MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday (Jan 27) praised Soviet soldiers for ending the “total evil” of Auschwitz on the 80th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of the Nazi death camp.
Auschwitz was the largest of the extermination camps and has become a symbol of Nazi Germany’s genocide of six million European Jewish people, one million of whom died at the site between 1940 and 1945, along with more than 100,000 non-Jewish people.
Soviet troops found 7,000 survivors when they arrived on January 27, 1945, the first Allied troops to enter the camp.
“We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this terrible, total evil and won the victory, the greatness of which will forever remain in world history,” Putin said, according to the Kremlin.
“We will do everything to defend the right of people to ethnic, linguistic and spiritual identity, and to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism, Russophobia and other racist ideologies,” he added.
