On the night of 22-23 July 1944, the Red Army liberated Majdanek camp near Lublin in eastern Poland. It was the first concentration and extermination camp to be liberated. Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee, emphasized this in Berlin:

"With the liberation of the Majdanek camp, the world became an eyewitness to what had already happened, and was still happening, in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. When the Red Army soldiers reached the camp, the murderous infrastructure of the camp was still intact. They discovered the mountains of shoes belonging mostly to murdered Jewish prisoners, the gas chambers and crematoria and around a thousand surviving prisoners in a terrible state on the verge of starvation and death. They included many Soviet prisoners of war.

Immediately after the liberation of Majdanek, journalists reported on the horrific sights they had witnessed and on the remembrance service held there two weeks later on 6 August 1944 in memory of those murdered. The American magazine Life took these documentary pictures and reports from Majdanek for publication and presented them to the American people in its issue of 28 August 1944.

From that moment on, what would later become known as the Holocaust or Shoah was written on the face of the world. From that moment on it would be impossible to deny what had happened in the German concentration and extermination camps, and the SS perpetrators and their henchmen had to be held accountable for the crimes."