Since January 2015, the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp has also been visited virtually
If visit of Auschwitz is far too hard to bear for you, or if it is for you simply impossible physically to get there, know that it is possible to do it virtually, from your computer chair. On the occasion of the 70 years of liberation from the camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the memorial had created a virtual panorama , allowing in a few clicks to survey the aisles of the Nazi death camp.
Thanks to high-quality panoramic images, the museum offers you the possibility to pass under the ark of the portal bearing the mention « Arbeit macht frei » . The visit is presented in English and Polish and allows the viewer to obtain a complete historical account of the camp, using thousands of photos, documentary evidence, works of art created by prisoners in the camp and objects they used daily. The virtual tour is first an educational project.
Auschwitz served the Nazis as an extermination camp from June 1940 to January 1945, and could hold some 150,000 people at the same time. The number of victims in Auschwitz is estimated between 1.1 million out of 1.3 million people, according to the museum’s officials, including 1 million Jews from different countries of Europe.
The site includes many testimonies of eyewitness witnesses and their respective location descriptions. Therefore, the panoramas can be useful when preparing a visit to the memorial site. It should not be forgotten, however, that many people will never have the opportunity to discover the authentic Auschwitz site in person. The virtual tour is therefore their only chance to have at least an approximate idea of the experience of the authentic places of the former camp.
In addition to the facilities, virtual visitors will be able to "enter" in some historical facilities that are closed to the public, such as the guard towers, Block 10, where sterilization experiments have been conducted, as well as in some cells located underground in the camp prison in Block 11. The panoramas also present Block 2, which is preserved in its original state. For conservation reasons, only small study groups are currently allowed to access this block.
Auschwitz in all seasons
One of the difficulties encountered by museum staff who have worked in recent years to establish the virtual visit was to visualize the former death camp at different times of the year. Thus, in two years before the 70th anniversary, museum staff took thousands of photos that show Auschwitz over the seasons.
Usually, visitors can spend only a few minutes at different locations on the site. During the virtual tour, however, they will have the opportunity to discover this very moving exhibition at their own pace.
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