Dozens of world leaders, including Britain’s king and the president of Ukraine, joined 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 held near former gas chambers and crematories in the Polish town of Oswiecim, whose name was Germanized to Auschwitz during Hitler’s 1939-1945 occupation of Poland, was shadowed throughout by a resurgence of nationalism in Germany and other European countries.
“In a place where the technique of mass and industrial murder was introduced, I feel great sorrow and regret very much that in many European countries, including our country, people in uniforms similar to Nazis and proclaiming Nazi slogans march with impunity,” Leon Weintraub, a 99-year-old Polish Auschwitz survivor, told a gathering of presidents, royalty and other dignitaries.
Speaking in a large tent erected at the entrance to Birkenau, an annex to the Nazi’s original extermination camp, Auschwitz I, he added: “Let us take seriously what the enemies of democracy preach. They really want to put into practice what they preach, these slogans that they propagate, if they manage to come to power.
“Let us avoid the mistake of the 1930s, when the German Nazis were not believed, their intentions to create a state free of Jews, Roma, people with different views and the sick considered unworthy of life were disregarded.”
After prayers were read by Jewish rabbis and Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian priests, Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, led King Charles III of Britain, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, President Emmanuel Macron of France and other guests in laying votive candles on a platform in front of a railway car.
The carriage, placed at the red brick entrance to Birkenau, was one of those that carried Jews, Roma and others considered subhuman by the Nazis to their deaths at the wartime death factory.
Speakers at the main ceremony, mostly survivors, warned of a dangerous rise in antisemitism and extremism, expressing alarm that the message of “never again” was being forgotten, particularly by young people hooked on social media.
Tova Friedman, a Polish-born American who was sent to Auschwitz as a young girl and held in a section of the camp reserved for children, recalled arriving by train and seeing “a terrible smoke hanging in the air.” She added: “I knew what this meant. We all knew.”
Lamenting the “shocking” spread of “rampant antisemitism,” Ms. Friedman said: “Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the world is again in crisis. Our Jewish Christian values have been overshadowed worldwide by prejudice, fear, suspicion and extremism.”
At the end of World War II in 1945, said Janina Iwanska, another survivor, “people believed this could never happen again” but “it is impossible now to say ‘never again.’ War and chaos can erupt anywhere, leaving no place for people to flee.”
When Soviet troops arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on Jan. 27, 1945, tens of thousands of weakened prisoners had already been removed by the Nazis and sent on a long, deadly march toward Germany. An estimated 15,000 were shot or died of cold, hunger and illness along the way.
The Red Army found only 7,000 prisoners left when they liberated the main camp at Auschwitz, nearby Birkenau and a labor camp at Monowitz. Most have since died, and fewer than 50 survivors took part in Monday’s commemoration, less than half the number who attended the 75th anniversary.
“In five years, there will be very few left. And those who are still alive won’t have the energy to go,” Ronald S. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress and chairman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, said in an interview.
“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,” he added.
The number of foreign dignitaries, however, keeps growing. This year’s guest list was the largest ever and included Germany’s departing chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and its president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
With less than a month before Germany holds a general election, Mr. Scholz, his likely successor, Friedrich Merz, and other mainstream German politicians are scrambling to curb support for Alternative for Germany, a populist party known as AfD that some see 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, 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.”
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” — opened to visitors for the first time on Monday following its sale by Polish owners to the Counter Extremism Project, a New York-based group.
The commemoration began early Monday with a small gathering of Auschwitz survivors, who hobbled into a courtyard at the main camp between two red brick former barracks to place candles on the Wall of Death.
The wall, flanked on one side by a building in which SS physicians conducted grotesque and often fatal medical experiments on female inmates, is where prisoners and Polish resistance fighters were executed by the Nazis. It remains pockmarked with bullet holes.
Aging survivors, many of them infirm and walking with canes or held up by young relatives, paused briefly and silently at the wall after placing their candles.
On the other side of the courtyard stood the building where, in September 1941, the SS first tested the use of Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany and later used for mass murder in gas chambers.
Piotr Cywinski, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum director, 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 was 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 commerce secretary.
Russia, which used to regularly take part in anniversary events at Auschwitz, was not invited to this year’s commemoration. 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.
The foreign ministry in Moscow protested Russia’s exclusion.
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.
The political struggles of the Middle East also intruded, with pro-Palestinian activists demanding that Poland arrest members of the Israeli delegation, led by the education minister, Yoav Kisch, for what they call “genocide” in Gaza.
Mr. Lauder, in an impassioned speech at Birkenau, spoke angrily of what he said were “vile comments” on social media and protests against Jews and Israel amid a resurgence of anti-Semitism.
Referring to the 2023 massacre carried out by Hamas, he said: “What happened in Israel on Oct. 7 and what happened here at Auschwitz have one common threat — an age old hatred of Jews.”
The lessons of Auschwitz, he added, are “not just for Jews. They are for the entire world.”
Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting from Warsaw.
