Commemoration of Auschwitz Liberation Marks 80th Anniversary with Dwindling Survivors

More than 50 world leaders, including King Charles III, will join a dwindling group of Nazi death camp survivors on Monday in southern Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of Auschwitz, where more than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered.

A day of solemn ceremony, shadowed by a resurgence of nationalism in Germany and several other European countries, will take place near a former gas chamber and crematory in the Polish town of Oswiecim, whose name was Germanized to Auschwitz during Hitler's 1939-1945 occupation of Poland.

The commemoration will begin early Monday with survivors of Auschwitz -- who numbered thousands at the end of World War II in 1945 but have mostly since died -- laying wreaths on the Wall of Death. The wall, in a courtyard between former barracks, is where prisoners were executed by SS guards and remains pockmarked with bullet holes.

Ronald S. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress and chairman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, said in an interview that "this is the most important anniversary we are going to have because of the shrinking number of survivors and because of what is happening in the world today."

"We thought the virus of anti-Semitism was dead," he said, "but it was just in hiding."

Fewer than 50 survivors will take part in Monday's commemoration, less than half the number who attended the 75th anniversary. "In five years, there will be very few left," Mr. Lauder said. "And those who are still alive won't have the energy to go."

The number of foreign dignitaries, however, keeps growing. This year's guest list, the largest ever, includes scores of government leaders and at least eight kings and queens. Among them are Germany's departing chancellor, Olaf Scholz and its president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Also expected is Mr. Scholz's likely successor, Friedrich Merz.

With less than a month to go before Germany holds a general election, Mr. Scholz, Mr. Merz and other mainstream German politicians are scrambling to curb support for Alternative for Germany, a hard-right party known as AfD that is widely seen as a dangerous throwback to the nationalism that brought Hitler to power in the 1930s.

At an election rally on Saturday in eastern Germany, AfD politicians and Elon Musk, a top adviser to President Trump, who spoke by video link, urged Germans not to feel guilty for the Nazi-era crimes of their grandparents.

That and calls at the rally for a "Great Germany," said Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk, on Sunday, "sounded all too familiar and ominous, especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz."

None of the leaders at the event on Monday will speak. As part of the anniversary events, the house where the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz lived with his family -- which was the subject of the Oscar-winning movie "The Zone of Interest" -- will open to visitors for the first time following its sale by Polish owners to the Counter Extremism Project, a New York-based group.

Piotr Cywinski, a Polish historian and the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, said his state-run institution wanted to avoid political speeches and to put survivors and the remembrance of Nazi victims at the center of Monday's events.

"Memory," he said in an interview, "is not only crying when you look to the past, it is not only empathy when you look to the victims. This is not enough. Memory, I think, is really the key for today's time and the key for finding your position today."

A U.S. delegation will be led by Steve Witkoff, President Trump's Middle East envoy, who played a key role in negotiating a recent Gaza truce agreement between Israel and Hamas, and Howard Lutnick, Mr. Trump's nominee for secretary of commerce. Also in the delegation is Charles Kushner, the father of Mr. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and who is Mr. Trump's choice as ambassador to France.

Russia, which used to regularly take part in anniversary events at Auschwitz, was not invited to this year's commemoration, despite the Soviet Army's liberation of the camp in January 1945. Representatives from Moscow have been banished from anniversary events since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which the Kremlin justified on the false pretext that Ukraine, whose president is Jewish, was run by Nazis. Ukraine was invited, and will be represented by its president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin has turned the Soviet role in the defeat of Hitler into a national cult in which anyone at odds with the Kremlin is cast as a Nazi. Never mentioned is the fact that the Soviet Union was effectively Hitler's ally until 1941, when the Nazis began gassing Jews at Auschwitz. Moscow and Berlin signed a nonaggression pact in 1939 that led to the invasion of Poland by Nazi and Soviet forces later that year.

Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry's spokesman, lambasted the Polish organizers of Monday's commemoration, telling them that "your lives, jobs, entertainment, and the very existence of your people, your children have been paid for with the blood of Soviet soldiers who defeated the Third Reich."

Pro-Ukrainian voices on social media responded by claiming that Ukrainian, not Russian, troops had liberated Auschwitz. The first troops to reach the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination complex were from the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front, a Soviet force comprising soldiers from across the Soviet Union. They freed around 7,000 prisoners from the main camp at Auschwitz, from nearby Birkenau and from a labor camp at Monowitz.

The political struggles of the Middle East have also intruded, with pro-Palestinian activists demanding that Poland arrest members of the Israeli delegation, expected to be led by the education minister, Yoav Kisch, for what they call "genocide" in Gaza. The International Criminal Court last year issued an arrest warrant for Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

While Mr. Netanyahu was not expected to attend, the Polish government announced this month that all Israeli officials who did come would be safe from arrest.

Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting from Warsaw.