World History: Russian Ministry of Defense for the first time releases the unique documents on freeing the prisoners of Auschwitz by the Red Army

 On January 27, 1945, troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front, advancing on territory occupied by Hitler's forces in Poland, released the prisoners from "Auschwitz-Birkenau" (Oswiecim) concentration camp.

Today, after 70 years from the time of these events, the Russian military department on Russian Defence Ministry’s official website of for the first time publicly disclosed reliable historical documents of the period of the Great Patriotic War from the funds of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.

The archive specialists prepared 15 unique in its content of documents, some of which had previously been secured and were accessible only by a narrow academic historians coterie.

Revealing the course of military operations and the liberation of Poland in January 1945 documents include combat reports of the headquarters of formations and units of the 1st Ukrainian Front, including the Journal of Hostilities of the 472nd Infantry Regiment, the reports of Chief Political Department of the 100th Infantry Division and Chief Political Department of the 60th army - the direct participants in the release of the Auschwitz concentration camp prisoners.

Among the available for users of the Military Department Internet portal documents are the memos of the military reporters of Komsomolskaya Pravda and Pravda newspapers Captain S. Krushinsky and Lieutenant Colonel B. Polevoy, who one of the first visited the "factory of death" and explained their overwhelming experience for the following generations.

The military personnel payroll report on the socio-demographic characteristics of the 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front helps to determine the international issue of the liberators’ staff; it contains information about the soldiers of the Red Army, a total of 39 nationalities - Russian, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Armenians, Ossetians, Georgians and many others, who shoulder to shoulder participated in freeing of the death concentration camp prisoners.

True, yet terrifying in its factual fullness evidences of the Auschwitz survivors and the local residents in the newsletter of the political control of the 1st Ukrainian Front became unchallengeable evidence inhuman crimes of the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg.

The Ministry of Defence for the first time releases the archival documents that reliably tell the story of how joyful, with enthusiastic mood Polish people met soldiers of the Red Army in the relieved territories, truly believing that they are their own liberators from Hitler's yoke.

The publication of the documents on the release of prisoners of Auschwitz concentration camp and the occupied territories of Poland by the Red Army is a part course of the military department on at the keeping and protection of historical truth, a resistance of the history falsification and the attempts to revise the results of the Great Patriotic War and World War II.