Auschwitz blueprints to go on display at Yad Vashem today
The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial will put on display today original blueprints of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camps, where about 1 million Jews perished during World War II.
The collection of 29 plans was given to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a visit to Germany last August. Netanyahu later brandished some of the documents at the United Nations to denounce Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for calling the Holocaust a lie.
The exhibition in Jerusalem includes four of the colored sketches showing detailed aerial views of the camp and blueprints of its bunks and one of its crematoriums. Tens of thousands of other prisoners, including Polish, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war, also died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi's concentration camp complexes.
After attending the exhibition's official opening today, Netanyahu will travel to Poland to take part in a ceremony marking 65 years since the camps' liberation by the Red Army.
The ceremony will take place on Wednesday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the killing of six million Jews as part of the Nazis' "Final Solution."
Along with the Jerusalem exhibition, a similar display with copies of the Nazi-era plans will be opened at the United Nations tomorrow.
One blueprint shows the camp from the air, including the railway tracks that brought in new prisoners. Another was a plan for bunks meant to hold up to 200,000 inmates, signed by top Nazi Heinrich Himmler. The two others show plans and drawings of a crematorium and the camp's entrance.
Yad Vashem's chairman Avner Shalev said the four blueprints, drawn at different points during 1941 by architects and engineers, show the evolution of Auschwitz-Birkenau from concentration camp to death camp.
"We witness in these blueprints the complete collapse of human values," Shalev said.
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