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This Happened

This Happened—January 27: Liberation Of Auschwitz

On this day in 1945, prisoners of Poland’s concentration camp, Auschwitz, where Nazis had exterminated more than one million people were finally free.

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How was Auschwitz liberated?

Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army during the Vistula–Oder Offensive of World War II. Although most of the prisoners had died by the time the camp was liberated, about 7,000 remained. The liberation of the camp was not a previous goal of the Red Army, but happened as a consequence of their advance westward across Poland. On site of the camp and the state of the prisoners, members of the Soviet army were shocked.

When were other concentration camps liberated?

By August 1944, there were more than 135,000 prisoners across the complex. The Red Army helped to liberate concentration camps in the Baltic area through mid-1944, and other concentration camps were liberated until the German surrender at the end of World War II in Europe in 1945.

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Society

Big Brother For The People: India's CCTV Strategy For Cracking Down On Police Abuse

"There is nothing fashionable about installing so many cameras in and outside one’s house," says a lawyer from a Muslim community. And yet, doing this has helped members of the community prove unfair police action against them.

A woman is walking in the distance while a person holds a military-style gun close up

Survellance and tight security at the Lal Chowk area in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India on October 4, 2022

Sukanya Shantha

MUMBAI — When sleuths of the National Investigating Agency suddenly descended on human rights defender and school teacher Abdul Wahid Shaikh’s house on October 11, he knew exactly what he needed to do next.

He had been monitoring the three CCTVs that are installed on the front and the rear of his house — a chawl in Vikhroli, a densely populated area in suburban Mumbai. The cameras told him that a group of men and women — some dressed in Mumbai police’s uniform and a few in civil clothes — had converged outside his house. Some of them were armed and few others with batons were aggressively banging at the door asking him to immediately let them in.

This was not the first time that the police had landed at his place at 5 am.

When the policemen discovered the CCTV cameras outside his house, they began hitting it with their batons, destroying one of them mounted right over the door. This action was captured by the adjacent CCTV camera. Shaikh, holed up in his house with his wife and two children, kept pleading with the police to stop destroying his property and simply show them an official notice.

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