# UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

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## Liberation: 60th anniversary

“The things I saw beggar description.... The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were... overpowering....I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a letter to Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, April 15, 1945

In the spring of 2005 the world marks the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe—and, with it, the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps by Allied forces. Sixty years later, your visit to the Museum or to its Web site coincides with the liberation dates of these concentration camps:

July 24, 1944: Soviet forces liberate Majdanek

January 27, 1945: Soviet forces liberate Auschwitz-Birkenau

February 13, 1945: Soviet forces liberate Gross-Rosen

April 4, 1945: American forces liberate Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald

April 11, 1945: American forces liberate Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau

April 12, 1945: Canadian forces liberate Westerbork

April 15, 1945: British forces liberate Bergen-Belsen

April 22, 1945: Soviet forces liberate Sachsenhausen

April 23, 1945: American forces liberate Flossenbürg

April 29, 1945: Soviet forces liberate Ravensbrück; American forces liberate Dachau

May 4, 1945: British forces liberate Neuengamme

May 6, 1945: American forces liberate Mauthausen

On May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender became official.

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