Auschwitz-Birkenau

The largest of the German camps was built around a Polish army barracks and grew into a complex of more than forty sites. About 1.1 million people were killed here, roughly a million of them Jews, along with Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and others.

Soviet troops reached it on 27 January 1945 and found some seven thousand people too ill to be marched away. That date is now the international day of remembrance. The site is preserved rather than restored: the barracks, the rails, and warehouses of shoes, spectacles and human hair.