Chilling drone footage captures Auschwitz ahead of 70th anniversary of liberation

Over one million people were killed at the camp during the five years it was open

Jack Simpson
Monday 26 January 2015 19:21 GMT
Tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
Tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

Chilling drone footage has been released showing the sheer scale of Auschwitz concentration camp ahead of Tuesday’s 70th anniversary marking the liberation of the Nazi regime’s largest death camp.

The eerie video taken over the weekend and featured on ITV’s lunchtime news show, shows an aerial view of the 40 square kilometres of inter-connected camps that imprisoned millions in southern Poland during the Second World War.

Also featured, is a bird’s eye view of Birkenau or Auschwitz ii, the extension in Auschwitz that was constructed from scratch in 1941 to facilitate mass murder.

Over one million people are said to have been killed at Auschwitz from the day it opened in May 1940, until the time it was liberated on 27 January 1945.

An estimated 90 per cent of these victims were Jews, with Poles, Romani gypsies, Soviet Prisoners, homosexuals and others deemed “undesirable” making up the hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish victims that were killed at the hands of the Nazis.

Tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of the moment where the advancing Allied troops liberated the camps and saw the horrors of Auschwitz for the first time.

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