The first camp to be liberated was not Auschwitz, but Majdanek, in July 1944. The Red Army and the Soviet news agency TASS had a loose set of procedures for documenting and publicizing Nazi atrocities. They already had uncovered evidence of the Einsatzgruppen mass shootings at Babi Yar and other sites the previous year. Soviet news agencies would deemphasize the Jewish background of their victims, enfolding the atrocities into a larger narrative of fascist violence against Soviet citizens.

The camps were something many Soviets were unprepared to deal with. Vassily I. Chuikov, one of the chief commanders at Stalingrad recalled in 1970:

A death camp. No, not a camp. A death factory outfitted with the latest equipment for mass murder in a fiendishly organized way. I am omitting the details of the horrifying procedure, for these are described in many documentary accounts. But I must confess that after I had heard the full story and saw photographs taken by our officers, I refused to go there. I just could not. Millions of human beings brutally murdered and burned in furnaces. Millions! Men, women, children—no one was spared. The Nazis hitched inmates on hooks, clubbed them to death, poisoned them with gas.

Soviet news agencies would publicize the camp infrastructure along with the human remains. They really couldn't force Germans to view them because the death camps were located deep in Polish territory and most Germans in the region had left in the face of the Red Army.

Source Shneer, David. Through Soviet Jewish Eyes Photography, War, and the Holocaust. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011.