The former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp has become a memorial site to darkest chapter of German historyImage: Tabea Guenzler/Eibner-Pressefoto/picture alliance
The 86th anniversary of the first transport carrying prisoners to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz has been marked by commemoration ceremonies.
A ceremony at the site of the former camp in what was then German-occupied Poland was attended, among others, by trainees from automaker Volkswagen, according to the deputy chairman of the International Auschwitz Committee, Christoph Heubner.
In remarks made in Berlin, he stressed how important it was that young people were involved in passing on the memory of the atrocities committed there.
Heubner said the first prisoners— 728 young Poles and Polish Jews — had quickly realized “in what a hell of hate and destructive intent they had ended up.”
He said that, as the earliest inmates, they had used their knowledge about the camp’s workings and the mentality of the SS guards to help other prisoners who came later.
“The prisoners who were deported to Auschwitz after them still today remember them with great appreciation and gratitude,” he said.
Most of the first prisoners had reportedly been trying to escape Poland to join foreign forces and fight against the German occupiers of their home country.
In Auschwitz, the Nazis murdered more than a million people, including some 960,000 Jews, before the camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945.
The International Auschwitz Committee was founded in 1952 by survivors of the death camp to give support to survivors and fight racism and antisemitism.
Germany’s darkest chapter: Auschwitz and the Holocaust
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