2-611-827 - Keystone Archives/Heritage Images

Pile of pairs of spectacles, Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland, 20th century. Dozens of pairs of spectacles removed from the victims of the gas chambers. The most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz, situated near the Polish town of Oswiecim, opened in 1940. There were in fact three separate main camps and a network of satellite camps, which became the focal point of the Final Solution, the industrial-scale extermination of the Jewish population of Europe. By the time Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945, an estimated 1.1 million prisoners, mainly Jews, Poles, Roma gypsies and Soviet soldiers, had been killed there by the Nazis.