Ceremonies are taking place to mark 80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp
About 50 survivors have returned to the site to lay wreaths and candles, and some will later give speeches at a service at 15:00 GMT
World leaders and King Charles are on their way to the event – but organisers want the dwindling number of survivors to be at the centre of the commemorations
Polish President Andrzej Duda says his country's job is to preserve the memory of Auschwitz "in order to never let it happen again"
The BBC is marking the day with a wide range of programming across TV, radio and online – click Watch Live at the top of this page
Some 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered at the Auschwitz complex, making it the site of the largest mass execution of human beings ever recorded
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Vigil held at 'death wall' in Auschwitz, 80 years on
By Francesca Gillett and Matt Spivey, with Paul Kirby reporting from Auschwitz
Daniela Relph
Senior royal correspondent, reporting from Auschwitz
The King has arrived in Poland ahead of the commemorations later today.
He will visit a Jewish community and give a short speech at a charity event where he will stress the collective duty we all have learn the lessons of history.
This will be the first time a British monarch has visited Auschwitz. Queen Elizabeth II visited Bergen-Belsen during her reign but not Auschwitz.
The King's trip is far from a regular royal engagement for him.
Palace sources have described his visit to Auschwitz as a "deeply personal pilgrimage". They talk about it being "poignant" and "profound".
It is emotive language that reflects the value the King puts on hearing the testimony of Auschwitz survivors shared in the place where the horrors of Auschwitz took place.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is confirmed to be coming to the ceremony later.
In a post on X, he says the Holocaust must "never be repeated, yet, sadly, the memory of it is gradually fading".
"We must not allow forgetfulness to take root. And it is everyone's mission to do everything possible to ensure that evil does not prevail."
The president arrived in Poland this morning, and yesterday attended a memorial event in Kyiv:
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"Can you see the smoke? That's where they are. They are all killed."
This is what Holocaust survivor Yisrael Abelesz was told, after he asked those who'd been there longer when he would see his parents again.
Abelesz and his older brother were sent to a concentration camp, after which he never saw his parents and younger brother again.
"Day and night there was smoke…we knew that they were burning human beings," he says. You can watch part of his interview above.
SS guards sought to hide their crimes as Soviet troops closed in, and tried to destroy their extensive prisoner records – making it hard to fully quantify the number of victims.
Academic studies since agree that in total close to 1.3 million people arrived at Auschwitz. About 1.1 million of them died there.
Jews from all across Nazi-controlled Europe made up the vast majority of the victims. Almost one million Jewish people were murdered at Auschwitz.
One specific example was Hungary's Jewish population. In the space of just two months, between May and July 1944, Hungary transported 420,000 of the 437,000 Jewish people it sent to Auschwitz.
Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz in June 1944
So many Hungarian Jewish people were killed in such a short time that victims' bodies were dropped in pits near the camp and burned. Tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz every day.
Three quarters of them were killed on arrival. Some 75,000 Polish civilians, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 25,000 Roma and Sinti, as well as Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and political prisoners were also put to death by the German state at the Auschwitz complex.
More: Who are the missing million?
An enormous heated tent has been erected over the "Death Gate", as the entrance to Birkenau is known.
This is where today's memorial ceremony will take place at 15:00 GMT, and where survivors, relatives and dignitaries will gather.
Although daytime temperatures have reached well above freezing and much of the snow has melted, many of the elderly survivors are now too frail to stay in the open for long.
We've got some photos of the tent and preparations:
Jessica Parker
Reporting from Auschwitz
Signs in Germany show the speaker of the Federal Parliament encouraging people to remember the Holocaust
In Germany – where the Nazis rose to power – there’s what’s known as a Culture of Remembrance. It’s a commitment to confront, and to take responsibility, for the Holocaust.
But German memory culture – despite being well established – isn’t without its critics. There are figures on the far right who have sought to recast the country’s Nazi past or even downplay it.
There’s an argument that, in essence, Germany has become weakened by dwelling too heavily on the Third Reich era – and should rediscover a broader sense of national pride.
Over the weekend tech billionaire, Elon Musk, dialled into an election rally of the far right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and said there was "too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that".
Those arguments are, however, deeply controversial.
The AfD rally quickly sparked criticism including from Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who noted it had happened just ahead of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – one of the Nazi camps that implemented the organised mass slaughter of Jews.
Today the German ambassador to the UK, Miguel Berger, said Germany’s commitment to remember the past was about an historic rather than "individual guilt" – and crucially there is a responsibility to learn from the past.
Daniel Wittenberg
BBC producer
Visiting Auschwitz with my uncle and cousin for a Radio 4 documentary marking this anniversary was a moving reminder of how lucky I am to be alive.
Lucky that my grandparents were able to escape Nazi rule, fleeing the fate of the six million murdered Jews.
Lucky to have the chance to hear – and now share – the story of three members of our family who weren’t so fortunate: my great-great-grandmother Regina, her daughter Sophie, and Sophie’s husband Josef, all killed at Auschwitz.
We also went to the old synagogue in Holesov, a small town over the border in Czechia, whose Jewish community was wiped out in the Holocaust. My great-great-grandfather Yakov, who died in 1937, was its last-ever rabbi.
The synagogue only survived because it’s hidden in a cellar beneath residential flats. For more than 80 years, though, it has mostly stood empty – a museum and, to my mind, a monument to a vanished community.
What you can’t see in Holesov is the vibrant life that once filled its Jewish homes and meeting places, or the unimaginable loss left behind.
"Eighty years ago, the horror of the Holocaust revealed itself to the world in all its terrifying force," says Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in a statement.
She says the Holocaust is "a tragedy without parallel in history".
Speaking of Italy's role in the war, she says that Hitler's plans "in Italy also found the complicity of the fascist one, through the infamy of the racial laws and the involvement in the roundups and deportations".
It is an "extraordinary lesson," she says, and warns that antisemitism has now "taken on different forms and spreads through new tools and channels". It must be fought, she adds.
At 99, cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is the only surviving member of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz.
The orchestra was set up by the SS working at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp. Members would perform marches for the morning and evening parades of camp workers.
When Lasker-Wallfisch arrived at the extermination camp in 1944, one prisoner asked her "what did you do before the war?"
"I said I used to play the cello and she immediately said there’s an orchestra here that needs a cellist. She went to find the conductor," she tells the BBC Two's The Last Musician of Auschwitz.
"Here I was, stark naked and here she was asking me, ‘who did you study with?’ It was rather incongruous," she adds. "I heard the words, ‘you will be saved”. She said someone would come for me and I would have an audition."
Jessica Parker
Reporting from Auschwitz
There’s a clear sky over Auschwitz II-Birkenau now as the morning mists have cleared.
We’re overlooking the site that the Nazis started building in late 1941, expelling the local Polish population in the process.
Birkenau was as an extension to Auschwitz camp that the German occupiers had already set up about three kilometres away.
It was here where the Nazis would install four gas chambers – as well as crematoria – in order to carry out the calculated slaughter of Jewish people.
This afternoon, Birkenau is where the main ceremony will take place with world leaders, politicians and survivors.
As the ceremony began in Poland earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron was at the Shoah Memorial in Paris where he laid a wreath and studied a memorial listing the names of 76,000 French Jews who died in the Holocaust.
He was then shown part of a new exhibit called Les Immortels, which pays tribute to the last survivors.
Macron, who will now head to Auschwitz for this afternoon's commemoration event, posted a message on X, saying: "Let us never forget the millions of victims of the Holocaust.
"Let us fight tirelessly against antisemitism and hatred, in the name of all those who perished. Let us be the memory of their memory."
Nadia Ragozhina
Reporting from Auschwitz
There are no resting places for the 1.1 million people who lost their lives at Auschwitz-Birkenau; nowhere for their descendants and survivors to bring flowers, or a gravestone to claim one’s own.
As I slowly made my way around Birkenau amid hundreds of tourists who were squeezing in a visit before the site closed its doors ahead of today’s commemorations, I saw people carrying red roses.
Approaching the site of one of the crematoria, two young Jewish men from an American group said the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
But there was a memorial that’s become a pivotal point of the camp. Between the remnants of the crematoria, at the end of the railway platform known as the "death road" which was the last path of those who were marched straight to the gas chambers, stands a monument.
The top blocks represent the chimneys that no longer stand. The rest is piled up stone blocks, for all the different ways in which men, women and children were murdered in the camp.
It is completed by bronze plaques with the same inscription in 23 different languages, spoken by the people from 28 different countries who were transported here to meet their death.
“Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity,” it begins.
The roses were laid on the plaques and the words of the Kaddish hang in the crisp winter air, as one attempts to process this place, that is impossible to describe.Daniela Relph
Senior royal correspondent, reporting from Auschwitz
The King is on his way to Poland for the Auschwitz commemorations.
During his visit, he will make a speech at a Jewish charity event.
Buckingham Palace says the King will focus on the testimony of survivors, and stress that they teach us "to cherish our freedom, to challenge prejudice and never to be a bystander in the face of violence and hate".
He will say it is our collective duty, in a world filled with "turmoil and strife," to learn the lessons of history and that "the act of remembering the evils of the past remains a vital task. In so doing, we inform our present and shape our future".
Renee Salt had been living a normal life with her mother and father in Poland when Nazi Germany invaded in 1939.
As the Nazi Germans began rounding up Jews, Renee found herself on a train headed for Auschwitz II -Birkenau.
"We were packed very tightly. They shut and bolted the doors, without any food," she tells the BBC's Jordan Dunbar. "They didn’t give us any food – no bread, no water, nothing. Not even any air, no windows – they only have a few slats on top."
When the train arrived at its destination in southern Poland, Renee made to follow her father off the car – but immediately lost track of him.
"My father jumped off first and I jumped after him. When I jumped off I didn’t see him anymore – he disappeared, like into thin air," she says.
"They took them away, we didn’t know where to, without a kiss, without a goodbye, he disappeared, like into thin air. I never saw him again."
A few hours ago, Holocaust survivors laid flowers and candles at Auschwitz's "death wall", where the SS executed thousands of prisoners.
About 50 survivors have returned to the camp to pay tribute. There was silence, apart from the sound of photographers' cameras clicking, as each took their turn to mark the moment.
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Holocaust memorial day: Vigil held at Auschwitz 'death wall'
Frank Gardner
Security correspondent
Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1990 was practically deserted.
For 45 years since its liberation from the Nazis there had been no mass tourism since Poland, as one of the Warsaw Pact countries in the Soviet sphere, had been largely cut off from much of the world.
On a cold, bleak February afternoon I walked alone through the empty, silent huts, with their triple tiers of wooden pallet bunks, past the signs in Gothic German script reading: ‘One louse : Your Death’. No tourists, no buses, no guides that day. Just the ghosts of those that perished in that terrible place.
Years later I interviewed Iby Knill, a Hungarian-Slovak woman who survived Auschwitz by volunteering to work in the hospital where they were given better rations.
We returned to the Hungarian railway siding at Szekesfehervar where she had been loaded onto a cattle truck, bound for an unknown fate. Asked if she wanted to return to Auschwitz she shuddered. “That was the place,” she said, “that God deserted”.
German ambassador to the UK, Miguel Berger, says they have to put "more emphasis into education" in Germany, so people continue to learn about the Holocaust.
Speaking to the BBC's Today programme, he says "it's the responsibility of Germany, of the German government, to always invest in young people, in education so that the Holocaust and all the horror that came with it is not forgotten".
It is not about the guilt, he says, which there is, but it's about "learning from history" and keeping the memory alive, and that they have to "stand up for rule of law against populism, against extremism," Berger adds.
Paul Kirby
Reporting from Auschwitz
“We are the guardians of memory,” Andrzej Duda told Poland and the wider world in his speech a few moments ago.
It was a very solemn address, and the only one you’ll hear during the day from a head of state at today’s ceremonies, first at Auschwitz and later today at the death camp at Birkenau.
His message was that Poland could be entrusted to keep the memory of the six death camps built and operated to such devastating effect during the Nazi occupation of his country.
Because while the Auschwitz site was by far the biggest, the others were no less significant.
At Treblinka, an estimated 850,000 Jews were murdered, and Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Chelmno made up the network of camps built purely for extermination.
Since the end of World War Two, Poland has often struggled to explain that while six million Poles died between 1939 and 1945, half of them were Jews.
And before Auschwitz evolved into the slaughter of Jews, Roma and other groups the Nazis wanted to destroy, the biggest number of victims here were Polish prisoners.
During the communist era the emphasis was very much on the fight against fascism, not the loss of its Jewish population. Visiting the museum here in 1995 it was striking how many photos there were of Polish political prisoners, not Jews.
That’s one reason why Duda singled out the bravery of Polish Cavalry Captain Witold Pilecki, who led a resistance movement at Auschwitz and escaped in 1943, only to be executed by Poland’s post-war communist authorities.
We've received some more photos from this morning's wreath-laying ceremony at Auschwitz I, which officially started today's commemorations.
Some survivors were pictured wearing blue and white striped hats or scarfs, in reference to the clothing worn by prisoners of the camps.
People laid candles at the base of what is known as the "death wall" in Auschwitz I, where thousands of prisoners were shot
A woman reacts as she watches the commemorations
People place their hands on the wall, as others said prayers
Polish President Andrzej Duda kneels before a wreath
President Duda says Poland conserves sites like Auschwitz "in order to preserve the memory, in order to keep it alive, so that people always remember".
He says this is so the "world never again lets such dramatic human catastrophe happen".
It caused "such horrible, unimaginable pain and harm upon other nations," he says.
"It is something unprecedented in human history," Duda says, and they preserve the memory "in order to never let it happen again."
"May the memory of all the murdered live on, may the memory of all the dead live on, may the memory of all those who are suffering live on."
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