Your view is inside the rail entrance to Birkenau, known as the Birkenau Death Gate. Scrolling to the left, you are confronted with the unloading ramp.
The State Museum Of Auschwitz-Birkenau & Remember.Org Present
- Virtual Tour Home
- Auschwitz I – Start
- Virtual Tour of Birkenau – Start
- Birkenau Entrance – Death Gate
- The Unloading Ramp
- Men and Women’s Barracks
- Birkenau Latrines
- The Penal Company – BIb
- Model of Krematorium II
- Krematorium II
- The Rear of Birkenau: The Final Moments
- The Little Wood
- The Ash Pond
- Krematorium V
- Sauna and Kanada
- Sauna Interiors (3)
- Little White House
- Birkenau Woods Incineration Area
- The Judenrampe – Old Ramp
- Russian POWs Graveyard
- Museum at Auschwitz
- Credits
Birkenau Death Gate
The Birkenau Death Gate Entrance to the Camp
This view is from inside the rail entrance to Birkenau.
The building it passes through is the main SS guardhouse.
Notice the windows in the tower.
Remember the scene in the film “Schindler’s List”, where the women are brought into Auschwitz at night with a large spotlight shining alongside the train.
Moving again to the left is Quarantine in the men’s camp, BIIa.
See painting depicting the ramp in the time of the Nazis
The rail track is the major vein leading to the heart of the Nazi massive murder system.
Trains from all over Europe flow to it; north, south, east, and west. There are other extermination centers, to be sure, but this is by far the largest in area and scope.
Then, further on, where victims just off transports walk to the gas.
As you scroll a bit further, you see the entire length of the ramp, almost 3/4k.
Scrolling near the end of the video you see the road where prisoners march to and from work, and the brick barracks of BIa, the first half of the women’s camp.
Inside the Birkenau Death Gate and Rail Entrance (Video 2)
Your view is inside the rail entrance to Birkenau, known as the Death Gate.
Scrolling to the left, you confront the unloading ramp.
Here trains from all over Nazi occupied Europe travel with their human contents to be, in large part, murdered in the gas chambers of this, the biggest killing center in the Nazi system.
Birkenau is known not only as a concentration and labor camp, but a death camp as well – “Vernichtungslager”.
It opened some time in early 1942.
The ramp is used to unload trains only after May 1944.
May and June ’44 are the largest production totals for this death factory, murdering approximately 10,000 people a day; mostly Jews from Hungary, mainly from the Budapest Ghetto.
And on one day, a “record” 20,000 people are sent to the gas chambers.
A view from outside the gate may be seen at:
All photos and videos are Copyright Alan Jacobs and Remember.org.