Soviet Forces Liberate Gross-Rosen

On this day, Soviet forces liberated the main Gross-Rosen concentration camp, then in German Silesia and now Rogoźnica, Poland. The SS had already evacuated the main camp in early February as the front approached. Guards forced at least 44,000 prisoners, many of them Jews, onto freight trains toward camps inside Germany. Many died of hunger, thirst, or shooting on the way.

Gross-Rosen began in 1940 as a Sachsenhausen subcamp and became independent in 1941. By the end of the war it administered at least 97 subcamps. On 1 January 1945 the complex held 76,728 prisoners, including nearly 26,000 women, one of the largest groups of female prisoners in the camp system. Of about 120,000 people who passed through Gross-Rosen, at least 40,000 died in the camps or during the 1945 evacuation.