After 60 years, a metal rack used to load victims’ remains into the furnaces has been excavated adjacent to the ruins of crematorium and gas chamber V. For years, only part of a handle protruded from the ground; everything else lay buried almost a meter below the surface.
The Nazis first used Zyklon-B gas to murder people in Auschwitz 64 years ago. The first test, on 20 to 30 Soviet prisoners of war, was carried out in the basement of Block no. 11, in the last days of August, 1941. This experiment was the beginning of the mass extermination that the Germans perpetrated in Auschwitz.
A National Remembrance Institute (IPN) source has told the Polish Press Agency (PAP) that the Institute has lodged a complaint with the Warsaw-City Center prosecutor calling for an investigation into whether or not it was a crime to use photographs of Auschwitz victims in an advertisement for a techno party.
August 12-13 marked the 61st anniversary of the deportation to the Auschwitz Nazi camp of the most numerous group of Warsaw residents as the uprising engulfed the Polish capital. Almost 6,000 people were deported on these two days.
Conservation work involved in the cleaning of several thousand children’s shoes found after the Red Army liberated Auschwitz Concentration Camp in January 1945 will go on through most of August.
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