plight--were deliberately outfitted for mass murder.

Auschwitz was actually a complex of three camps (including Birkenau and Monowitz) built on the site of a Polish artillery barracks. Freight trains arrived almost daily with shipments of thousands of Jews deported...