The commemorations were held in the southern Polish town of Oświęcim, where the camp complex was located.
In his address, Nawrocki referenced Polish resistance hero Witold Pilecki, who voluntarily infiltrated Auschwitz and later wrote detailed reports on the atrocities committed there.
Pilecki’s report, Nawrocki said, “defined the duties of today’s Polish state,” which he described as a guardian of the truth about German crimes and their victims.
He called the report one of the most important works of factual literature documenting crimes committed at the camp.
Nawrocki said Auschwitz was “a factory of death organized by the Germans,” adding that the path to genocide began earlier, in interwar Germany, when society supported National Socialism and allowed Adolf Hitler to come to power.
He described the crimes of Nazi concentration camps as “state-sponsored evil.”
The president said Auschwitz symbolizes not only the brutality of Nazi ideology but also indifference to the deaths of the innocent, including victims of Nazi euthanasia programs before and after 1939, and what he called Western Europe’s indifference to events in occupied Poland in the early years of the war.
Nawrocki noted that Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, including 3 million citizens of prewar Poland. He said the crimes might have been prevented had there been an adequate international response earlier.
“Eternal memory to the victims of the Holocaust—to the Jews murdered at Auschwitz, members of one nation and citizens of many countries, including my homeland, Poland,” Nawrocki said.
He also criticized the postwar handling of accountability, saying that only about 15 percent of perpetrators from German concentration camps were ever brought to justice.
“The world turned away for many years from responsibility for what happened in Auschwitz,” he said, adding that while victims were remembered after 1945, perpetrators were often forgotten.
Nawrocki also reiterated his position that Germany has not paid wartime reparations to Poland, saying accountability and apologies were essential to building lasting peace.
Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945. The camp has since become the most powerful symbol of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes against Jews, as well as against Poles, Roma and people of many other nationalities.
Nazi Germany established Auschwitz in 1940 to imprison Poles. In 1942, it expanded the complex with Auschwitz II-Birkenau, building gas chambers and crematoria to carry out mass extermination of Jews.
The camp system also included dozens of subcamps where prisoners were forced into slave labor.
At least 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, including about 1 million Jews. The victims also included some 70,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma, 14,000 Soviet prisoners of war and about 12,000 people of other nationalities, historians say.