International Day of Liberation of Prisoners of Nazi Concentration Camps

On April 11th, the International Day of Liberation of Prisoners of Nazi Concentration Camps is celebrated in Russia and in many countries of the world. This day does not allow the world to forget about the unjustified cruelty and ruthlessness of the fascists and reminds the current generation of the price the victory over them came at.

The international event was established by the UN in memory of the rebellious prisoners of one of the most numerous concentration camps in history – Buchenwald. Mass killings by shooting, hanging, gas poisoning, hunger and cold, brutal beatings, medical experiments on living people, including children, blood sampling from babies already exhausted – all this is only a small part of what people who fell under the monstrous ice rink of the Nazi regime had to experience behind barbed wire. Due to the scale of the tragedy of the Second World War, the International Day of Liberation of Prisoners of Nazi Concentration Camps quickly gained universal significance, since citizens of the overwhelming number of countries of the modern world belonged to the prisoners of the camps.

Concentration camps are places of detention of large masses of people placed there on political, social, racial, religious and other grounds. During the Great Patriotic War, nazi Germany created a whole network of such places where hundreds of people were killed every day. Sometimes the numbers of those killed reached a terrifying magnitude, and the penalties and subsequent deprivation of life were sophisticated and accompanied by torture. Most of the people killed during the Third Reich were from the Soviet Union.

In total, more than 14 thousand concentration camps, ghettos and prisons operated on the territory of Germany and the countries occupied by it. One of the largest Nazi concentration camps was Buchenwald, which began operating near the German city of Weimar on July 19, 1937, and by the end of the war, according to German statistics, it had from 60 to 130 branches. Basically, soldiers from the front, captured women and children were sent there. Jews were especially severely exterminated. The terrible genocide that existed in the Buchenwald charter claimed the lives of all representatives: children, women, men and the elderly.

Buchenwald's main profile was the extermination of the population through physical torture, and the fascists also used a gas chamber, which allowed the Nazis to kill a large group of "useless" people at once... Many surrendered and submitted to fate, enduring cruel tortures and begging for death, but there were also those who held on to the end. Resistance groups were created underground, which developed a combat plan – their main task was to overthrow the leadership of Buchenwald. On April 11, 1945, people managed to do it.

After the victory of the world over Nazi Germany, the concentration camps ceased to exist. At the Nuremberg trials in 1946, the international tribunal recognized that the imprisonment of peaceful citizens of foreign States, as well as the forced use of their labor in the interests of Germany, is not only a war crime. It was qualified as a crime against humanity.

Today, during the celebration of the International Day of Liberation of Prisoners of Nazi Concentration Camps, various commemorative events are held in many countries, commemoration of the dead, worship of their memory, laying flowers at the graves and burial sites of victims of fascism. Public organizations conduct various educational events, open lectures, charity events. After all, only by preserving the memory of those terrible events and paying tribute to the people who died and survived in that hell, one can hope that such a thing will never happen again in human history.