The Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi regime is the most well-known horror of a horror-filled twentieth century. At Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, the world confronts the realities of evil in this world and the human condition. Whatever it takes, we must never forget. 

Eighty years ago, on January 27, 1945, Soviet forces overran a section of German-occupied Poland. The Nazis had been on the run for a couple of years by this point near the end of World War II, so it was not the retreat that shocked the Soviets. In the neighborhood of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Soviets discovered 600 corpses and 7000 live, emaciated prisoners. It was only the beginning of the discovery of the horrors of the Holocaust, a word now used as a synonym for evil.

In 12 years of Nazi power, and particularly after the 1942 start of the “Final Solution,” some six million Jews, along with five million Slavs, Roma, dissidents, and other prisoners, were worked, shot, or gassed to death. The bulk were taken from modern day Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine, but Hitler’s odious apparatus netted victims from across Europe, sometimes with complicity of local governments. The Nazis claimed that the Jews were being resettled in newly conquered areas of the USSR, but they were instead systematically executed. Those who could work were worked to death. Those who couldn’t work, including children and the elderly, were killed with all the industrial genius of the German nation.

What should be a source of shock for today is the increasing number of young Americans who doubt that the Holocaust, one of the most well-attested events in all history, even happened. The records are there, as were a number of eyewitnesses. The Nazis said they were going to do it, and Germans today admit they did. This evil happened.

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