Holocaust Memorial Education Center
Shimon and Sara Birnbaum Jewish Community Center
COMMEMORATING LIBERATION
“The things I saw beggar description…. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were… overpowering….I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”
—General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a letter to Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, April 15, 1945
In 2015 the world marked the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe—and, with it, the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps by Allied forces. Listed here are dates of liberation of some of the camps:
July 23–24, 1944: Soviet forces liberated Lublin-Majdanek
January 27, 1945: Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau
February 13, 1945: Soviet forces liberated Gross-Rosen
April 4, 1945: US forces liberated Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald
April 11, 1945: US forces liberated Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau
April 12, 1945: Canadian forces liberated Westerbork
April 15, 1945: British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen
April 22, 1945: Units of the First and 47th Polish Armies, operating under overall Soviet command liberated Sachsenhausen
April 23, 1945: US forces liberated Flossenbürg
April 29, 1945: Soviet forces liberated Ravensbrück; US forces liberated Dachau
May 4, 1945: British forces liberated Neuengamme
May 6, 1945: US forces liberated Mauthausen
On May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender became official.
Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC
