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@ a source familiar with the matter
2023-10-02 13:11:34
I did not know this:
Understanding that a museum of National-Socialist atrocities at Auschwitz must absolutely feature a “gas chamber” in order to be convincing and attract visitors, the Polish postwar museum administrators went to work in 1946/47 to create the climax of their future museum tour: the “gas chamber.” Without documenting either the state of the building before their changes, or the changes they were about to make, they
built a new crematorium chimney, although it is not connected to any smoke duct;
rebuilt two of the three furnaces, yet in a dysfunctional manner (they built the hearth in the ash chamber beneath the muffle rather than attached to the rear of the furnace);
knocked a large, asymmetrical opening at the wrong spot through the wall connecting the former morgue with the furnace room, and “forgot” to put any door into it;
knocked down all thick separation walls except for one, although they should have left one standing, meaning their new, larger room included what used to be the separate washroom;
removed the toilet stall walls and the toilets, but left the toilet drains clearly visible;
left the entrance to the air-raid shelter with its air-tight door and air-lock standing, because without it there was no direct access for victims to the morgue, and this gas-tight air-raid-shelter door with peephole was a tempting (though fake) piece of evidence pointing to the room’s alleged misuse as a homicidal gas chamber.
As a climax of their criminal tampering with the evidence of a claimed crime scene, they crudely knocked four square-shaped holes through the ceiling, put some wooden boards around them and a wooden lid on top, and declared them to be Zyklon B introduction shafts.
This grand plan of deception was and still is called to this day a “reconstruction” of the “original gas chamber,” although there never was an original, and the mistakes made during the effort clearly qualify it as a forgery rather than a “reconstruction.” Until the turn of the millennium, the Museum mendaciously told millions of visitors that this building was in its original state, although they knew better. Only later, beginning in the 1990s, did they admit having made some “mistakes” during their “reconstruction.”
https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/instruments/camp/mixed-purpose-camp/auschwitz-main-camp/382/