Nazi Germany carried out its human eradication programme on an industrial scale, inspired by Hitler's wicked views about race and people. That genocidal effort relied heavily on a net of extermination camps, responsible for the deaths of millions of people. Of those death factories, Auschwitz was the most “efficient”.
23 January 2020, Jerusalem. More than 45 heads of state and other politicians gather in the Holy City for the Fifth World Holocaust Forum. The event kicks off at Yad Vashem Memorial just days ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, timed to coincide with the liberation of Auschwitz.
Speaking to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Rivlin on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the Holocaust a “shared tragedy”. According to the most widely-cited estimate, 40 percent of Jews that died during World War II were from the Nazi-occupied parts of the Soviet Union (2.5 million out of the total 6 million victims of the Holocaust).
Auschwitz was at the centre of what came to be known as one of the most inhumane episodes in world history. It was created in 1940 in former army barracks at the confluence of the Vistula and Sola rivers in southern Poland.
People from all over Europe were carted into the camp in cattle wagons. Though most of them were Jews, Nazi ideology was also premised on the elimination of other “inferior” nations and groups – including Slavs. The Nazis viewed those nations as non-Aryan…
