philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

A VR Model of Auschwitz Helps Catch Nazis

Contributing to the morass was Hanning’s claim that he never personally witnessed victims being gassed to death. Prosecutors needed evidence to link Hanning to the charges in his indictment: monitoring arriving prisoners as they were sorted into groups headed directly into labor or the gas chambers, a process that came to be known as “selection.” Essentially, the court needed to travel back in time and see what Hanning saw, from the perpetrator’s vantage point.

That’s how virtual reality wound up in the courtroom, for the first time, in what might be the last World War II Nazi trial. David Freid’s short documentary Nazi VR details how a team of German forensic VR engineers recreated a 3-D model of Auschwitz-Birkenau through millions of laser scans, historical blueprints of the site, aerial photographs, and witness testimonies. Wearing the VR goggles, investigators and judges can climb the watchtowers and observe how prisoners would have been moved around the 15-mile camp, where more than 1.1 million people were murdered during the war.

“Virtual reality is a great tool to objectively establish what was visible to the defendant,” says David Scheffer, who served as Germany’s war-crimes ambassador from 1997 to 2001, in the film. “So, as Mr. Hanning claimed, ‘I was in such a position that I could not have seen what was occurring elsewhere in the camp,’ the VR will contradict that claim.”

See the full story here: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/586567/nazi-vr/