In mid-June 1944, more than half a million people from many European countries were being held in German concentration camps, tortured, humiliated and exploited as slave labourers. In mid-June 1944, it was mainly the freight wagons carrying Jewish families from Hungary that rolled into Auschwitz.

The gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau were ready and waiting for most of these people, especially the women and children. Jewish people lived in German towns with illegal papers or hid themselves in an effort to escape their henchmen and murderers. Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee, spoke about this during a visit to the Auschwitz Memorial:

"The news of the Allied landings in Normandy on 6 June reached the concentration camps in whispers and spread like wildfire. With failing strength and utterly exhausted, all the people in the concentration camps, on the deportation trains, surviving illegally and hiding in Germany awaited the arrival of the Allies to free them from the hands of the murderers.

They were their only, inextinguishable hope. This is precisely why, around the world, survivors of the German concentration and extermination camps are feeling deeply grateful as they remember the Allied soldiers who defeated Hitler's Germany and gave them back their lives. The survivors are also sincerely hoping that today in Europe there will be no re-investment of political power in forces that want to revive the murderous and anti-Semitic ideology of the Nazis. 

That was the ideology that once dragged Europe into the abyss and was so devastatingly unmasked and defeated by the Allies."