In just over four-and-a-half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, built in the south of occupied Poland near the town of Oswiecim. Auschwitz was at the centre of the Nazi campaign to eradicate Europe's Jewish population, and almost one million of those who died there were Jews.

For the 7,000 prisoners remaining—more than 60,000 had been forced to undertake a death march in the weeks before Allied troops arrived—liberation came as a bitter relief, overshadowed by the harrowing murder of 1.