Meanwhile: The Liberation of Auschwitz

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Meanwhile: The Liberation of Auschwitz

Published: 27 Jan. 2026, 00:05

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Roh Jeong-tae

The author is a writer and senior fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research.

By 1945, Nazi Germany was in retreat. On the Eastern Front, Soviet forces advanced steadily westward, pushing back German lines. On Jan. 27, Soviet troops reached the vicinity of the Polish town of Oswiecim. There stood Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp. It was the moment when the greatest and most horrific war crime in human history was exposed to the world.

The railway tracks where hundred of thousands of people arrived to be directed to the gas chambers inside the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, are pictured in Oswiecim, Poland, on Dec. 7, 2019. [AP/YONHAP]

Auschwitz was too vast to conceal. Even as the front collapsed and defeat loomed, the Nazis could not bring themselves to abandon the machinery of mass murder. They transferred most prisoners elsewhere, leaving behind roughly 7,000 people. They attempted to destroy the camp to erase evidence, but what remained defied imagination. Investigators found 48,820 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s coats, hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes and more than 6,350 kilograms of human hair. The number of victims is estimated at 1.1 million, of whom about 1 million were Jews.

The history of genocide is as old as human history itself. Yet Auschwitz occupies a singular place in that grim record. It demonstrated how the most primitive impulses of racial hatred and exclusion could be fused with the most advanced science, technology and administrative systems of the era to produce industrialized mass murder. It revealed with brutal clarity that rational thinking and efficiency, when reduced to purely instrumental tools divorced from moral judgment, can generate outcomes far more terrifying than unreasoning violence.

In this sense, Auschwitz became a defining negative lesson for the postwar international order. The establishment of the United Nations in 1945 and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the third UN General Assembly in 1948 were inseparable from the shock Auschwitz inflicted on humanity. A shared conviction emerged that states must never incite racial discrimination or hatred and that they bear an absolute responsibility to protect the lives and safety of all people under their authority.

Looking at news from around the world today, it is difficult to escape the unease that these lessons are fading. Rhetoric that stigmatizes minorities, policies that treat certain lives as expendable and political movements that draw strength from fear and resentment are again gaining ground.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.