April 30th is celebrated as a public holiday in Vietnam as Liberation Day or Reunification Day.

Among former South Vietnamese expatriates in the US the day is referred to as ‘Black April’ and is used as a time of lamentation for the fall of Saigon.

The date was a sign of American abandonment, a memorial for the war and the mass exodus as a whole.

The Fall of Saigon, the capture of Saigon, marked the end of the Vietnam War. American citizens were generally assured a simple way to leave just by showing up to an evacuation point.

South Vietnamese who wanted to leave Saigon before it fell often resorted to independent arrangements.

The under-the-table payments required to gain a passport and exit visa jumped sixfold, and the price of seagoing vessels tripled.

Those who owned property in the city were often forced to sell it at a substantial loss or abandon it altogether.

The embassy evacuation had flown out 978 Americans and about 1,100 Vietnamese. The Marines who had been securing the Embassy followed at dawn, with the last aircraft leaving at 07:53.

420 hundred Vietnamese and South Koreans were left behind in the embassy compound, with an additional crowd gathered outside the walls.

The U.S. State Department estimated that the Vietnamese employees of the U.S. Embassy in South Vietnam, past and present, and their families totaled 90,000 people.

22,294 people were evacuated by the end of April. Of the tens of thousands of former South Vietnamese collaborators with the State Department, CIA, U.S. military, and countless armed forces officers and personnel in risk of reprisal, nothing is known.

Following the end of the war, according to official and non-official estimates, between 200,000 and 300,000 South Vietnamese were sent to reeducation camps, where many endured torture, starvation, and disease while being forced to perform hard labor.

In 1977, National Review alleged that some 30,000 South Vietnamese had been systematically killed using a list of CIA informants left behind by the US embassy.