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Virtual reality rebuilds of the concentration camp at Auschwitz are set to be used in the war trials of suspected guards.
Officials at the Bavarian State criminal office in Germany, who are responsible for building cases against alleged guards, have created 3D digital models to aid prosecutions, using them to establish how much defendants could see and were aware of from watch towers and other positions.
Now a version is being made for use in virtual reality, opening up the models to be viewed from almost any angle.
The use of such models has come about as a way of testing the frequent defence by alleged guards, who investigators say often admit being at the camp but claim they were unaware of its true nature, or couldn’t see what was happening. The makers of the virtual reality version say they can now challenge that defence.
In the recent trial of former guard Reinhold Hanning, who was sentenced to five years in prison for being an accessory to at least 170,000 murders, the judge made reference to the use of the 3D digital model in the trial as a key point in the case, confirming Hanning would have been able see sufficiently from his watch tower to understand some of what happened at the camp.
Digital image expert Ralf Breker is the man building the project, and told the BBC that he believes the access VR can give to crime scenes will become an important tool in the future.
“I think that within five to 10 years, virtual reality will become a standard tool for police, not just in Germany but all over the world because it’s a way to make scenes of crime accessible even years later,” he said.
The Auschwitz model has been built using on-site scans combined with blueprints from the camp’s old archives, something Breker said was “lucky” as many were destroyed by the SS along with many of the camp’s files towards the end of the Second World War.
“We spent five days in Auschwitz taking laser scans of the buildings and the whole project to complete took about six months.”
The VR version of the model is yet to be used in court, but Germany’s Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes is continuing to attempt to identify those guilty of committing crimes at the various camps, meaning it could be utilised in the future.
