{"id":24072,"date":"2019-04-07T19:05:19","date_gmt":"2019-04-08T03:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philiplelyveld.com\/?p=24072"},"modified":"2019-04-07T19:05:19","modified_gmt":"2019-04-08T03:05:19","slug":"a-vr-model-of-auschwitz-helps-catch-nazis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/philiplelyveld.com\/?p=24072","title":{"rendered":"A VR Model of Auschwitz Helps Catch Nazis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GiJuPB7S2I4\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe>Contributing to the morass was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2016\/02\/11\/466376936\/elderly-former-nazi-death-camps-guard-to-go-on-trial-in-germany\">Hanning\u2019s claim<\/a> 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 \u201cselection.\u201d Essentially, the court needed to travel back in time and see what Hanning saw, from the perpetrator\u2019s vantage point.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s 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\u2019s short documentary <em>Nazi VR<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cVirtual reality is a great tool to objectively establish what was visible to the defendant,\u201d says David Scheffer, who served as Germany\u2019s war-crimes ambassador from 1997 to 2001, in the film. \u201cSo, as Mr. Hanning claimed, \u2018I was in such a position that I could not have seen what was occurring elsewhere in the camp,\u2019 the VR will contradict that claim.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>See the full story <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/video\/index\/586567\/nazi-vr\/\">here:\u00a0https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/video\/index\/586567\/nazi-vr\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Contributing to the morass was Hanning\u2019s 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 \u201cselection.\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-3d-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/philiplelyveld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/philiplelyveld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/philiplelyveld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/philiplelyveld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/philiplelyveld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24072"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/philiplelyveld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24073,"href":"http:\/\/philiplelyveld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24072\/revisions\/24073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/philiplelyveld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/philiplelyveld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/philiplelyveld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}