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Was ist am 27. Januar 1945 gesche~en?
Holocaust' Remembrance Day Here's a look at how Germany is honouring the day this year, as well as some of the history.
History of the day
Germany has gone through different phases of self-examination in coming to terms with Adolf Hitler's regime, and it wasn't until 40 years after the end of the Second World War that Germany named an official day to remember victims of the Nazis' genocide.
The 1968 student movement in West Germany during the Cold War played a large part in bringing discussions of the Nazi history to the forefront of debates.
In 1996, German President Roman Herzog - who died earlier this month - first declared January 27th as the official day of remembrance, marking the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
It was a time of deep reflection for the country, with the official remembrance day declaration preceded the year before - on the 50th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation - by numerous speeches, television documentary specials and reflective newspaper think pieces_
"The darkest and most awful chapter. in .German• history was written at Auschwitz," then Chancellor Helmut Kohl said in 1995. "Above all, Auschwitz symbolizes the racial madness that lay at the heart of National Socialism and the genocide of European Jews, the cold planning and criminal execution of which is without parallel in history."
On that first memorial day, politicians and former concentration camp prisoners laid wreaths at sites across the country, but some members of the Central Council of Jews in Germany criticized the ceremonies as insufficient.
About a decade later in 2005, the United Nations also declared the day as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Memorials on Friday
Concentration camp sites around Germany and elsewhere are holding memorials on Friday, including at the site of the former Auschwitz camp in Poland - where more than 1.1 million people were killed.
The Bavarian state parliament is a guest at Prague's ceremony to remember the victims in the Czech camp of Theresienstadt. During Nazi times, more than 81,000 Jews were deported from the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia" under Hitler's rule. Only around 10,500 survived the Holocaust.
The German parliament (Bundestag) is also observing an hour of reflecting on the victims of the Nazi regime. Chancellor Angela Merkel attended the ceremony in the Bundestag, at which parliament speaker Norbert Lammert made a speech about the Nazis' often forgotten "euthanasia" programme, which killed 300,000 ill and disabled people.