The daily routine at Auschwitz had been diminishing for several days. In January 1945, surrounded by the advancing Soviets who were getting closer to the center of the Holocaust, the Nazi leaders decided to transfer the prisoners from the extermination camp to other locations. The liberation of Auschwitz was a fact, and the death marches began: anyone who could walk was led through forests in a terrible march to other extermination camps.
That's why the activity in the camp was decreasing. On the morning of January 27, only seven thousand people remained, mostly sick individuals who couldn't move, and some children locked in a barrack. An advance unit of the 332nd Infantry Regiment of the Red Army marched in formation towards the camp, reaching it around three in the afternoon, when the soldiers came across a metal gate with the inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work sets you free").
Inside, despite the Nazis' efforts to prevent it, they found a scaled representation of the greatest atrocity committed in modern history: the murder of Jews and other minorities as part of the final solution devised by Adolf Hitler.
This Monday marks 80 years since the liberation. A round number that will be commemorated at the camp with the presence of European and world leaders, who once again want to join in condemning the Holocaust. 42 delegations have confirmed their attendance, 27 of them at the highest level. All parliamentary monarchies of Europe will be represented, presidents will travel, prime ministers will attend, and Israel will send the Minister of Education. Poland has announced that it will overlook the arrest warrant for Netanyahu in case he wishes to attend the tribute. A meeting to remember the horror. Because in Auschwitz, 1.1 million people were murdered.
"80 years later, it doesn't seem like the vaccine of the Allies' victory has been so definitive to say that evil has been eradicated," reflects Emilio Sáenz-Francés, Professor of International Relations at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas, in conversation with EL MUNDO. It was in August 1933 when Hitler came to power in Germany leading the National Socialist Party. From then until the beginning of the labor camps and the arrival of the extermination camps, there was a crescendo of the offensive against the Jewish people. A harassment that can be dated with several milestones, from the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws to exclude them from public life in 1935; through the night of broken glass in 1938, to the approval of the final solution in 1942.
In September 1941, experimental gassings with Zyklon B gas were tested in Block 11 of Auschwitz, and they saw that it was the most effective way to carry out their plan. As Dan Stone recalls in The Holocaust (La Esfera de los Libros), "the first new gas chamber and crematorium complex built specifically in Birkenau did not start operating until March 1943." But by that time, they had already murdered 3.8 million Jews between 1941 and 1942.
Remembering what happened in Auschwitz remains important, as emphasized by Sáenz-Francés: "That in the heart of one of the most enlightened nations of the European continent, the cruel extermination of millions of people was scientifically designed and carried out with the connivance of a large part of the population of that country, which remains very controversial, is a terrible milestone."
And the international summit on each anniversary is necessary - the Kings already visited Auschwitz in 2020 for the 75th anniversary of the liberation - at a time when far-right parties continue to grow. In Europe, they represented 17% of popular representation in 2022, according to data collected by The Guardian's Popu-List. "After World War II, a new international order was designed that was liberal and moderate, not ruling from the extremes. The fever of extremism in the 1930s had led to a world war, and it was necessary to govern with moderation," explains Sáenz-Francés. A century later, "it seems that moderate politics are emptying, and Europeans and Americans are leaning towards populist extremes that somewhat resemble that dramatic decade of the 30s. It's not the same fever, but it's a worrying low-grade fever," he opines.
"Today there is a discourse present in all these parties that is xenophobic, unleashing a fear of the other. I don't mean to say that they are parties like the National Socialists, but there is a connection. Because there is a mental mechanism being used that offers certain similarities," analyzes Sáenz-Francés a week after immigrants monopolized part of Donald Trump's discourse at his inauguration.
Eight decades after the liberation of Auschwitz, the meeting of European leaders at the camp is also a review of the role each played during the Third Reich. "The allied nations of National Socialism were complicit: Vichy France was complicit without being a racist regime, Italian fascism...", Sáenz-Francés enumerates before reaching Franco's Spain.
"Spain was not an active collaborator, much less of the Holocaust," he states. However, he acknowledges that "it was a regime that did not feel affinity towards the Jewish people but for different reasons than the Nazis, its antisemitism was more traditional, religious... But one cannot place Spain's hostile passive attitude towards the Jews on the same level as the atrocious will to destroy a people of National Socialism. The attitude was devious, tending to look the other way, and when it finally acted to repatriate the Sephardic community to Spain - whose ambassador in Hungary, Ángel Sanz Briz, saved 5,000 Jews - it did so more under pressure from the allies than by its own initiative." Another 400,000 Hungarian Jews were exterminated in Auschwitz, by the way, when the war was already completely lost.