===================BIRKENAU.JPG============================
This photo is taken from the german edition of 'scientific
american', named 'Spektrum der Wissenschaft'. It was
published in the August 1996 issue of the magazine.
It shows a photo of the concentration camp Auschwitz-
Birkenau, taken from an airplane on January, 14th, 1945.
The description of the photo is as follows (translation
of the originally german text by sender):
                       ****
The bombing missions of the allies agains the Buna and
the fuel factories of the IG-Farben 1944/45 were 
accompanied with missions for air reconnaissance purposes;
sometimes there were photos taken of the nearby concen-
tration camp Auschwitz Birkenau as well. These photos
however, weren't evaluated until 1978, after The author and
Robert G.Poirier recovered them from an archive of the US
Ministry of Defense. The picture, taken on January, 14th,
1945, when russian troops were approaching, shows the snow
the hungarian author Elie Wiesel, who was an inmate of the
camp at that time, is mentioning in his novel "The night".
It's visible, that a part of the gas chambers was already 
destroyed and that the evacuation of the camp had started.
The snow on the roofs of the women's shacks reveals, that
they were empty (Most of the women, among them the 15 years
old Anne Frank, whose diaries became famous after the war,
had been deported to the concentration camp Buchenwald or
to other camps).
The largest part of the men's section and the SS shacks were
still occupied, which is clearly visible by the roofs being
free of snow. Because every shak in the men's section housed
about 1000 prisoners, there were still 80.000 men there
(usually, the camp had 250.000 inmates). When the russian
troops reached the camp on january, the 27th, they found
not more than 8.000 sick or exhausted prisoners there.
                       ****
The title of the article was "The Start of Modern 
Reconnaissance". The author is Dino A. Brugioni, who joined the
CIA in 1949 and became one of the founders of the 'National
Photographic Interprtation Center', which does the evaluation
of photos taken for reconnaissance purposes for all intelligence
services within the USA.
Reference:
The Holocaust Revisited. A Retrospevtive Analysis of the Auschwitz-
Birkenau Extermination Complex. Dino Brugioni and Robert. G.
Poirer. Central Intelligence Agency (ST-79-10001), 1979.

This document was sent to NIZKOR by

Stefan Schneider, 08/16/1996. 

Any suggestions concerning the quality of the scan or the resolution 
of the jpg picture should be directed to
                 s.schneider@rz.uni-sb.de
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