It’s been more than 70 years since millions of Jews were sent to concentration camps, many of whom were killed in gas chambers as their lungs slowly burst.
In the last few years, Germany has convicted several people who worked at some of these Nazi-run camps during the Holocaust — especially those who worked at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, which became a symbol of terror and the centrepiece of Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” plan to exterminate Jews.
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German prosecutors and police have developed a new tool they say may help uncover some of the atrocities that happened there.
A 3D virtual-reality model allows investigators to explore the camp as it stood during the Second World War, giving an insight into the layout and its implications regarding who was able to see what was going on.
Think of it as Google maps but with much more precision. Wearing a headset, the model brings light in astonishing detail into who could have been an accessory to a murder, the makers explained.
“We carried out a survey with laser scanners and the buildings that are no longer there were reconstructed on the basis of plans from the Auschwitz archive,” engineer and digital imaging expert Ralf Breker said.
The makers used blueprints from the land surveying office in Warsaw along with more than a thousand photographs for their digital recreation.
The chilling 360-degree perspective allows prosecutors to debunk claims that, for example, a guard who was stationed at a certain point was unable to see what was going on in the crematoria where bodies were burned.
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Even trees stand tall in the virtual reality to determine exactly who could see what at certain vantage points.
The technology could thus help untangle the question of whether people, who were small cogs in the Nazi machinery and did not actively participate in the killing of six million Jews, were guilty of crimes.
Until recently, the answer from the German justice system was “no.”
In the last couple of years, prosecutors have convicted people who worked at Auschwitz as accessories to a crime.
In 2015, Oskar Groening, known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” was sentenced to four years in prison at the age of 94.
Prosecutors argued that although he did not facilitate genocide, he did help the concentration camp run smoothly. He was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people.
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And in 2016, Reinhold Hanning, a former guard at the camp, was sentenced to five years in prison for the murders of at least 170,000 people for knowing what was going on and not stopping it.
The VR version of Auschwitz has not yet been used in court. However, a digital model of it that can be viewed on a computer monitor was used to prosecute Hanning’s crimes.
Since then, the model has been adapted by the new VR technology so investigators can examine the camp from almost any angle. It took six months to complete.
“The intention behind it is to get a better overview of the camp and to show various perspectives and lines of sight, for example from the watchtowers. Or, for example, if a company marched through here, what could you see from there?” Breker said.
It is estimated that around 1.5 million people were murdered at Auschwitz.
— With files from Reuters.