April 11 marks the International Day of former political prisoners, concentration camp inmates and victims of fascism and wars.
This is how the uprising of the Buchenwald concentration camp inmates, prepared for a long time by the Soviet prisoners of war, is honored. On April 11, 1945, the guard towers, internal and external guards of the camp were attacked, the insurgent concentration camp inmates went outside the wire nets and raised a red flag over the administrative building of the camp. SS soldiers and officers are turned to flight. The uprising saves the prisoners from certain death, because only a day before, the Nazis decided to exterminate all the concentration camp inmates. Two days later, the 3rd Division of American troops advancing in Thuringia reached Buchenwald. Earlier, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the largest concentration camp, Auschwitz, near Krakow in Poland.
In the years of the Second World War, more than 18 million people passed through the death camps, of which 5 million were citizens of the Soviet Union. Over 12 million of them do not survive. More than 14 thousand concentration camps operate on the territory of Germany and the occupied countries. These are places of terrible crimes. People were burned in the furnaces of crematoriums, suffocated in gas chambers, tortured, raped, forced to starve and work to exhaustion. Terrible medical experiments were carried out on them. By the SS's own admission, the life expectancy of a concentration camp inmate is less than a year, but his work equals almost fifteen hundred Reichsmarks in net profit.
On April 11, we pay tribute and bow to the heroism, to the strength and courage of all the fighters against fascism and Nazism, the barbarism of the twentieth century, marked by 50 million deaths in the years of the Second World War.
May the memory of them not extinguish and peace of their souls.
People, watch out! Never again fascism!