The figure marks a significant uptick from 2020 and 2021, when around 500,000 and 560,000 people visited the site respectively.
Bartosz Bartyzel, press spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in the southern Polish city of Oświęcim, told Poland's PAP news agency that before the COVID-19 pandemic the number of visitors to Auschwitz exceeded 2 million, with 2019 seeing an all-time record of 2.32 million.
According to the director of the Auschwitz Museum, Piotr Cywiński, more than 90 percent of the visitors could learn about the history of the concentration camp on guided tours with educators.
“Thanks to this, a visit to Auschwitz is not only a learning experience of being in a historic site but also a time of personal reflection on today’s relevance of the history of Auschwitz for all of us," Cywiński said.
"This is of particular importance as we see and realize better these days how much the memory of the past is a key to the future,” he added.
According to Paweł Sawicki of the Auschwitz Museum Press Office, Poles constitute the most numerous national group among the visitors.
Among foreign visitors, the most sizeable groups were from Britain, the Czech Republic, Germany, the United States, Spain, France, Italy, Slovakia and Ukraine.
Sawicki said the Auschwitz Museum's website had almost 23 million visits in 2022, with over 1.5 million people following the museum’s English-language Twitter account.
January 27 will mark the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet army.
More than 1.1 million people were killed by the Germans at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.
The victims were mostly European Jews, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet POWs and prisoners of other nationalities.
(mk/gs)