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Auschwitz-Birkenau is liberated

Name: Auschwitz-Birkenau is liberated
Start: 1945-01-27
Location: Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Oświęcim, Poland

Auschwitz II-Birkenau · Oświęcim, Poland · 1945-01-27

Soviet troops reached the camp where at least 1.1 million people had been murdered. The date is now International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The record

Date	1945-01-27
Place	Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Oświęcim, Poland
Coordinates	50.027, 19.203 (landmark-level precision)
Scope	World-historic
Sources	Wikipedia
Added	2026-08-14 · source: editors

Go deeper. This page records the place, the date and what is tied to them — the full story is told better elsewhere: Wikipedia. What you will not find there is this location’s other time layers, the map, and the memories readers add below.

Coordinates are given at landmark level. A landmark-level coordinate points at the structure; a city-level one points at the settlement, not at a parcel.

Finding photographs

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Wikimedia Commons — freely licensed images, with the licence stated on every file. This is the only source we republish from.
The reference article — its own illustrations, and its citations to archives.
Image search filtered to reusable licences — useful for tracing which institution holds a picture.
National and municipal archives of Poland, and the picture desks of newspapers published there at the time.

Check the licence before you reuse anything. A photograph being online, or being old, does not make it free; in most countries a 1960s press photograph is still in copyright.

Footage

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Time layers at this place

One place, several moments in time. This location has 2 recorded time layers between 1940 and 1945 — slide through them:

1940

Auschwitz

1945

Auschwitz-Birkenau is liberated

1940 — Auschwitz
1945 — Auschwitz-Birkenau is liberated this page

Seeded by the editors. This entry was compiled by us from public reference works and is labelled as such, not presented as a reader’s contribution. Sources are listed on the entry. If you know more, or we have it wrong, tell us — corrections are published.

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What readers have added

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Nearby in Europe

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