Auschwitz, Poland – Nazi Death Camp Ceramic Rack from Crematorium Unearthed

Auschwitz, Poland – A ceramic rack from a crematorium at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp has been found during maintenance work at the site.

“The ceramic rack was buried in the ground among the ruins of one of the former crematoria,” Bartosz Bartyzel, spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum at Oswiecim, southern Poland, said.

“It is an object directly linked to the horror of the Holocaust,” he said, adding that bodies would have been placed on the rack before being incinerated.

The ceramic rack showed signs of heavy use and of having been exposed to extremely high temperatures, as well as damage from when retreating Nazi forces attempted to destroy the crematoria in January 1945 before the arrival of the Soviet Red Army.

The museum previously had one such crematorium rack.

Between 1940 and 1945 Nazi Germany killed some 1.1 million people at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in what was then Nazi-occupied Poland.

The vast majority of the victims were Jews, targeted by Nazi Germany’s campaign of genocide against all of Europe’s Jews.

Polish anti-Nazi partisans, Gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war were among the camp’s other victims.