In conjunction with our visit to, and subsequent reporting on Auschwitz, the Imperial War Museum London established a permanent Holocaust exhibition.

One component of this exhibition I was particularly impressed by was a model constructed with painstaking detail showing the process by which Jews and others were led off the trains in Birkenau and straight into the gas chambers. I share this with my readers not out of morbidity, but because I believe it assists with understanding the manner in which the camps operated and helps give one a sense of how they would have appeared.

If you wish for more detail, you can click on the picture and it will take you to a new window. Click on the picture again and it will become significantly larger.

At the end of the model you can see the infamous Death Tower to give you a sense of what your perspective is here. In the middle of the scene, a train has arrived and disembarked its prisoners. On the right, a group of prisoners is being led to additional gas chambers or to the barracks for slave laborers. On the left, a group has just finished being led to the grounds of a gas chamber and crematorium for certain death:

On the right of this picture is the crematorium seen above, where the bodies of the prisoners on the left being led underground into the gas chamber will be converted to ashes:

This last picture shows the prisoners starting to enter the underground gas chamber (the outline of which you can see connecting to the crematorium). On the left side of the entrance they are piling up their belongings: