Eighty years ago today, Red Army soldiers liberated the surviving prisoners at Auschwitz, one of many Nazi death camps but now an enduring symbol of the Holocaust. Today, there will be no Russian representative at the official commemorations of the Holocaust at Birkenau, eight decades on. This podcast explores the complex nature of memorialisation at Auschwitz and the challenges of managing memorialisation, tourism and the past. Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you e
Reading time:
1–2 minutes

Explaining History Podcast
For more than a decade, the Explaining History Podcast has helped listeners around the world make sense of modern history. What began in 2012 as a simple experiment—short, accessible episodes explaining major historical events—has grown into a long-running library of carefully researched, thoughtful explorations of the 20th and 21st centuries.
If this was useful, there’s more where it came from.
Every week I publish one piece connecting a current event to its historical roots — free, every Tuesday. Paid subscribers get two additional deeper dives and full archive access.
Subscribe to Explaining History →