On April 28, 2025, La Poste issued a commemorative stamp to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps.
On July 23, 1944, the Majdanek extermination camp, located in occupied eastern Poland, was liberated by Soviet troops. This was the first discovery of a death camp. On the Western Front, a similar revelation occurred on November 25 with the liberation of Struthof, in annexed Alsace, by the American army. As the Allied armies advanced, thousands of concentration and extermination camps of all sizes were liberated, the last being Terezín, in Czechoslovakia, on May 8, 1945.
The SS attempted to destroy evidence of their crimes, for example, by dynamiting the gas chambers at Auschwitz. They also forced the detainees onto the roads, starving and freezing, to reach other camps further from the front. Of the 700,000 people interned in January 1945, nearly 300,000 would succumb during the final months of the war.
General Eisenhower, who visited the Ohrdruf camp on April 12, 1945, was disgusted and brought in film crews to document Nazi barbarity. Liberation did not mean the end of the deportees' torment. In the camps, supplies and medical care were improvised and inadequate. Fearing the spread of the typhus epidemic raging in the Bergen-Belsen camp, the Allies kept the deportees there for several weeks. 13,000 of them died from typhus and general exhaustion. Upon their return, the survivors—resistance deportees and Jewish deportees—were faced with the difficulties of returning to normal life. The era was one of celebrating fighters and heroes rather than victims.
In 2025, for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, Auschwitz survivor Esther Senot called for the transmission of memory: "We are only a handful left, we are counting on you."
