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Podcast: Crossing Continents
Episode: Death Marches: uncovering the truth beneath the soil
Description: How a town in Poland – once in Germany - is discovering its troubling past.
80 years ago Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi extermination camp. Over 1.1 million people, mainly Jews, were murdered there. However, there is an aspect of those terrible days which is less well known and which 80 years later is still being uncovered and still resonating: the death marches.
As Soviet troops approached, in January 1945, SS soldiers at Auschwitz-Birkenau forced some 60,000 prisoners to march west, in freezing temperatures. Weak with hunger and disease, those who fell behind were shot.
This is the story of how eight decades on...