Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: Witness History
Episode: The liberation of Auschwitz
Description: On 27 January 1945, prisoners at the Nazis’ largest death camp were freed by the Soviet Union’s Red Army.General Vasily Petrenko commanded one of the four units that liberated Auschwitz.The Nazis murdered 1.1 million people at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1941 and 1945. Almost a million were Jews, 70,000 were Polish prisoners, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and an unknown number of gay men.It was one of six death camps the Nazis built in occupied Poland in 1942, and it was by far the biggest.Vicky Farncombe produced this episode using an interview General Vasily Petrenko gave...