News

A memorial plaque was unveiled near the site of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp on the sixtieth anniversary of the deportation by the Nazis of the residents of Brzezinka. During his first visit to Auschwitz in March 1941, Heinrich Himmler decided to expand the Auschwitz Main Camp and to build a new camp, Birkenau, with a capacity of 100,000 prisoners. Over the next two months, the civilian residents of the villages of Pławy, Babice, Broszkowice, Brzezinka, Budy, Harmęże, and Rajsko were evicted from their homes.

More than 6,000 residents of the city of Oświęcim have signed a petition calling for a referendum on plans for a new zoning ordinance for the areas around the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum historian Franciszek Piper denies that Hollerith machines were used to keep records at the camp. Edwin Black states that IBM assisted Hitler in carrying out the destruction of the Jews. Black makes the assertion in his book IBM and the Holocaust, published simultaneously in 20 countries in mid-Feburary. One of the most powerful images from American writer Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust is that of a Hollerith machine, using punch cards produced by IBM, standing in the Auschwitz administrative offices. Yet Franciszek Piper, director of the Research Department at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum denies that there was such a machine at the camp. Nor were punch cards used to keep records on prisoners at Auschwitz, states Piper.

Just after midnight on February 1, a bus carrying miners to the nearby Piast coal mine went out of control and struck the "Gate of Death" at the site of the Birkenau camp, dislodging part of the wall and damaging the metal gate and the protective grille over the railroad tracks.

The British Embassy has donated a Pentium III computer worth approximately 12,000 zloty ($4,000) to the Museum. The computer was installed in the office of the director of the Archives, where it will function as the server for the archival network and facilitate coordination of work on a catalogue of the resources there.

The annual training program for Museum guides began in January. The aim is to enhance the quality of guide services offered by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial.