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Why is January 27th the date the United Nations chose to remember victims of Nazism?

Published on: Wednesday, 27th January 2010 07:53 AM     By      Administrator

Why is January 27th the date the United Nations chose to remember victims of Nazism? In 2005, the UN designated this date as theInternational Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. It is a recognized memorial day in Germany, the UK and elsewhere in the European Union. The date marks the 1945 liberation of the largest and most lethal of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau, by Soviet troops. Nazis had murdered some 1.5 million people, most of whom were Jews, in this camp, located near Oświęcim, Poland. The camp began operation in 1940 and by 1944 more than 100,000 inmates were housed there, with the population growing constantly. Six thousand a day died in the gas chambers. Ten days before the Soviet troops reached the camp, most of the inmates were sent on a Death March. When Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated, fewer than 8,000 people were left in the camp. 

Quote: "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." — Viktor Frankl