Interior of Auschwitz Gas Chamber
Photo taken in 2005
shows the interior of the Auschwitz gas chamber
The photo above shows the view that one
sees upon entering the Krema I gas chamber through the tourist
entrance door, which is behind the camera. In the center of the
photo, in the background, is the wooden door through which tourists
entered in 1998. The wooden door is in the open position; to
the left of the door is the wall of a tiny vestibule, which has
a door to the outside. The outside door and the wooden door were
added when the room was converted into an air raid shelter in
1944.
On the left side of the photo is the
open doorway into the oven room. This doorway was cut when the
gas chamber was reconstructed; the original doorway was a few
feet to the left. Notice that the doorway has no doorframe, and
no marks where a doorframe was removed.
The colors in the photo above, and in
the photo below, are an accurate representation of what the gas
chamber actually looks like. I resisted the urge to add some
warmth to the colors to make the photo more artistic. The gas
chamber looks cold, hard, gray and creepy.
According to my 1998 tour guide, the
gas chamber room was disguised as a shower room when it was used
for gassing people, but there are no shower heads or water pipes
on the ceiling now and I could not find the marks which indicate
where they were removed. The walls of the gas chamber room are
covered with stucco and there are patches of blue paint on the
wall, but no deep blue stains left by Zyklon-B, as in the gas
chambers at Majdanek.
Inside the gas chamber
at the main Auschwitz camp
When the original gas chamber was converted
into a bomb shelter, it was divided into four small rooms. This
means that the gas chamber, as it looks today, consisted of five
small rooms, including a washroom, when it was used as a bomb
shelter.
In the foreground of the photo below,
there is a mark on the floor which looks like where the wall
of one of the small rooms of the air raid shelter was removed
when the gas chamber was reconstructed. On the wall on the left
side, you can see the marks where the walls of the small rooms
of the air raid shelter were removed. This photo is looking toward
the door where the victims entered the gas chamber. Note the
doorway into the oven room on the right-hand side.
2005 photo of gas chamber,
looking toward victims' entrance
When the gas chamber room, shown in the
photo above, was used as a morgue, it must have had a floor drain
so that the room could be cleaned with water. The only drain
that I saw on my two visits to Auschwitz, and the only one that
is visible in any of my photographs, is the large floor drain
at the far end of the room, near the door from the "laying
out" room into the former wash room.
Original blueprint
of Auschwitz I gas chamber building
According to the original blueprint of
the building, the wash room was a separate room from the morgue.
When the morgue was converted into a gas chamber, the victims
had to go through a door into the "laying out" room
or a door from the vestibule into the wash room to enter the
gas chamber. This means that the gas chamber had no floor drain
and no way to clean the room, according to the Auschwitz Museum.
However, Fred Leuchter wrote the following
in his infamous Report, after examining the gas chamber in Februrary
1988:
We had, by this time, obtained blueprints
of the alleged gas-chamber facility and were able to follow the
structural changes back to the dates in question. We also verified
the existence of the floor drain for the periods of alleged gas
chamber usage.
Close-up shows fingernail
scratches on the gas chamber wall, Jan. 12, 2004
Photo Credit: Simon
Robertson
For over fifty years, visitors were told
that the reconstructed gas chamber was in its original state.
On my 1998 visit to Auschwitz, I was led to believe that what
I was seeing was the original gas chamber, complete with two
wooden doors that both opened inward, a large floor drain, and
drains for two toilets.
This page was last updated on February
12, 2008
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