March 30, 2015: Victims of the Holocaust will be remembered and honored in a new traveling exhibit at the National Infantry Museum. Architecture of Murder: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Blueprints will open Tuesday April 7, 2015, and remain on display at the museum throughout the month, in conjunction with the nation’s Days of Remembrance.
The exhibit premiered in 2010 at the United Nations in New York on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The camp, built by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland, was the largest and most important concentration and extermination camp complex. During its operation between June 1940 and January 1945, the German Nazis murdered approximately 1,100,000 people there, mostly Jews.
Auschwitz-Birkenau is identified with the epitome of human evil. None of the camp’s procedures gave any indication that they were instruments used to commit one of the greatest of all crimes against humanity.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau blueprints collection, consisting of 29 documents, shows details for expanding the camp, including the addition of a crematorium and a gas chamber. Some of the documents bear notes in the margins, or signatures by senior Nazis, including Heinrich Himmler.
Guests also are encouraged to visit the museum’s permanent Holocaust installation in the World at War gallery. The exhibit is dedicated to the late Colonel and Judge Aaron Cohn, who helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp at Ebensee, Austria, while serving with General George Patton’s Third Army in May 1945.
Both exhibits are open to the public Tuesday through Saturday 9am-5pm and Sundays 11am-5pm.
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