At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum announced the launch of a new digital replica of the concentration camp for filmmakers. Titled Picture from Auschwitz, the virtual film location is designed to facilitate a range of productions set on the grounds, where preservation regulations currently restrict filming to documentaries.
Established in the town of Oświęcim in German-occupied Poland, Auschwitz consisted of three main camps where over 1.1 million European Jews were murdered: the Auschwitz I concentration camp, the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) killing centre and the Auschwitz III (Monowitz) labour camp.
With this new technology, the museum hopes to support the “true story” of the camp, “without compromising the Memorial’s historical integrity”. It intends to do so not only by digitally preserving the Holocaust site, which receives over two million visitors annually, but by submitting the scripts for all new feature film projects involving the replica to a team of historians for review.
