Charles Dharapak / AP

Audience members comprising of Holocaust survivors, veterans, and family members stand during a moment of silence in a tent sent up across from the museum for the 20th anniversary of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., April 29.

Charles Dharapak / AP

World War II veterans stand as they are recognized for their service at the 20th anniversary of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., April 29.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

Holocaust survivor Romana Strochlitz Primus, center, of New London, Connecticut, whose father Sigmund Strochlitz was the chairman of the museum's Contents Committee, becomes emotional during the 20th anniversary National Tribute at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum April 29, in Washington, D.C. The Museum was hosting a two-day tribute event to honor Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans to mark its 20th anniversary.

Gary Cameron / Reuters

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton applauds 90-year-old WWII veteran and concentration camp liberator Scottie Ooton, left, as Ooton accepts the commendation medal during a ceremony commemorating the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., April 29.

Elderly survivors of the Holocaust and the veterans who helped liberate them gathered in Washington, D.C. for what could be their last big reunion at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Former President Bill Clinton and Holocaust activist and writer Elie Wiesel were present, along with 1,000 others to mark the 20th anniversary of the museum's opening. 

Since the museum's opening in 1993, it has had more than 30 million visitors. In addition to providing resources for survivors and educating the public, it partnered with Ancestry.com to begin creating an online archive of the museum's 170 million documents which will be searchable through the World Memory Project.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Survivor Petro Mischtschuk, 87, from Ukraine, wears his old prisoner's garb as he stands near the memorial site of the Little Camp at Buchenwald.

Between July 1937 and April 1945, the Nazis imprisoned a quarter of a million people in the Buchenwald concentration camp, located near the German city of Weimar. Around 56,000 of them were killed before the camp was liberated by U.S troops on April 11, 1945.

68 years later, Reuters photographer Lisi Niesner interviewed some of the remaining survivors as they returned to Buchenwald to mark the anniversary of the liberation.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Victor Karpus, 88, from Ukraine, stood at the muster ground where inmates gathered at dawn each day for a roll call. Karpus was imprisoned in several camps including Buchenwald for a total of three years. He even once managed to escape from a camp but got captured and taken to Buchenwald, where he remained until its liberation.

"Work or die – it was impossible to get out from Buchenwald," Karpus says.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

"To each his own": An inscription on Buchenwald's iron gate.

Eva Pusztai, 88, from Hungary, sat in a wheelchair in front of a reconstructed gallows. In July 1944 she was deported to Birkenau and six weeks later to Muenchmuehle, one of 136 satellite camps of Buchenwald.

The forced labor in the arms industry or the camp's stone quarry took the imprisoned to the brink of their physical abilities. "You got just enough food to survive. I lost a third of my weight and I was almost starving to death," she says. 

"The employable have to be destroyed by work," she says, explaining the attitude of the Nazis to their prisoners. Her right eye filled up with a single tear that ran down her cheek, then she composed herself and smiled.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

"Where is your god? Why he does not help you?" Jakob Silberstein, born in Poland in 1924, remembers the mocking of a high-level Nazi on Yom Kippur. He survived six years of captivity in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and witnessed brutal actions by the SS, being locked in a standing cubicle for a week, carrying stones and drinking rainwater for days. 

He was standing inside the gas chamber at Birkenau when an SS man asked if any of the men were skilled laborers. "I stated I was an electrician, which luckily saved my life," he said. After the liberation he found out that none of his family or friends had survived the war. He now lives in Israel and tirelessly tells his story.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Urns are displayed in a room adjacent to the crematorium at Buchenwald.

Professor Elling Kvamme, 94, from Norway, stood at the site of Barrack Block 22. He was teaching medicine at a university in Oslo in 1943 when he was arrested for his connections with underground politics. "Students are always dangerous and the Nazis realized it very quickly," he explained.

He was forced to take part in the Nazi program of Germanization and had to work at the pathological facility in Buchenwald. Before the dead were cremated in an incineration system developed to veil the traces of murder, specimens were taken from their corpses for anatomical collections.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Vasile Nussbaum, 83, from Romania, spent a year in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. "Buchenwald was a sanatorium in comparison to Auschwitz" he recalls without hesitation.

Nussbaum revisits the site of the camp every year on liberation day. "You never know what’s coming, today we are 83 years old and in the next year we are no more here", he says.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

Barracks behind trees at Buchenwald.

Editor's note: Pictures taken between April 11-14, 2013 and made available to NBC News today. Read more at Reuters' Photographers Blog.

Menahem Kahana / AFP - Getty Images

Contestants stand during a beauty pageant for Holocaust survivors in the northern Israeli city of Haifa on June 28, 2012. The winner, Hava Hershkovitz, is on the right.

The Associated Press reports — Fourteen women who lived through the horrors of World War II paraded on stage Thursday night in an unusual pageant, vying for the honor of Israel's first 'Miss Holocaust Survivor'. The unusual event was hosted by an Israeli group that aids Holocaust survivors. Around 20 women, all in their 80s and 90s, told the audience their life stories. 

"I have the privilege to show the world that Hitler wanted to exterminate us and we are alive. We are also enjoying life. Thank God it's that way," said Esther Libber, a 74-year-old runner-up who fled her home in Poland as a child, hid in a forest and was rescued by a Polish woman. She said she lost her entire immediate family.

Billed by organizers as a celebration of life, the event also stirred controversy. In a country where millions have been touched by the Holocaust, many argued that judging aging women who had suffered so much on physical appearance was inappropriate, and even offensive. Read the full story.

Abir Sultan / EPA

Holocaust survivor Genia Schwartz-Bardt, 89, has her hair made up before the Holocaust Survivor Pageant.

Menahem Kahana / AFP - Getty Images

Pageant contestant Mania Herman, 87, dances during the event.

Sebastian Scheiner / AP

A man sends a kiss to Holocaust survivors participating in the pageant.

Abir Sultan / EPA

Winner Hava Hershkovitz is kissed after her victory.

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David Buimovitch / AFP - Getty Images

Holocaust survivors wearing 'Talit' (prayer shawls) and 'Tefilin' (phylacteries), sit in a synagogue during a Bar Mitzvah ceremony on May 17, 2012 in Ashkelon, Israel.

Six Holocaust survivors who were unable as children to celebrate the bar mitzvah, the Jewish rite of passage that marks a boy's 13th birthday, were finally able to mark their coming of age in a ceremony in the Israeli city of Ashkelon on Thursday.

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David Buimovitch / AFP - Getty Images

David Buimovitch / AFP - Getty Images

A Holocaust survivor whose number tattoo is still visible puts on the 'Tefilin' during the ceremony.

Gali Tibbon / AFP - Getty Images

People observe two minutes of silence during the annual ceremony at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, Israel, marking the annual Holocaust remembrance day on April 19, 2012.

The entire country of Israel came to a halt on Thursday when a siren sounded to mark Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day. 

The day is one of the most solemn on Israel's calendar. Restaurants and places of entertainment shut down, and radio and TV programming focuses on Holocaust documentaries and interviews with survivors.

-- The Associated Press and EPA contributed to this report

Oded Balilty / AP

Holocaust survivor Meir Friedman waits to tell his personal testimony to an audience of Israeli border police officers during a ceremony in the Martyr's forest near Moshav Kesalon, in central Israel, April 19, 2012.

Oded Balilty / AP

Meir Friedman, center right, tells his story to a group of Israeli border police officers on April 19, 2012.

Jim Hollander / EPA

A man's eyes wells up with tears as he and everyone in a car of the electric light tram system comes to a stop in Jerusalem when a siren sounds for two minutes, April 19, 2012, marking Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day.

Sebastian Scheiner / AP

Israelis stand still next to their cars on a highway as a two-minute siren sounds in memory of victims of the Holocaust in Jerusalem on April 19, 2012.

Bela Szandelszky / AP

Holocaust survivor Eva Szirtes pays respect to relatives at a memorial wall bearing the engraved names of tens of thousands of victims of the Nazi Holocaust at the Holocaust Memorial Center, during Holocaust remembrance day in Budapest, Hungary, on Jan. 27. The remembrance day marks the day of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps 67 years ago.

Jim Hollander / EPA

A visitor to the 'Hall of Names' in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum in Jerusalem, Jan. 27. The room holds 600 portraits of individual Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust of World War II and contains binders documenting more than 4,000,000 of those people. Today marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day on this day in 1945 that the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was liberated by Soviet forces.

John Mcconnico / AP

A man smells a flower during the Holocaust remembrance memorial in Chisinau, Moldova on Jan. 27. The remembrance day marks the day of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps 67 years ago.

AP reports:

It's a huge question for observant Jews: How can one still believe in a merciful God after suffering through the worst genocide in history?

As the world marks Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday, members of Israel's most devout group will remember the victims with prayer, study of scripture and a deep conviction in a grand plan that is beyond their earthly comprehension.

Many notable survivors, including Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, have famously questioned where God was during the Holocaust. But survivors from the insular ultra-Orthodox community say they felt a divine presence even in the worst places imaginable.

Read the full story.

John W. Adkisson / Orange County Register via AP

With the help of instructor Josh Higgins, of San Diego, Calif., top, Gary Lenzner, 85, of Mission Viejo, free falls while skydiving on Sunday, July 31, at Sky Dive San Diego in San Diego. Lenzner went skydiving with his grandson Bryan Wasserman, 26, of Costa Mesa, in celebration of the Holocaust survivor's 85th birthday.

 Awesome!

A German court found John Demjanjuk guilty on Thursday of helping to kill 27,900 Jews at the Nazi death camp Sobibor during the Holocaust. The Munich court sentenced the 91-year-old to five years in prison as an accessory to mass murder as a guard at the Polish camp during World War Two. Defense attorneys had said during the 18-month trial they would appeal any guilty verdict.

Christof Stache / AFP - Getty Images

Defendant John Demjanjuk arrives at the courthouse compound on a stretcher for another session of his trial on May 11 in Munich, southern Germany. John Demjanjuk is accused of helping to murder 27,900 Jews and others during his alleged time as a Nazi death camp guard at Sobibor, one of a network of camps erected by Hitler's Germany in Eastern Europe during World War II with the sole purpose of mass extermination.

Earlier Demjanjuk rejected an offer from judges at the Munich state court to make a final statement ahead of a verdict. Lying in a bed wearing sunglasses and speaking through an interpreter, he replied with a simple "no." Continue reading.

Previous post: Silence in court

Lukas Barth / AFP - Getty Images

The bed of defendant John Demjanjuk is pictured ahead of another session of his trial on May 4 in a courtroom in Munich, southern Germany. 91-year-old Demjanjuk, who is alleged to have been a Nazi camp guard, has been on trial since November 2009.

AP reports: John Demjanjuk's lawyer assailed Germany's prosecution of the 91-year-old on Tuesday, arguing that investigators have failed to offer concrete evidence of his involvement in Nazi war crimes and have been inconsistent in their efforts to pursue suspects.

Demjanjuk is charged with 28,060 counts of accessory to murder for allegedly serving as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland. He denies the charges.

Demjanjuk, as he has for much of his trial, lay in a bed wearing sunglasses during the proceedings. Read more.