January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day

In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th, I am posting some of the photos that I took in 1998 and in 2005 at Auschwitz, the main extermination camp of the Holocaust. Auschwitz was liberated on January 27th, 1945 by soldiers of the Soviet Union.

Ruins of Krema II gas chamber at Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau

Early morning photo of the ruins of Krema III at Birkenau

The Germans marched 60,000 prisoners out of the three camps in the Auschwitz complex on January 18, 1945.  They came back twice, on January 20th and again on January 26th, to blow up the gas chambers in order to destroy the evidence.  

Are the ruins of Auschwitz collapsing?

Among the very nice photos on this blog, I found the photo below which shows the ruins of one of the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. (Click on the photo to see full size.)

Ruins at Auschwitz-Birkenau Photo Credit: http://www.lindsayfincher.com/auschwitz.html

I am not positive, but I believe that the photo above shows Krema II, which Robert Jan van Pelt called “the Holy of Holies” when he testified at the David Irving lawsuit trial; he claimed that 500,000 Jews had been gassed in the Krema II gas chamber alone. Compare the photo above to my photo below which shows Krema II in October 2005.  The ruins seem to have collapsed more over the past 6 years.

My photo of Krema II taken in October 2005

There were 1.4 million visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau last year.  When I first visited the Birkenau camp in October 1998, my private tour guide and I were the only people there.  I could not get any photos of the crematoria at that time because the whole camp was grown up in weeds and I was told that it was full of snakes and bees.  The tour guide would not allow me to get close to the ruins of the gas chamber buildings.