In November of 1989, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., received from the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau a shipment of artifacts for inclusion in the new museum’s exhibitions tracing the history of the Holocaust. In addition to planks from an Auschwitz barracks, rubble from a crematorium, a pole from an electrified barbed-wire fence, and twenty empty cans of Zyklon B—the cyanide gas used in the extermination process—the shipment contained a large number of personal items, among them hairbrushes, mirrors, razors, toothbrushes, eating utensils, scissors, hat brushes, clothes hangers, shoe daubers, clogs, and suitcases. One box contained approximately twenty pounds of human hair. “When we first received the hair, we regarded it as just another artifact for the museum,” Jacek Nowakowski, who was in charge of acquiring objects for the exhibition, says, “but then, when the Content Committee met to discuss the best way to display it, it became clear that the members viewed human hair differently from the other objects.” The Content Committee, which consisted of twenty scholars, Holocaust survivors, religious leaders, and museum officials, and which was responsible for deciding on the substance of the museum’s exhibitions, devoted two emotional and highly charged meetings to the issue of displaying the hair, which was a jumble of braids, curls, and long strands shorn from women’s heads. According to Nowakowski, these discussions were among the most sensitive deliberations of the entire project, which had been under way for more than ten years. “Hair is a highly personal matter,” Nowakowski says. “It is not only part of the human body; it is also a part of the human personality—part of one’s identity. How you wear your hair tells a lot about you as a person. Hair is so simple—but it is so fundamental.” Many committee members felt strongly that the hair, which had been discovered in large bales when the Red Army liberated the concentration camp, in January of 1945, should be displayed in the museum. “The basic argument was that we were trying to make a convincing case against any possible Holocaust deniers,” Jeshajahu Weinberg, the director of the museum and the chairman of the Content Committee, explains. “It was not even so much for the present generation as it was for future generations. The hair was one piece of clear evidence.” Other members vehemently opposed the idea of such a display. “The women survivors, in particular, objected to the presence of the hair in the exhibition,” Weinberg says. “‘For all I know, my mother’s hair might be in there,’ one of them said. ‘I don’t want my mother’s hair on display.’ ” Weinberg, who initially had had no objection to exhibiting the hair, was moved by the appeal, as was the rest of the committee. Eventually, the museum decided to install a wall-length photographic mural of the nearly two tons of human hair on exhibit at the Auschwitz Museum. While the question of whether or not to display the hair of Holocaust victims has been settled at the Holocaust Museum, conservators and administrators at the Auschwitz Museum, in Oświęcim, Poland, are grappling with a more practical problem: how to preserve those four thousand pounds of human hair on display in their museum. This issue has recently risen to prominence with the initiation of a multi-million-dollar effort to preserve the ruins of the Auschwitz concentration-camp complex. As conservators from around the world confer on how best to save the remaining barracks, the barbed-wire fencing, the watchtowers, the ruins of the gas chambers, and the heaps of hair, they have had to take a hard look at what it means to preserve a “relic.” Ever since Auschwitz was liberated, these remnants of human beings have stood as one of the most chilling symbols of the Holocaust. The Nazis did not just murder millions of men, women, and children but literally “harvested” their remains to drive Germany’s industrial machine. In the early nineteen-forties, a brisk trade emerged between German death camps, such as Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka, and German felt and textile manufacturers who used the versatile fibre in the production of thread, rope, cloth, carpets, mattress stuffing, lining stiffeners for uniforms, socks for submarine crews, and felt insulators for the boots of railroad workers. According to a memoir written by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, an inmate who worked as an assistant to the notorious Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele, human hair “was often used in delayed action bombs, where its particular qualities made it highly useful for detonating purposes.” Women’s hair was preferred to men’s or children’s, because it tended to be thicker and longer. The hair was shorn from the heads of corpses immediately after their removal from the gas chambers (the hair of prisoners selected for labor was shaved off when they entered the camp) and was then “cured” in lofts over the crematorium’s ovens and gathered into twenty-kilogram bales. The bales were marketed to German companies at twenty pfennig per kilogram. I have been told that some of the products manufactured in those plants may still be in use in German homes today. In May, 1945, just days after the German capitulation, Polish officials dispatched ten pounds of human hair found at Auschwitz to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Cracow. Following a series of chemical tests, Jan Robel, the head of the institute, confirmed, in his final report, “the presence of traces of cyanide, particularly the poisonous compound bearing the name Zyklon.” Such findings served as evidence in trials against Nazi war criminals, including Rudolf Hess, the former commandant at Auschwitz, who was sentenced to death on April 2, 1947, and was hanged fourteen days later beside the former crematorium of the Stammlager, the main Auschwitz camp. Since then, the human hair has continued to bear witness: on the second floor of Block IV, a former Auschwitz barrack, it lies in heaps inside a row of large display cases. In the dim light, individual braids, tight knots, and occasional elegant waves can be distinguished in the dull, tangled mass. A faint scent of naphthalene—the chemical used in mothballs—permeates the still air. As visitors file into the room and stand before the windows, some shake their heads, some look away, some are moved to mutterings of disbelief. Most stand for a moment or two in silence, then turn and leave the room. Witold Smrek, the Auschwitz Museum’s chief conservator, and other museum officials are currently deliberating on the fate of this display. “Some people are telling us that the exhibition is offensive, that it is in poor taste to have human hair on display like this,” Smrek told me recently in his office, which is in a former barrack that houses the offices and workshops of the museum’s conservation department. At present, Smrek said, his main concern is not whether or not to display the hair but how to preserve it. After a half century in a room without temperature or humidity control, and having been subjected to various treatments, including occasional washing, the hair has become faded and brittle. And, Smrek said, “Over the years, we noticed that insects, especially moths, were infesting the hair. In order to prevent this, we began to treat it with naphthalene.” The treatment was carried out during the occasional “dusting” of the hair, a process in which the hair was spread on large vibrating screens, and dust particles and other airborne debris were shaken out of it. After the hair was dusted, pans of liquid naphthalene were placed beneath the screens. The vapor impregnated the hair and provided protection against future infestation. Each time the hair was treated, however, it seemed to become more brittle. “We haven’t touched the hair since the nineteen-seventies,” Smrek said. “It has grown too fragile. Some of it has already turned to dust.” Currently, Smrek is awaiting recommendations on how best to check the deterioration process. “I have written to museums all over the world seeking advice, but no one has given us an answer yet,” he said. “Some museums have succeeded in preserving small amounts of hair, but I don’t think anyone knows how to preserve hair in such quantities. No one has ever had this problem before.” Adam Zak, the rector of the Jesuit College in Cracow, feels that there is no reason to preserve the hair in Block IV, and proposes that it be removed from the display cases and buried. “Hair is part of a victim’s body and, as such, it should be accorded the dignity due to it,” he claims. “People say that you need the hair as evidence of the Nazi atrocities, but, with the film footage and the shoes and the brushes, there is enough other evidence to prove that the Holocaust took place.” Ernest Michel disagrees adamantly. Michel, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, who, along with another survivor, Kalman Sultanik, has been lobbying for years for the preservation of Auschwitz, insists that the human hair on display in Block IV remain exactly where it is. “There is nothing that speaks louder against the Nazi crimes than this hair,” Michel told me recently. “To destroy it would be to remove the strongest evidence of what happened to us. On the transport that I came on, all the women and children were taken from the train and immediately gassed. The hair, along with the combs and suitcases and shoes, is all that remains of them. No matter how painful it may be to look at, it is all part of the story that I believe has to be told.” Smrek told me that the museum would not make a decision on the hair any time soon. He added that the hair was only one of his concerns. “I am responsible for the preservation and maintenance of the entire museum site,” he said, pointing to two yellowing maps behind his desk. One was of Auschwitz I, the Stammlager, which consisted of twenty-eight brick barracks; the other was of Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau. Birkenau, a vast complex a mile and a half to the west of Auschwitz I which occupied an area thirty times its size, was the “death camp”—the site of four crematoriums where the bodies of more than a million men, women, and children were incinerated. “Everything needs constant maintenance and restoration,” Smrek said. “The brick buildings, the wooden barracks, the barbed-wire-fence posts, the shoes, the suitcases, the prison uniforms, the metal artifacts. We have twenty cubic metres of spoons, forks, and other metal articles. We are trying to preserve everything we can, but we can do only so much. The problem is that nothing lasts forever.” 
 
 Today, a half century after the Second World War, as time and nature conspire against the remaining physical evidence of the Holocaust, other equally corrosive forces are at work on that most crucial of all Holocaust legacies—human memory. In Europe and North America, a growing number of revisionist “historians” claim that many assumptions about the Holocaust are based on faulty or insufficient evidence—that, in the words of one revisionist, “a hank of hair and a jar full of ashes” are not sufficient proof that the Germans exterminated an estimated twelve million people. Although Holocaust revisionism has lurked on the fringe of public consciousness since the nineteen-fifties (in Germany, revisionists refer to the Holocaust as the Auschwitz-Lüge, or Auschwitz lie), over the past decade the revisionists have popularized their cause in a series of spectacular courtroom cases in Germany, France, Canada, and the United States. In France, the Conseil d’État, the country’s highest administrative court, has repeatedly ruled against the revisionists, in some cases banning their writings and imposing stiff fines. “Such writings are not only a perverse expression of anti-Semitism but also an aggression against the dead, the survivors, and society at large,” Roger Errera, a member of the Conseil d’État, has written in defense of his court’s decisions. “Their aim is the destruction of the dead’s only ‘grave,’ that is, our memory, and the erosion of all awareness of the crime itself. Such an aggression is not to be tolerated.” The eminent French literary historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet has denounced the revisionists as “assassins de la memoire.” Despite their setbacks in courtrooms, however, the revisionists have made dramatic inroads into the public consciousness in recent years. Last spring, a Roper poll published in the Boston Globe indicated that one out of three Americans believes it possible that the Holocaust never took place. The revisionist pressure has become so great that two years ago Auschwitz Museum officials, in order, they said, “to counter claims in the West that the Holocaust did not take place,” retested samples of hair and portions of the gas-chamber walls for Zyklon B. The wall fragments still revealed the presence of the poisonous gas, but the hair, after years of washing and treatment, had been leached of all cyanide residues. The revisionists’ plaint is deceptively simple. They ask for one incontrovertible piece of evidence—the proverbial “smoking gun”—that can prove that the Nazis devised and executed a policy of genocide in Europe. Revisionists, it must be stated, do not deny the presence of crematoriums in the camps, or the fact that millions of people may have died in the camps from exhaustion, hunger, or disease, or the fact that Zyklon B was used in gas chambers, to delouse clothing, but they adamantly reject the notion that human lives were deliberately, systematically destroyed. And they challenge at every turn the veracity of eyewitness testimony, whether from Holocaust survivors, including inmates who manned the gas chambers and ovens, or from S.S. guards and camp officials. Revisionists claim that this testimony, including the dramatic memoirs of Rudolf Hess, is often biased or distorted or has been elicited under duress. According to Mark Weber, who is the editor of the Journal for Historical Review, a prominent revisionist publication issued six times a year by the California-based Institute for Historical Review, the overturning of the conviction of John Demjanjuk in an Israeli courtroom this past summer further advances the revisionist claim. “Here you have five individuals who swore under oath in court, sometimes shouting, that this man was Ivan the Terrible,” Weber said to me shortly after the trial. “This turned out not to be true. One should be skeptical about the testimony of Holocaust survivors.” This is exactly the point that revisionists have been making for over a decade. In December, 1978, Robert Faurisson, a professor of French literature at the University of Lyons, published an article in Le Monde called “The Problem of the Gas Chambers, or The Auschwitz Rumor,” in which he challenged the claim that hydrocyanic gas had been used to kill people in the Auschwitz crematoriums. Faurisson not only claimed that the proximity of the “alleged” gas chambers to the crematory ovens would have prevented the use of Zyklon B gas, which is highly inflammable, but also maintained that these facilities by their very design could never have functioned as factories of mass destruction. Further, in studying the original blueprints for the structures Faurisson could find no evidence that the crematoriums had been intended as extermination facilities. In his view, there was no hard evidence that the Holocaust had occurred, and he refused to accept that the worst crime in the history of mankind could have been perpetrated and not have left such evidence. “One proof” is what Faurisson demanded. “One single proof.” Given the scale of the extermination process at Auschwitz, the material evidence—official documents, photographs, internal memos, and directives—is surprisingly scarce. One reason is the extensive use of euphemism in official documents. Another lies in the evolution of the Auschwitz camps and the extermination facilities. In June, 1940, nine months after the occupation of Poland, the Germans established the Konzentrationslager Auschwitz in the brick buildings of a Polish military camp that dated back to the First World War. A former munitions depot on the edge of the camp was converted into a crematorium to incinerate the corpses of inmates who had been executed or had perished from disease, exhaustion, or abuse. Poison gas is reported to have first been used in Auschwitz that September, when six hundred Soviet prisoners of war and two hundred and fifty sick prisoners were locked in basement rooms of Block XI and exposed to Zyklon B. Later that month, nine hundred Soviet soldiers were crammed into the morgue of the Auschwitz crematorium and gassed. Rudolf Höss, who observed both operations, recalled the later one in his memoirs, written in prison after the war: “The Russians were ordered to undress in an anteroom: they then quietly entered the mortuary, for they had been told they were to be deloused. The whole transport exactly filled the mortuary to capacity. The doors were then sealed and the gas shaken down through the holes in the roof. I do not know how long this killing took. For a little while a humming sound could be heard. When the powder was thrown in there were cries of ‘Gas!,’ then a great bellowing, and the trapped prisoners hurled themselves against both the doors. But the doors held. They were opened several hours later, so that the place might be aired. It was then that I saw, for the first time, gassed bodies in the mass.” On January 20, 1942, the Nazi leadership convened a secret meeting at a villa in Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin, to discuss plans for the mass extermination of Europe’s Jews and other minority groups. Auschwitz, because of its relative isolation and its proximity to major rail links, became the end point for the Nazis’ “final solution.” When it became evident that the Stammlager could never accommodate the vast numbers of prisoners, a second camp, Auschwitz II, was erected in the village of Brzezinka, or, in German, Birkenau. Within the year, Birkenau came to dwarf the Stammlager in virtually every respect—in the squalor of its living conditions, in the capacity of its gas chambers, and, with its wire fences encompassing some four hundred and thirty acres of meadows, swamps, and woods, in its physical dimensions. To service this massive complex, the Germans constructed a railway line that fed directly into the center of the camp. They also erected the four crematoriums, which had a total of forty-six ovens; the combined capacity of these ovens allowed for the incineration of thousands of bodies a day. In November of 1944, as the Germans prepared to abandon Auschwitz, they began dismantling and dynamiting three of the crematoriums at Birkenau. The fourth had been destroyed in October, during a short-lived inmate revolt. By the time the Soviet Army reached Auschwitz, nothing remained of the extermination facilities except heaps of broken bricks, slabs of concrete, pieces of twisted metal, and, of course, the endless piles of shoes, suitcases, flatware, and bales of human hair. With the crematoriums and the gas chambers in ruins, and with the directives for the extermination process obscured in bureaucratic euphemisms, survivors’ testimony remained the only apparent proof of the crimes committed by the Nazis. In the blueprints, construction documents, and work orders that trace the construction and subsequent use of these buildings, which are now housed in Auschwitz Museum archives, there is not a single explicit reference to the use of gas chambers or Zyklon B for homicidal purposes. This dearth of evidence is what led one prominent revisionist, Arthur Butz, a professor of engineering at Northwestern University, to denounce the Holocaust as “the hoax of the twentieth century.” Because most serious Holocaust scholars have avoided engaging people like Butz and Faurisson in debate—and, in fact, generally refuse to dignify them with the term “revisionist historians,” preferring “Holocaust deniers”— the revisionist demand for “one single proof” for years went unanswered. Then, in 1989, came a reply in the form of a five-hundred-and-sixty-four-page book called “Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers.” In this tome filled with technical drawings, work orders, and photographs, Jean-Claude Pressac, a French amateur historian who had taken up the Faurisson challenge, delivered, point by point, thirty-nine pieces of evidence that collectively have provided irrefutable proof of the existence of the extermination facilities at Auschwitz. In the late nineteen-seventies, Pressac, having recently left the French military to pursue a career in pharmacy, decided to write a work of fiction depicting the world that would have resulted from a German victory in the Second World War. In collecting background information for his novel, Pressac travelled to Auschwitz to inform himself in detail about Nazi extermination techniques and was surprised at the lack of physical and documentary evidence. After his initial visit, in 1979, Pressac, who admits to having had revisionist leanings, spent the next eight years studying and analyzing the minute technical details of the Auschwitz crematoriums. His findings—rendered with cool detachment—have laid to rest the vaguest suggestion of the credibility of revisionist claims. In reviewing blueprints, work orders, and inventories, including plans for electrical wiring and plumbing, Pressac exposed glaring inconsistencies between form and function. In the case of the gas chamber in Crematorium II, in Birkenau, Pressac revealed that there were more than twenty showerheads entered in the inventory list for the room, but the construction plans did not indicate the presence of any water pipes, nor was there any indication of showerheads on the blueprints. Pressac also discovered references in work orders to “gasdichte Türen,” or gas-tight doors; to a “Vergasungskeller,” or gassing chamber; to gas-detection devices; and to four chutes for introducing Zyklon B into the chamber. Just last month, Pressac bolstered his findings with a second book, “The Auschwitz Crematoria: The Machinery of Mass Slaughter,” which provides additional documentary evidence from recently opened K.G.B. archives in Moscow. (An English translation will be included in an anthology about Auschwitz to be published next spring by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with the University of Indiana Press.) “In my first book, I worked with twenty documents from the archives of the Auschwitz Museum,” Pressac told me recently by telephone. “The Moscow archives provided me with another sixty documents. This has allowed me to create a complete chronology of the extermination process at Auschwitz and a complete history of the instruments of destruction—when they were built, what their capacity was, when they broke down or malfunctioned.” Through his research, Pressac has provided incontrovertible evidence, based on objective technical detail, that the Germans developed and implemented an industrial-style process for the killing of human beings. “The Holocaust is no longer written in sand,” Pressac said. “Now it is written in concrete.” 
 
 In June, 1987, Ronald S. Lauder, a New York businessman, who had been the American Ambassador to Austria for several years during Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, paid a visit to Auschwitz. “I went there and was shocked not only by the condition of the place but by the fact that there was no place to pray,” he told me recently when I went to see him in his offices, in the G.M. Building in midtown Manhattan. Lauder, who is a son of Estée Lauder, runs the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, a philanthropic organization fuelled by the family fortune. “You could see the entire place deteriorating before your very eyes—the shoes, the suitcases, the wooden barracks,” he said. “I realized that in another few years the place would be gone forever. Something had to be done.” Lauder got in touch with the objects-conservation department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and requested the names of consultants who could provide practical advice about the preservation of Auschwitz. Tony Frantz, the head of the department, thought that the Met itself might be interested in taking on the project on a pro-bono basis. In December of 1988, he visited the site in the company of his colleague George Segan Wheeler, a specialist in stone preservation. After carefully reviewing both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II, Frantz and Wheeler determined that forty-two million dollars would be required for the long-term preservation of the site. Frantz’s department agreed to undertake the project. Lauder suspected that most of the likely sources of private funding had been wrung dry in the eighties by related projects: the Holocaust Museum in Washington, which had raised a hundred and sixty-eight million dollars; the Holocaust Center in Los Angeles; and Holocaust memorials in New York and Boston. Lauder decided to make an appeal to national governments instead. “The idea was to approach countries that had had citizens deported to Auschwitz,” Lauder explained. “We estimated there were about twenty eligible countries.” In the past two years, the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation’s International Auschwitz-Birkenau Preservation Committee has secured guarantees of nearly twenty million dollars, with seventeen million dollars coming from the Germans, one and a half million from the Belgians, and a half million from the Greeks. “We are still seeking commitments from a number of countries who say they are in principle willing to contribute but have not yet committed money,” he told me. The preservation committee has received written promises from France, Austria, and Russia, and is waiting to hear from Italy, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Ukraine, among other countries. Lauder also asked for “symbolic contributions” from the United States and Israel. “I thought it was important that Israel, which is built out of the ashes of Auschwitz, should contribute to the project,” he said. Israel has agreed to commit a hundred thousand dollars. A contribution from the United States is still pending. Lauder does not anticipate that he will achieve the forty-two-million-dollar goal, but he is confident that he will eventually raise at least thirty-five million dollars. According to Bohdan Rymaszewski, a consultant at the Ministry of Culture in Warsaw and a member of the International Auschwitz Council—an advisory body that was created in 1989 during the acrimonious dispute between Jews and Poles over the presence of Carmelite nuns in a building adjacent to the Stammlager—the Polish government will be thankful for anything that the preservation committee can raise. “People have been telling us for years that we should do something about preserving Auschwitz,” he told me recently. “But Ron Lauder went ahead and did something. The world owes him a great deal of thanks.” Lauder, in turn, gives Ernest Michel and Kalman Sultanik, the co-chairs of the preservation committee, much of the credit for the success of the initiative. “Ernie and Kalman have been involved with this project from the start, and have done much of the real legwork,” Lauder says. Michel and Sultanik, who had worked together organizing a gathering of ten thousand Holocaust survivors at Yad Vashem and the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 1981, each helped to advance the Auschwitz project in the crucial initial stage of its fund-raising process. Sultanik, a Polish Jew who fought in the underground during the Second World War and survived three Nazi concentration camps, lives in New York and holds high positions with the United Israel Appeal, the World Jewish Congress, and other Jewish groups. He secured a written statement from the Polish government authorizing the Lauder committee to raise money for the cause on Poland’s behalf. Then Michel, a German Jew who also lives in New York, approached the German government and after eighteen months of negotiation secured its seventeen-million-dollar commitment for the project. “After that, everything else fell into place,” Michel says. “There are a lot of countries that have good reason to want to see Auschwitz preserved.” Ernest Michel has his own reasons. 
 
 Ernest Wolfgang Michel, born in 1923 in Mannheim, is the son of Otto and Frieda Michel. His father’s family had roots in Germany that went back more than three hundred years. “My grandfather was an officer in the cavalry and fought in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. My father also served in the German military during the First World War. We were as German as we were Jewish,” Michel told me when I visited him this summer at the Manhattan office of the United Jewish Appeal, where he has worked for more than forty years. Michel retired four years ago, and has spent much of his time since writing his memoirs; they were published by Barricade Books last month under the title “Promises to Keep.” “My father was in the cigar-manufacturing business, but when Hitler came to power, in 1933, our lives changed totally,” Michel said. In the next few years, the Michel business was “Aryanized”—confiscated by the National Socialist government—and Michel’s father was forced to sell his wife’s jewelry and parts of his extensive stamp collection to sustain his family. Young Ernest also felt the consequences of National Socialist rule. “In 1937, I was kicked out of school,” Michel told me. “My two best friends joined the Hitler Youth. Suddenly, I wasn’t allowed to associate with them. Then the soccer team was made ‘judenrein’ ‘cleansed of Jews.’ I had always loved soccer, and suddenly I wasn’t allowed to play. In order to give me something to do, my father had me learn calligraphy.” Michel could not have foreseen that five years later this skill would save his life. Ernest Michel is a cheerful man with gray hair, a full face, and an easy, disarming manner. His office walls are covered with photographs of luminaries he has met in the course of his work for the U. J. A.: Elie Wiesel, Pinchas Zukerman, Barons Elie and Guy de Rothschild, Joseph Biden, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Barbara Bush, Jesse Jackson, Jack Benny, Harpo Marx. On the wall behind his desk is a yellow cloth Star of David in a small frame. Beside it, in a shadow box, is a leather belt that Michel wore in Auschwitz. And nearby is a large color photograph of Michel at Birkenau, taken in July, 1983, when he returned to Auschwitz for the first time. “Life in Germany became very, very difficult,” he recalled now. “Many of my friends had been leaving—going wherever they could, to Shanghai, Australia, Borneo, South America, the United States. My father knew that his children had no future in Germany. He did everything he could to get us out.” Early in 1939, Otto Michel managed to have his daughter sent to France with a transport of Jewish children. A few months later, he nearly succeeded in having his son sent to America when a family in Wilmington, Delaware, agreed to take Ernest into their care. But United States consular officials in Stuttgart, explaining that quotas for German Jews had been filled, told him his number would come up in 1942. “After the war, I looked into this matter and learned that they had lied—that there were tens of thousands of quotas that were never filled,” Michel said. “There were about a hundred and twenty thousand visa possibilities, and less than twenty thousand were filled. I could have left for America within a month.” Instead, he was arrested. On September 3, 1939, two days after Germany invaded Poland, two Gestapo men came to the door and informed Ernest Michel that he was to report to the main train station in Mannheim the following morning at six o’clock. He was told to bring work clothes and one suitcase. “It was the last evening I spent with my parents,” Michel says. “My mother made me my favorite meal—Dampfnudeln. She also gave me a chocolate bar—I don’t know where she got it. The next morning, they walked me to the train station. That was the last time I ever saw them.” Michel spent the next four years in a series of labor camps in Germany, harvesting crops and chopping wood outside Berlin and cleaning the sewers in the town of Paderborn, a hundred miles from Hannover. “We worked hard, we had little food, and there were guards, but nobody was killed,” Michel said. One day in February, 1943, the inmates learned that the Paderborn camp was to be closed the following day, and that its entire inmate population, both men and women, would be moved to camps in the East. “That night, the Gestapo took us on foot from the camp to the train station. There they put us on cattle cars. After five days and five nights, we learned we were arriving in a place called Auschwitz. Somebody had looked through the air vent and seen a sign saying ‘Oświęcim.’ Someone else said he had heard the name Auschwitz before, but no one knew what it meant.” Michel said that the train arrived in Auschwitz during the night of March 3rd, and that the instant the cattle-car door was opened he knew that things were bad. “There was total bedlam. Klieg lights were on. Trains were everywhere. It was madness. Thousands of people everywhere. There were dogs and the S.S. All this yelling and screaming and beating people with whips. We knew this was bad. We knew this was not a labor camp.” Michel paused and stared at me to see if I could fathom the scene. “Then ‘Raus! Raus!’ ‘Get out! Get out! Leave everything behind.’ ” His voice fell into a subdued, chantlike cadence. “And then more screaming and yelling, and fathers and children and mothers, and the whips. Until you were finally brought along and they were separating men and women. Then we heard numbers being called. We saw two elegant S.S. men with the cap and long leather coat, one of whom, we were later told, was Mengele. ‘Wie alt?’ Everyone over forty was sent to one side. If you were eighteen or nineteen, on the other side. We didn’t know it at the time, but all the women and the men over forty were taken away to the gas chambers.” Michel and most of the other men from Paderborn were loaded into trucks and driven five miles to the slave-labor camp at Monowitz, which was officially known as Auschwitz III and provided manpower for the sprawling I.G. Farben rubber factory. There they were assembled in an open square before the wooden barracks, in a blaze of klieg lights. As S.S. officers stood watching in the background, older inmates greeted them, saying, “Welcome to Auschwitz-Monowitz! You are the lucky ones.” “We didn’t understand what that meant, ‘the lucky ones,’ ” Michel said. “Then someone asked them why we were lucky, and they replied, ‘Die Anderen sind schon rauf im Kamin’—‘The others are already up the chimney.’ There had been this horrible smell in the air. Then we knew what it meant.” The men were ordered to remove all their clothing and leave everything on the ground except their belts and shoes. They were then sprayed with a disinfectant, tattooed, shaved, and, finally, issued striped prison uniforms. “They shaved every hair off our bodies. We were like newborn babies,” Michel commented, then added, on a note of awe, “When I look back on all this, I sometimes still can’t believe it actually happened to me.” Michel worked for the first few months on a factory-construction site. “The Germans calculated everything very scientifically,” he said. “They figured that a prisoner would last about six months before he was used up. Then he was called a Muselmann—a Muslim, which was camp slang for someone who didn’t have long to live. A Muselmann was sent up the chimney. We all knew that this would happen—that it was just a matter of time.” When Michel had been working in the camp for about four months, he was struck on the head by an S.S. officer. He continued to work, but after a few days the wound became infected. “I did not want to go to the Krankenbau, the hospital barracks. If you stayed there, you were subject to selections every day. Every day, the S.S. would come through and decide who would be sent to the gas chambers. But finally I got so sick I had to go. I had a temperature. I knew I was beginning to be a Muselmann. I finally decided to go to the Krankenbau and have the wound opened up and the pus taken out.” While Michel was in the Krankenbau waiting to be seen, a prisoner who was on the medical staff entered the waiting area and asked if anyone in the room had good handwriting. No one responded. Michel hesitated to answer, suspicious that it might be some sort of ploy, but just as the man was about to leave the room he raised his hand and said he knew calligraphy. “I thought maybe I could earn an extra piece of bread,” he told me. Michel was led into an adjoining room, given a pen and paper, and told to write a name, a number, and the word “Körperschwäche,” which means “exhaustion.” Then he was instructed to write the word “Herzanschlag,” which means “heart attack.” The other prisoner looked at the writing samples and said, ‘You’ll do,” and then gave Michel a long list of names and instructed him to write “Körperschwäche” next to each name. “I spent the next two hours writing ‘Körperschwäche’ beside each name,” Michel said, and he repeated “Körperschwäche, Körperschwäche, Körperschwäche.” The names on the lists were the dead of Auschwitz. Michel was treated for his head wound, and for the next few weeks he remained in the Krankenbau, writing endless lists of names and the prescribed words. He recalls keeping two separate tallies—one for prisoners who were brought to the camp as slave labor and one for those who were sent to the gas chambers. “The Germans were meticulous record keepers,” he said. At first, Michel was registered in the Krankenbau as a patient, but he was soon allowed to join the staff as an orderly, and was assigned to the barracks for infectious diseases. His primary duty was to transport dead or dying inmates to a special storage room attached to the barracks, then to the trucks that delivered them to the crematoriums. “I carried thousands of bodies during that year and a half,” Michel recalled. “Most of them hardly weighed anything at all, maybe seventy or eighty pounds, just skin and bones. Some were children—ten, twelve years old. At first, you are horrified, but then it becomes too much for the human mind to absorb. After a while, you become totally oblivious. I carried more bodies in these arms than you will ever know or see.” Michel held out his arms. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and I could see that his arms were full and muscular. “Thousands of bodies. Every day, every single day.” He fell silent, then added bitterly, “And today there are people who say that this never happened, that the gas chambers are a myth. Where did they all go? You tell me, where did all these people go?” In January of 1945, with the Soviet Army approaching, the Germans began to clear the camp of inmates, forcing them on death marches to the west and then packing them into cattle cars and transporting them to camps in Germany. Michel was sent first to Buchenwald, then to a subsidiary camp called Berga. In early April, Berga was cleared, in turn, and the inmates were sent on a death march toward Dachau. Michel and two other inmates broke from the column and escaped into the woods. They eventually reached a small village, and found work on farms. When the war ended, Michel made his way back to Mannheim, and discovered that his family home had been destroyed in the bombing raids. He eventually learned that his sister, Lotte, had been able to escape from France to Palestine, but his mother and father had not been so lucky. In August of 1942, Michel’s parents had been dispatched to Auschwitz via Drancy. “They arrived in Auschwitz on separate transports, two days apart. I don’t know why they were separated like that. They were gassed immediately on their arrival. There are no tombs. There are no graves. There is nothing.” Michel’s voice grows bitter. “They died a horrible death in Auschwitz without knowing that their children would survive and would be able to have new families.” He sighed heavily. “That is the greatest regret of my life.” In 1945 and 1946, Michel covered the Nuremberg trials as a correspondent for the German news agency DANA, and during that time he had a face-to-face encounter with Hermann Göring in his prison cell. Eventually, he emigrated to the United States, and soon thereafter he became involved with the United Jewish Appeal. Michel told me he had never had any intention of returning to Auschwitz. “In the spring of 1983, I received a phone call from Robert Loup, who was then national chairman of the United Jewish Appeal. I have known Robert for a long, long time. So Robert says to me, ‘Ernie, this is not an easy call for me to make, and I hesitated for a long time. I’m planning a national chairmen’s mission to Auschwitz and Israel in July. I was wondering if you would be willing to lead the group. There is no one who can tell us better than you can what happened, when it happened, how it happened. If you don’t want to go, I will understand it. But, if you could make it, it would really mean something to us.’ I didn’t want to go. My wife told me I was crazy to even think about it. On my birthday, my sixtieth birthday, instead of being at home with my friends I would go to Auschwitz. But then I thought it would make a statement to me that, after all that had happened, I had to go back there—that I could show that I was still alive, that I had survived.” Michel leaned back in his chair and pointed to the large color photograph behind his desk. “That’s me sitting on the tracks at Birkenau on July 1, 1983, the day of my sixtieth birthday,” he said. In the photograph, he is sitting on one of the rails, staring at the earth, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands together. The tracks are overgrown with weeds, at some points completely obscured by them. The surrounding landscape—distant barbed-wire fences, a watchtower, expansive empty fields—are bleached in the afternoon heat. “This is where we arrived, on these tracks, right there on these tracks, in March, 1943.” There was astonishment in Michel’s voice, as if he were telling a story he himself had trouble believing. “I had not known what to expect, but I was amazed at how much the camp had deteriorated. The barracks that we lived in were totally disintegrating. The exhibits, the hair, the combs, the suitcases, the artificial legs were all in just total disrepair. That visit convinced me that something had to be done, because that place was just falling apart. That was when I knew that something had to be done to save Auschwitz.” 
 
 Last August, the Auschwitz Museum invited a group of thirty-two experts—conservators, architects, historians, religious leaders, and government representatives from the United States, Western Europe, and Israel—to consult with museum officials on preservation work at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Beyond the technical issues of preservation, much discussion at the conference was devoted to the over-all vision of the camp’s future. Proposals ranged from “modest intervention” to reconstruction work “on an epic scale.” Gertrud Koch, a German film historian who collaborated with Claude Lanzmann on the documentary “Shoah,” felt that the camp should be left to fall into ruins, an approach endorsed by James Young, a professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts and the author of “The Texture of Memory,” an authoritative study of concentration-camp memorials, who has argued for allowing the site to age “gracefully.” Yaffa Eliach, who designed several important exhibits for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, recommended placing video monitors with interviews of former inmates in the brick barracks at the Stammlager. Jean-Claude Pressac urged that Crematorium III be reconstructed, and offered his services to that end. “I want people to experience exactly what it meant to enter a gas chamber at Auschwitz,” Pressac said. “I want them to walk down the stairs into the chamber, to stand before the ovens and see that this was insane and criminal. I want it to be a slap in the face. You can’t create memory, but you can create an experience that is as powerful as memory. According to Krystyna Oleksy, the deputy director of the Auschwitz Museum, one of the most perplexing questions currently confronting the museum staff is not one of preservation or reconstruction. “Recently, a number of Holocaust survivors have contacted us and asked that their remains be buried at Birkenau,” Oleksy told me. “Many of these people lost their entire families here—mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings. We understand their desire to have their remains interred here. Birkenau is a cemetery, but not a cemetery where you can conduct funerals.” She said there had been no final decision on the burial issue, but noted that there were plans for a place of mourning for Jewish visitors. Before many of these questions can be answered, most experts agree, a conclusion must be reached on the purpose of the renovated site. “The museum staff must ultimately decide what the place is supposed to be,” said Detlef Hoffmann, a German professor of art history, who was one of the organizers of the conference. “Is it a memorial? A museum? A cemetery? A place to educate? Or is it all of these?” But, even as the experts gathered at Auschwitz to ponder these issues, the museum was continuing with renovation work both in the Stammlager and in Birkenau. “Some participants at the conference found it ironic that while we were sitting there discussing what should be done to preserve the site, the museum has gone ahead with many renovation projects, some of which may irreparably damage the integrity of the site,” Hoffmann told me. Krystyna Oleksy said that she appreciated the experts’ concerns, but she and her colleagues cannot accommodate all opinions, nor do they always have time to ponder the finer distinctions between restoration, renovation, and reconstruction. “There are countless decisions that have to be made every day,” she said. ‘You cannot call a meeting of intellectuals every time something has to be done. We simply don’t have the time.” A case in point, she noted, is the nineteen stone plaques in front of the monument at Birkenau, which, until the spring of 1990, commemorated, in nineteen languages, the “four million people” who “suffered and died here at the hands of the Nazi murderers.” In May, 1990, Franciszek Piper, the museum’s senior historian, caused an international sensation when he released the results of a ten-year study that concluded that the number of victims at Auschwitz was just over a million—a dramatic reduction from the previously accepted figure of four million. The study also said that the percentage of Jewish victims was higher than it had been thought to be—nearly ninety per cent, as opposed to the original estimate of twenty-five per cent. The museum administration responded, almost overnight, by removing, with hammer and chisel, the inscriptions on the nineteen stone plaques, and charging the International Auschwitz Council with the task of drafting a new text incorporating Piper’s revised calculations. The new inscription also had to reflect the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Auschwitz victims were Jewish. After two years of cautious deliberation, the council reached consensus on a new text. On the monument, there will be a statement paying tribute to the “Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, and others who suffered and perished in the camp and its gas chambers.” The statement will be accompanied by a quotation from the Book of Job: “O Earth, cover not up my blood / And let my cry never cease,” and by the words “Let this place remain for eternity as a cry of despair and a warning to humanity.” The nineteen stone plaques are to bear the following inscription: “About one and a half million men, women, children, and infants, mainly Jews from different countries of Europe, were murdered here. The world was silent. Auschwitz-Birkenau 1940-1945.” Today, more than three years after the original inscriptions were removed, the stone tablets remain blank. According to Oleksy, now that the text and the translations have been approved, metal plaques bearing the inscriptions are being designed, and they should be affixed to the tablets at some point next year. The delay is understandable. “Auschwitz is more than just a memorial site,” Detlef Hoffmann told me. “It is a symbol of the Holocaust, and one must be very careful. Whatever is done here carries great symbolic importance.” And, in some cases, potentially grave historical implications. Last year, a young revisionist agitator from California, David Cole, who makes much of the fact that he is Jewish, visited Auschwitz to undertake his own site assessment. Amid the barbed-wire fences and watchtowers of the Stammlager, Cole discovered, he says, a camp theatre, where the inmates used to put on productions; a swimming pool with a diving board and starting blocks for races; and delousing chambers, for maintaining camp hygiene. “These were the real gas chambers,” Cole reported in a videotaped excursion through the camp, “except their victims were clothing and mattresses, and their purpose was to preserve the health of the inmates.” David Cole also toured a “fake” gas Chamber—a reconstruction of the room where Rudolf Höss, by his own account, witnessed the first mass gassing of camp inmates. Cole noted, accurately, that the crematorium chimney is a freestanding structure, in no way connected to the ovens. One entrance to the gas chamber does not have a door, or even any evidence of hinges. Inside the chamber, a tight rectangular space with a low ceiling, there are marks where walls have obviously been removed. To one side, there are pipes where a bathroom once stood. In the center of the room is a manhole with an iron cover. Museum officials readily admit that the crematorium at the Stammlager is indeed a “reconstruction,” but they point out that the Germans dismantled it in the autumn of 1943 and converted it into an S.S. air-raid shelter. After the war, the Poles tried to restore the crematorium and the gas chamber to their earlier appearance. Cole, along with other revisionists, claims that the reconstruction work has “discredited” the Stammlager crematorium and gas chamber as evidence, noting, in particular, that any proof of the existence of four original Zyklon B induction chutes has been destroyed. “The point is the ‘gas chamber’ is no longer valid proof in its present state,” Cole argues in his videotape. “The official view holds that the Soviets and Poles created a ‘gas chamber’ in an air-raid shelter that had been a ‘gas chamber.’ The revisionist view holds that the Soviets and Poles created a ‘gas chamber’ in an air-raid shelter that had been an air-raid shelter.” Jerzy Wróblewski, who is the director of the Auschwitz Museum and therefore is ultimately accountable for all preservation work at the Stammlager and Birkenau, is painfully aware of the questions about authenticity, but he says that he has neither the time nor the resources to deal with all the issues that the museum confronts both in its day-to-day operation and in its long-term plans. “Today, the whole world is watching what we do in here,” he says. “But for the last forty years nobody cared about Auschwitz. We had hardly any money to maintain the site. If we hadn’t done what we did, there would be nothing left today.” Wróblewski is a handsome man in his sixties, with Slavic features, fine hair, fair skin, and light-blue eyes. The day after the conference, I visited him in his office, a former barrack in the Stammlager that stands beside the crematorium. The square brick chimney looms ominously outside his office window. Wróblewski pulled out a photograph album from the early sixties containing pictures of vast tracts of buildings in complete collapse, guard towers reduced to tumbled piles of wood, and broken wire fences. “At the conference, there was a lot of criticism about our restoration of the wooden barracks,” he told me. “Some of the experts object to the fact that we have built brick foundations for the buildings. The original structures sat right on the ground.” Wróblewski said that if he had consented to leave them like that—as some conservators thought he should—the wood would have rotted in five years. He also mentioned that in 1991 a windstorm levelled one of the more dilapidated barracks at Birkenau. Complicating Wróblewski’s task is the fact that the death camp at Auschwitz was built on a provisional basis. “Unlike most monuments in the world, Auschwitz was never intended to last,” Bohdan Rymaszewski, of the Warsaw Culture Ministry, says. “The Germans built the camp with the intention of exterminating an entire race and then destroying all the evidence of this deed. Everything was poorly made—the barracks, the crematoriums, the paper used for documents. It is difficult to preserve something that was made to vanish.” Wróblewski told me that at the moment the exhibit of human hair in Block IV was one of the most difficult and perplexing problems facing the museum. “It is obviously an extremely delicate matter,” he said. “We don’t know whether we are doing the right thing by showing the hair in a public display, but for the present it will remain where it is.” After a pause, he added, “I am telling you this as the director of the Auschwitz State Museum. Now I will give you an answer as Wróblewski the individual. I personally feel the hair should be removed and placed in controlled storage. We could take a panoramic picture of the hair, as they did at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. But before we do anything, we will need to gather the opinions of many people—philosophers, intellectuals, humanists, religious leaders—to determine what would be the best thing to do. Any decision we make on the hair will go through a long process of deliberation before we arrive at a decision.” In any case, Wróblewski has rejected any suggestion that the hair be buried. “The era of the concentration camps is history. Fifty years from now, it will seem like Verdun or Waterloo. Certainly, we will have photographs and eyewitness testimonies, but the hair will remain the ultimate proof of what happened here.” ||||| Play Facebook 
 
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 MAINZ, Germany — Catching the last surviving Nazi war criminals isn't easy. In the past, officials have had to dig through piles of yellowing and dusty documents, and even then the suspects often claim they never saw the atrocities being carried out around them. 
 
 But now investigators, prosecutors and judges are able to rely on a new technological tool — one that allows them to essentially travel back in time to see for themselves. 
 
 German experts have constructed a detailed digital model of Hitler's Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where more than 1.1 million people were murdered during World War II. 
 
 A 3-D model of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp which can be toured with a virtual-reality headset. Ralf Breker's Team / Bavarian State Criminal Investigation Office 
 
 Using virtual-reality googles, investigators can now walk around the camp in the shoes of former SS soldiers, analyzing the terrain through the eyes of the suspect. 
 
 "The model can be used in trials to counter the objection of suspects who claim that they did not witness executions or marches to gas chambers from their vantage point," said Jens Rommel, head of Germany’s federal office for the investigation of Nazi war crimes. 
 
 Auschwitz cries out with the pain of immense suffering and pleads for a future of respect, peace and encounter among peoples. — Pope Francis (@Pontifex) January 27, 2015 
 
 The digital camp has been rendered in harrowing detail by experts from Bavaria’s State Criminal Office (LKA). It allows investigators wearing the VR goggles to even climb the watchtowers and observe how prisoners would have been moved around the 15-mile camp. 
 
 "Because the former crematoriums and other installations had been completely destroyed, we had to remodel them with the help of old construction plans," according to 43-year-old Ralf Breker, a forensics software developer at the LKA who helped build the model. 
 
 He calls it "a tool with extraordinary added value." 
 
 Another view of the Auschwitz-Birkenau simulation. Ralf Breker's Team / Bavarian State Criminal Investigation Office 
 
 Breker and his team first visited the camp in 2013 and have used a variety of sources to reconstruct what is perhaps the most infamous site of the Nazi extermination program. The same year, forensics experts scanned the site with lasers, capturing parts of the fence, watchtowers and barracks. 
 
 His team combined the 3-D model with aerial photographs for greater accuracy, and the camp can be viewed in both winter and summer weather conditions. 
 
 In the future, Breker hopes to advance the technology so that two or more people can wear the virtual-reality googles and see each other inside the camp. 
 
 The computer simulation is designed to help prosecute the last remaining officials complicit in the Nazi's Final Solution — the murder of 6 million Jews and other persecuted groups. 
 
 Rommel, the head Nazi hunter, leads a team of six judges and prosecutors responsible for finding these suspects and bringing them to court. His team applauds the technology, which is used to scrutinize the suspects' claims of innocence once in court. 
 
 In the past four years, Rommel's team has found 30 Auschwitz suspects and handed their cases over to the courts. They have also submitted the details of three cases from the Majdanek death camp and eight from the concentration camp at Stutthof. 
 
 He said they have at least a dozen other cases currently in the pipeline that they soon hope to bring to prosecution. 
 
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 For Breker, who often encounters chilling murder scenes during his day job, building the Auschwitz-Birkenau model was "one of the most difficult tasks" he has experienced. 
 
 "The legacy [of the camp] and my encounter with the site of mass killings was very encumbering," he said.
– As World War II waned, Nazis were ordered to destroy evidence of the Final Solution at Auschwitz so that only a portion of the original camp remains today. That makes corroborating testimony of suspected war criminals difficult—but not impossible, thanks to virtual reality. Using original construction plans, period photographs, and a laser scan of the site, Bavaria's State Criminal Office has recreated the 15-mile camp in virtual reality so investigators can go "back in time" and see how it would have looked in the 1940s, reports NBC News. Not only are they able to walk around the camp and see how individuals moved around fences and barracks in both winter and summer, but they can even climb watchtowers to recreate, for example, the viewpoint of a guard. Even trees, long since felled, have been replaced in the VR model to determine whether they blocked crimes from view. "The model can be used in trials to counter the objection of suspects who claim that they did not witness executions or marches to gas chambers from their vantage point," says a German official in charge of investigating Nazi war crimes. "To my knowledge, there is no more exact model of Auschwitz," adds a digital imaging expert who helped create the VR version, per the Guardian. "It is much, much more precise than Google Earth … When I zoom in, I can see the smallest detail." Already used in the cases of Johann Breyer and Reinhold Hanning, the model could help bring dozens of suspects to court, prosecutors say. (An Auschwitz prisoner's will was just found.)