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A blueprint of a crematorium that is part of an exhibition called Architecture of Murder: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Blueprints in Jerusalem - Source: Reuters -
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Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial will put on display this
week original blueprints of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death
camps, where about one million Jews perished during World War
II.
The collection of 29 plans was given to Israeli 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, called Architecture of Murder,
includes four of the coloured 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, 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, International Holocaust Remembrance
Day, which commemorates the killing of six million Jews as part of
the Nazi's Final Solution.
Absent from the ceremony will be the original metal sign that hung
at the entrance to the Auschwitz camp which carries the German
motto Arbeit macht frei (Work makes you free).
The sign was stolen last month, cut in three, and later recovered
by Polish police.
The original is being repaired and officials at the
Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in Poland said a back-up sign would be in
place for the ceremony.
Along with the Jerusalem exhibition, a similar display with copies
of the Nazi-era plans will be opened at the United Nations on
Tuesday.
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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