Digital replica will allow film-makers to shoot scenes inside Auschwitz

The Auschwitz Memorial has launched a "historically accurate" digital replica of the former concentration camp for film-makers to set their pictures in, breaking a long-held taboo about shooting features at the site where an estimated 1.1 million people were murdered by the Nazis.

- Philip Oltermann

At the Cannes film festival on Thursday the organisers of the Picture from Auschwitz project said they had harnessed "cutting-edge 3D scanning technologies" to build a digital model of the concentration camp that matched the site in its current state "down to every single brick".

A second phase of the €1.5m (£1.3m) project will involve 3D scanning the adjacent Birkenau site, which is roughly 30 times larger than Auschwitz, as well as building historically accurate digital replicas of the crematoriums and gas chambers that were destroyed by the Nazis in late 1944.

"We are responding to a growing need," said Wojciech Soczewica, the director general of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation. "More and more people are coming to visit Auschwitz because they are interested in history, and it's our responsibility to provide the film industry with resources that are credible."

Soczewica said the licensing model for Picture from Auschwitz had not yet been finalised but that any fees would go directly to the memorial and thus support its mission to commemorate the victims.