More than 50 world leaders, including King Charles III, will join a dwindling group of Nazi death camp survivors on Monday in southern Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, where more than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered.

A day of solemn ceremony, shadowed by a resurgence of nationalism in Germany and several other European countries, will take place near a former gas chamber and crematory in the Polish town of Oswiecim, whose name was Germanized to Auschwitz during Hitler’s 1939-1945 occupation of Poland.

The commemoration will begin early Monday with survivors of Auschwitz — who numbered thousands at the end of World War II in 1945 but have mostly since died — laying wreaths on the Wall of Death. The wall, in a courtyard between former barracks, is where prisoners were executed by SS guards and remains pockmarked with bullet holes.

Ronald S. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress and chairman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, said in an interview that “this is the most important anniversary we are going to have because of the shrinking number of survivors and because of what is happening in the world today.”

“We thought the virus of anti-Semitism was dead,” he said, “but it was just in hiding.”

Fewer than 50 survivors will take part in Monday’s commemoration, less than half the number who attended the 75th anniversary. “In five years, there will be very few left,” Mr. Lauder said. “And those who are still alive won’t have the energy to go.”

The number of foreign dignitaries, however, keeps growing. This year’s guest list, the largest ever, includes scores of government leaders and at least eight kings and queens. Among them are Germany’s departing chancellor, Olaf Scholz and its president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Also expected is Mr. Scholz’s likely successor, Friedrich Merz.

With less than a month to go before Germany holds a general election, Mr. Scholz, Mr. Merz and other mainstream German politicians are scrambling to curb support for Alternative for Germany, a hard-right party known as AfD that is widely seen as a dangerous throwback to the nationalism that brought Hitler to power in the 1930s.

At an election rally on Saturday in eastern Germany, AfD politicians and Elon Musk, a top adviser to President Trump, who spoke by video link, urged Germans not to feel guilty for the Nazi-era crimes of their grandparents.

That and calls at the rally for a “Great Germany,” said Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, on Sunday, “sounded all too familiar and ominous, especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.”

None of the leaders at the event on Monday will speak. As part of the anniversary events, the house where the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz lived with his family — which was the subject of the Oscar-winning movie “The Zone of Interest” — will open to visitors for the first time following its sale by Polish owners to the Counter Extremism Project, a New York-based group.

Piotr Cywinski, a Polish historian and the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, said his state-run institution wanted to avoid political speeches and to put survivors and the remembrance of Nazi victims at the center of Monday’s events.

“Memory,” he said in an interview, “is not only crying when you look to the past, it is not only empathy when you look to the victims. This is not enough. Memory, I think, is really the key for today’s time and the key for finding your position today.”

A U.S. delegation will be led by Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, who played a key role in negotiating a recent Gaza truce agreement between Israel and Hamas, and Howard Lutnick, Mr. Trump’s nominee for secretary of commerce. Also in the delegation is Charles Kushner, the father of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and who is Mr. Trump’s choice as ambassador to France.

Russia, which used to regularly take part in anniversary events at Auschwitz, was not invited to this year’s commemoration, despite the Soviet Army’s liberation of the camp in January 1945. Representatives from Moscow have been banished from anniversary events since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which the Kremlin justified on the false pretext that Ukraine, whose president is Jewish, was run by Nazis. Ukraine was invited, and will be represented by its president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin has turned the Soviet role in the defeat of Hitler into a national cult in which anyone at odds with the Kremlin is cast as a Nazi. Never mentioned is the fact that the Soviet Union was effectively Hitler’s ally until 1941, when the Nazis began gassing Jews at Auschwitz. Moscow and Berlin signed a nonaggression pact in 1939 that led to the invasion of Poland by Nazi and Soviet forces later that year.

Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, lambasted the Polish organizers of Monday’s commemoration, telling them that “your lives, jobs, entertainment, and the very existence of your people, your children have been paid for with the blood of Soviet soldiers who defeated the Third Reich.”

Pro-Ukrainian voices on social media responded by claiming that Ukrainian, not Russian, troops had liberated Auschwitz. The first troops to reach the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination complex were from the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front, a Soviet force comprising soldiers from across the Soviet Union. They freed around 7,000 prisoners from the main camp at Auschwitz, from nearby Birkenau and from a labor camp at Monowitz.

The political struggles of the Middle East have also intruded, with pro-Palestinian activists demanding that Poland arrest members of the Israeli delegation, expected to be led by the education minister, Yoav Kisch, for what they call “genocide” in Gaza. The International Criminal Court last year issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

While Mr. Netanyahu was not expected to attend, the Polish government announced this month that all Israeli officials who did come would be safe from arrest.

Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting from Warsaw.

A rebel militia backed by Rwanda has announced the capture of the city of Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a major victory for the group and one of the most significant escalations in the conflict between the two countries in years.

The militia, known as M23, briefly occupied Goma once before, in 2012, then was defeated and lay dormant for almost a decade. Now it has come roaring back, aiming to occupy the region for the long term and exploit its valuable rare minerals, according to United Nations experts.

This time, M23 appears to be in a stronger position to keep hold of Goma, a city made up mainly of people who left their homes in terror and will now have to live under the rule of one of the armed groups they fled.

A spokesman for M23 announced the “liberation of the city of Goma” in a post on X, saying Congolese military personnel had to hand over their arms to the U.N. and assemble in a stadium before 3 a.m. There was no confirmation that had been completed yet, though, and there were scattered reports of gunfire in the city into Monday morning.

The conflict in eastern Congo — an area about the size of Michigan — was once labeled Africa’s World War. It has been going on since the 1990s, and has involved dozens of armed groups, of which M23 is currently dominant.

The rebels plan to occupy and exploit the region for the long term, according to the U.N. and the United States, which say the group is funded and directed by Congo’s much smaller neighbor Rwanda. Rwanda denies those accusations.

The rebels’ advance on Goma, which began with an offensive in the region launched this month, escalated rapidly over the past three weeks, prompting people to flee to — and from — the city.

On Sunday morning, thousands of people arrived in Goma from areas north of the city, some toting the few possessions they had managed to grab in pieces of cloth tied around their foreheads, others carrying babies only a few days old. Many had already been displaced and were fleeing bombs that had fallen near camps. Others had left their villages, which were caught in the crossfire between M23 and the Congolese armed forces.

Camps on the outskirts of Goma that had hosted more than 300,000 people completely emptied out in a few hours, the U.N. said.

On Friday, the military governor of North Kivu, the province of which Goma is the capital, was fatally wounded on the battlefield, according to a Congolese military spokesman. The circumstances of his death remained murky, but the spokesman said that the governor, Gen. Peter Cirimwami, died as he was being evacuated to Kinshasa, Congo’s capital.

On Saturday, the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Goma evacuated many of its staff members from the city, putting them on buses to the airport with plans to fly out to Entebbe, in neighboring Uganda.

In 2012, Rwanda came under intense international pressure to stop backing M23, and as a result, the militia was defeated the following year. But it is unclear whether such pressure can be summoned again, experts said. Rwanda has built up its relationships with Western nations since then, and has become less dependent on aid.

At an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Sunday, the United States and other members condemned Rwanda’s actions, but stopped short of calling for sanctions. Bintou Keita, the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, told the meeting that three peacekeepers had been killed trying to protect Goma and a nearby town, Saké, from M23’s advance. She also said that the rebels had closed the airspace over Goma.

“In other words, we are trapped,” she said.

As the rebels advanced on Goma, an already dire humanitarian situation was becoming even worse. Over 400,000 people have fled their homes since the start of this year, according to the U.N. refugee agency, as M23 rebels have attacked new areas of North Kivu province, where Goma is, and South Kivu. They joined 4.6 million people who were already displaced in Congo’s east.

And still, people poured into Goma, often in long columns.

Some pushed wheelbarrows with a few salvaged belongings. Some had bicycles or carried mattresses on their heads and backs. Many of them had life-threatening injuries.

Myriam Favier, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s sub-delegation in Goma, said on Friday that the day before, more than 100 people had arrived within 24 hours at the hospital where she worked — normally the number of people who arrive in a whole month.

“They’re coming from everywhere,” she said. “They’re coming from all fronts.”

Ms. Favier described medical staff treating patients with mortar or shrapnel wounds and said that the number of minors with serious injuries had been increasing significantly. She called on those using heavy artillery to reduce their attacks, saying that so many people were arriving with head wounds and chest trauma that the hospital had run out of beds and had to put patients on mattresses in the parking lot.

Across Goma, schools were being turned into shelters for displaced people. Families were stocking up what supplies they could so they did not have to venture out.

Many of the people who fled had sought sanctuary in Goma, knowing it was in the rebels’ sights, but having no other option.

As the city fell into M23’s hands, they hid where they could, many of them hungry, cold or badly injured. Some slept in the street, others in hospitals.

Solange Safi Ndakwinja was trying to look after her three daughters, who were badly injured by a bomb that exploded at an army checkpoint.

“My hope is God will help us,” Ms. Ndakwinja said. “For the rest, we don’t know what will happen.”

Elian Peltier contributed reporting from Dakar, Senegal, and Declan Walsh from Nairobi, Kenya.

Tensions flare in Lebanon and Gaza

Fragile cease-fires in Lebanon and Gaza were put to the test yesterday.

In Southern Lebanon, Israeli forces killed or injured scores of people, Lebanese officials said, and in Gaza, Israel prevented thousands of uprooted Palestinians from moving back to their homes, saying Hamas had violated the terms of their truce, including by not adhering to the agreed order of hostage releases.

By the end of the day, however, Israel and Hamas said understandings had been reached via mediators to resolve their dispute, and the White House issued a statement indicating that in Lebanon, an arrangement for an initial 60-day truce would be extended until Feb. 18.

Negotiators had hoped that the cease-fire in Lebanon would become permanent by now, securing a measure of calm in a turbulent region. Thousands of Lebanese displaced by the war have poured onto roads leading south as they aim to return home.

The latest: Displaced Gazans in the enclave’s south can start returning on foot to their homes in the north starting at 7 a.m. local time this morning, followed by vehicles via a different route two hours later, according to an Israeli military spokesman.

Diplomacy: President Trump has pushed to “clean out” the Gaza Strip, including by asking Egypt and Jordan to take in hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. His suggestion drew flat rejections from those countries, two of the most important U.S. allies in the Middle East.

Related: A sudden halt to U.S. foreign aid will not apply to emergency food aid and weapons support to Israel and Egypt.

A Colombia-U.S. feud comes to an end

The U.S. and Colombia narrowly avoided a trade war yesterday, with President Gustavo Petro of Colombia and President Trump sparring over the deportation of Colombian migrants from the U.S.

Late last night, Petro backed down and agreed to receive all deportees from the U.S., including those on military planes. Trump had threatened to impose steep tariffs and a raft of other penalties in response to Petro’s announcement that he had turned back military planes carrying deportees to Colombia.

In a statement yesterday, the White House said Petro had agreed to all of its terms. It said tariffs and sanctions would be “held in reserve” and that other penalties would remain in effect until the first planeload of deportees had arrived in Colombia. Colombia’s foreign ministry also released a statement, saying that it would accept deportation flights and “guarantee dignified conditions” for those Colombians on board.

In other Trump administration news:

Lukashenko wins re-election — again

In an election that was widely dismissed as rigged, Europe’s longest-serving leader, President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus, cruised to his seventh election victory in a row yesterday.

A survey of voters leaving polling places that was released by state media yesterday evening showed the president getting 87.6 percent of the vote, more than the 81 percent he claimed to have won in 2020. Exit polls are controlled by the state, like all aspects of elections in Belarus, and generally reflect the ultimate outcome.

MORE TOP NEWS

Caity Weaver, a Times magazine writer, loves sugar. Like, really loves it. Her home contains stashes of Dunkaroos, pouches of Gushers and packs of Strawberry Sensation Fruit Roll-Ups, auto-delivered from Amazon.

Determined to kick the habit and learn about sugar dependence, Weaver traveled to a food therapy facility in Austria to try to change her ways. It was, she says, a journey into hell.

Lives lived: Carol Downer, a leader in the feminist women’s health movement who drew national fame for her role in a case known as the Great Yogurt Conspiracy, has died at 91.

Art fraud, on a grand scale

Two art fraud rings in a remote Canadian city produced thousands of paintings that were peddled as works by Norval Morrisseau, Canada’s most celebrated Indigenous artist.

By the time it all came out — decades later — the works had collectively fetched millions of dollars across Canada, making it onto the walls of the country’s top galleries and universities. They were purchased by retired schoolteachers, billionaire art collectors and even a rock star.

“None of us knew anything about art,” said one of the hard-boiled homicide detectives who helped crack the case. They carried out their investigation by reconstructing Morrisseau’s life so they could understand how and what he painted, and how he signed his works.

Read about the saga here.

That’s it for today’s briefing. It’s great to be back. — Natasha

Reach Natasha and the team at [email protected].

Two art fraud rings in a remote Canadian city produced thousands of paintings sold in galleries as works by Norval Morrisseau, Canada’s most celebrated Indigenous artist.

Jan. 26, 2025

Tim Tait put two and two together when he went to sell some of his paintings to a law firm in downtown Thunder Bay two decades ago. He spotted one of his other works already there — but with somebody else’s signature on it.

And not just anybody’s. It read “Copper Thunderbird,” a.k.a. the “Picasso of the North.” Real name Norval Morrisseau, Canada’s most famous Indigenous artist whose original style shattered the country’s idea of art and elbowed its way into its most important museum.

“I called the cops,” said Mr. Tait, a local artist in Thunder Bay, Ontario, who is also Indigenous. “All they did was laugh at me and ridicule me on the phone.”

“And I said, ‘When it comes out, I’ll be singing like a bird.’”

By the time it all came out — decades later — two criminal rings in Thunder Bay had knocked off thousands of bogus Norval Morrisseaus that collectively fetched millions of dollars across Canada. The fakes, which included rebranded paintings by Mr. Tait and other Indigenous artists, made it onto the walls of the country’s top galleries and universities. They were purchased by retired schoolteachers, billionaire art collectors and even a rock star.

The leaders of the Thunder Bay rings have pleaded guilty to fraud in the past year and are now imprisoned. Thunder Bay — an isolated city on Lake Superior’s north shore that drug dealers from Toronto have turned into Canada’s homicide capital — has also emerged as the epicenter of the biggest art fraud in the country’s history.

The convictions came a quarter-century after the authenticity of many Morrisseaus was first publicly questioned — and only after a series of unusual events linking the rock star; a cold-case murder of a teenager; his aging, grieving parents; and the hard-boiled homicide detectives initially skeptical of art fraud. The detectives ended up mastering the finer points of Morrisseau’s Woodlands style of art.

“None of us knew anything about art,” Det. Jason Rybak of the Thunder Bay Police Service said during a recent drive through the city, whose muted colors were further drained by fresh snow and a cloud-filled sky.

Recalling the first raid of a ringleader’s house, Detective Rybak, who led the investigation, said: “Next thing you know, we have these paintings. And we’re like, ‘Oh yeah, what now?’”

The police knew of Morrisseau, though. A member of the Ojibwe First Nation, he was born on a reserve northeast of Thunder Bay. But Morrisseau had long been a fixture on the city’s streets where he hawked his artwork.

Morrisseau became famous for creating the Woodland School of painting, a fusion of Ojibwe and European styles. His paintings touched on Indigenous beliefs, depicting people, animals and the physical and spiritual worlds in bright colors and X-ray-like motifs.

Canada’s artistic establishment had long considered works by Indigenous artists to be ethnography, not fine art. But Morrisseau’s work changed that starting in the 1960s, as it earned acclaim in Toronto, the United States and France, where he became known as the Picasso of the North.

In 2006, a year before his death at 75, the National Gallery of Canada, the country’s most important museum, held a retrospective of Morrisseau’s art — the first time a contemporary Indigenous artist was given such a spotlight. But the homage was marred by news reports of the proliferation of suspected knockoffs. Morrisseau himself had spoken out against the fraud and identified fakes with his forged signature.

The stories never led anywhere because gallery owners, auctioneers and others with a financial stake in counterfeit Morrisseaus fiercely denied the existence of widespread fraud, said Jonathan Sommer, a lawyer who represented three people who sued galleries for selling them counterfeits.

Many wealthy collectors were too embarrassed to admit they had bought fakes, Mr. Sommer said. But one client happened to be a rock star: Kevin Hearn, the keyboardist for the Barenaked Ladies, a Canadian band that has sold more than 15 million albums.

Mr. Hearn, a onetime choirboy, loved “the bold colors and the black lines” in the paintings of Morrisseau, whose work was influenced by stained-glass church windows. In 2005, he bought a painting of animals in a circle on a green canvas called, “Spirit Energy of Mother Earth,” paying 20,000 Canadian dollars, about $16,500 at the time, at a Toronto gallery that reassured him of its authenticity.

After learning a few years later that it was a fake, Mr. Hearn successfully sued the gallery even as he weathered online attacks from people at risk of losing financially by the exposing of sham Morrisseaus.

“I was scared for my family,” Mr. Hearn said in an interview. “They were posting photos of my special-needs daughter online saying that I was a bad father for pursuing this litigation.”

Mr. Hearn also backed the making of a documentary, “There Are No Fakes,” on the broader fraud involving Morrisseau.

“I feel like the relationship between an artist’s work and the people that take that work into their heart is sacred,” he said.

The documentary featured information on Gary Lamont, a Thunder Bay man convicted of sexual abuse who was also, according to the police, a small-time drug dealer and a suspect in the 1984 killing of a 17-year-old named Scott Dove.

When Scott’s parents learned he had been mentioned in the documentary, they reached out to an investigator who had been looking into the cold case: Detective Rybak, who said that Mr. Lamont was still a suspect in the murder.

Detective Rybak, 49, had spent his career on homicides and drugs. When the detective called Mr. Hearn and his lawyer, Mr. Sommer, he was focused on the cold case and showed little interest in the fake Morrisseaus, Mr. Sommer said. But that changed when the detective became aware of the potentially strong case against Mr. Lamont — for art fraud.

“Once he got it,” Mr. Sommer said, “he became like a pit bull.”

Detective Rybak and two colleagues, Det. Sean Verescak and Det. Kevin Bradley, said they carried out their investigation by reconstructing Morrisseau’s life so they could understand how and what he painted, and how he signed his works.

Morrisseau, who was sexually abused at the Roman Catholic residential school he was sent to at 6, according to biographies, battled alcoholism for most of his life and, at one point, was homeless in Vancouver.

“He had lots of demons,” Detective Rybak said.

After his international success, Morrisseau returned to Thunder Bay in the 1970s.

It was a blue-collar town where people worked at paper mills and grain elevators. Toronto was a 16-hour drive, a place children visited for the first time on eighth-grade field trips. Few in Thunder Bay were aware of Morrisseau’s accomplishments. Locals knew him simply as the Indigenous artist who milled around downtown offering his drawings outside a bank in exchange for money, food or alcohol.

During one winter storm, Peter Kantola was driving when Morrisseau appeared out of nowhere and flagged him down. The artist had his hands deep in the pockets of a flimsy jacket.

“He was half frozen, the snow was blasting his whole face,” recalled Mr. Kantola, 84, a retired high school science teacher.

Mr. Kantola gave Morrisseau a lift, and, after that, would do so whenever he ran into him. Morrisseau, Mr. Kantola said, gave him two large paintings that now grace his living room.

Morrisseau also befriended Gary Lamont, the future art-fraud ringleader, in the 1970s, according to Mr. Lamont’s guilty plea statement. During the course of their friendship, Mr. Lamont occasionally set up Morrisseau in an apartment and covered the rent.

Mr. Lamont’s longtime partner, Linda Tkachyk, would take money, food and alcohol to the artist, her niece Amanda Dalby recalled. Ms. Dalby, 40, lived with her aunt and Mr. Lamont when she was a child.

On one visit, Morrisseau gave Ms. Dalby and her sister a painting.

“He said it would be enough to pay for our schooling,” Ms. Dalby said, adding that Mr. Lamont later took it.

According to Mr. Lamont’s guilty plea, he started producing counterfeit Morrisseaus in 2002 and continued until 2015. He was sentenced last December to five years in prison.

In the house where Ms. Dalby stayed, Indigenous artists, including a nephew of Morrisseau’s, painted nonstop inside a tiny room that Mr. Lamont kept locked, she said.

According to his guilty plea, Mr. Lamont also traded money and marijuana for paintings by Mr. Tait — the local artist who vowed to sing like a bird and helped expose Mr. Lamont. Mr. Tait stopped supplying him with paintings after realizing they were being passed off as Morrisseaus.

“He took advantage of me pretty bad,” Mr. Tait said one recent evening as he painted on a large canvas, his granddaughter bounding around their apartment. “That was my biggest weakness, drugs. I’m not like that anymore — 20 years in August.”

Hundreds of paintings produced by the Indigenous artists were rebranded with Morrisseau’s signature in Cree syllabics — “Copper Thunderbird” — and sold for 2,000 to 10,000 Canadian dollars.

By the end of their investigation, the detectives had unearthed a second forgery ring in Thunder Bay. Under its leader, a housepainter named David Voss, fake Morrisseaus were made in assembly-line fashion with Mr. Voss sketching outlines that were colored in by multiple individuals, each responsible for a single hue. Mr. Voss pleaded guilty to fraud in June. The case of a third ring, based in southern Ontario, is still working its way through the courts.

According to the detectives, Mr. Lamont used drugs and alcohol to turn Indigenous artists into Morrisseau forgers.

Gil Labine, Mr. Lamont’s lawyer, said his client was not a drug dealer, though he supplied the Indigenous artists with drugs. Mr. Labine added that Mr. Lamont has denied any involvement in the 1984 murder.

The artists regularly showed up at the arts supply shop in town, the Painted Turtle, to pick up large orders for Mr. Lamont, said the owner, Lorraine Cull.

Late one December, Mr. Lamont showed up with four young men.

“He almost cleaned us out of all the canvases we had,” Ms. Cull said. “I asked him, ‘What are you doing with all this?’ And he said they were Christmas gifts for all the artists up North.”

“And it was after Christmas.”