On January 27, 1945, the Red Army took control of Auschwitz away from the Nazis, where more than one million Jewish victims were liquidated that comprised roughly 1/6 of all the murders committed during the Holocaust. Unlike the Operation Reinhard death camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdankek, and Chelmo, which saw almost two million murders combined, Auschwitz functioned as both a concentration and a death camp. After the Operation Reinhard death camps had largely exterminated Polish Jewry by 1943, and since they had started to become a liability with the war effort swinging in favor of the Red Army, Auschwitz, located farther to the west, began killing more and more Jews as the war came to its final climax.   Auschwitz entrance Photo credit: xiquinhosilva Less well known, most of the remaining prisoners at Auschwitz, together with many other concentration camp prisoners located throughout German occupied territories, were removed before the Soviets took control...(Read Full Article)