News

Preparations have begun for a new Belgian permanent exhibition at the Auschwitz I site (Block no. 20). The appropriate Belgian cabinet minister has commissioned the Museum of Deportation and the Resistance Movement in Mechelen (Malines) to design the project, which will be completed in cooperation with the Auschwitz Museum. Belgian soldiers have arrived in Oświęcim and will spend several weeks dismantling the old exhibition.

September 15 was the 64th anniversary of the establishment of the Russisches Kriegsgefagenen Arbeitslager, or labor camp for Soviet prisoners of war, in Auschwitz. The Nazis treated the captured Soviet soldiers with exceptional harshness. Only a handful survived out of a total of around 15,000 held at Auschwitz.

Preservation work on one of the wooden barracks at the site of the men’s quarantine camp in Birkenau sector BIIa will continue until October.

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.