“The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a tragic date of enormous moral and humanistic significance.
The Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945, revealing to humanity the truth about the crimes of the Nazis and their henchmen, who murdered millions of Jews, Russians, Gypsies, and representatives of other nations,” Putin read in his message.
The president’s text read at the ceremony commemorating the tragic event by Russia’s Chief Rabbi, Berel Lazar, added that the Russian people “will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed that terrible total evil and won the victory, the greatness of which will forever remain in world history.”
The date was chosen because on the same day, in 1945, the Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where more than 1.1 million people, including about one million Jews, were exterminated during the German occupation.
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