April 11 is celebrated all over the world as a memorable date — International Day of Fascist Concentration Camps Prisoners Liberation. It was installed in memory of the international uprising of prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp, which occurred on April 11, 1945.
Concentration camps — are places of detention for large masses of people placed there on political, social, racial, religious and other grounds. They became widespread during the Second World War and were located both in Nazi Germany itself and in the territories occupied by it.
On March 22, 1933, the first concentration camp in Nazi Germany began operating in Dachau, and in subsequent years the Nazis created a huge network of these camps, turned into places of organized systematic murder of millions of people.
In total, more than 14 thousand concentration camps, ghettos and prisons operated in Germany and the countries it occupied. One of the largest Nazi concentration camps was Buchenwald, which began operating near the German city of Weimar on July 19, 1937. By 1945, it had 66 branches and external work teams.
According to the SS men themselves, the prisoner, whose life expectancy in the camp was less than a year, brought the Nazis almost one and a half thousand Reichsmarks of net profit.
Among other world-famous Nazi concentration camps in which tens and hundreds of thousands of prisoners were kept and killed: Auschwitz – 4 million prisoners, Majdanek – 1.38 million, Mauthausen – 122 thousand, Sachsenhausen – 100 thousand, Ravensbrück – 92.7 thousand, Treblinka – 80 thousand, Stutthof – 80 thousand. The number of children under 14 years of age in these camps was 12-15%.
During the Second World War, more than 20 million people from 30 countries passed through death camps, of which 5 million — were citizens of the Soviet Union. Approximately 12 million people never lived to see liberation, including — about 2 million children. In Buchenwald alone, over 56 thousand people of 18 nationalities were killed, including 19 thousand Soviet prisoners of war.
On April 11, 1945, Buchenwald prisoners launched an international uprising against the Nazis and were released. It seems like it was so long ago. But not for those who went through the horrors of fascist dungeons. Biographies of these people — are real lessons of courage for the younger generation.
At the Nuremberg trials in 1946, an international tribunal recognized that the imprisonment of civilians of foreign states, as well as the forced use of their labor in the interests of Germany, was not only a war crime. It was classified as a crime against humanity.
Today, April 11, many countries are hosting various commemorative events, meetings of former prisoners, commemoration of the dead, worship of their memory, laying flowers at the graves and burial places of victims of fascism. After all, only by preserving the memory of those terrible events and paying tribute to the people who died and survived that hell can we hope that this will never happen again in human history.
• Infographics – poster «April 11 — International Day for the Liberation of Prisoners of Fascist Concentration Camps»