This malevolent room is where the prototype for mass murder was tested. Formerly a room where the condemned to death by Gestapo courts were shot, it was transformed into a gas chamber in September 1941. It could hold 900 people at a time. The bodies were burned in an adjoining room.
Even today, in the gloom and dampness, there is a sense of the terrible history of this place. One can stand under the square perforations cut into the flat roof through which the SS dropped the gas crystals. One crosses a drain in the floor through which the excreta and the bodily fluids were washed.
Next door three ovens were installed. A kind of iron turntable with tracks was installed in the floor, and the bodies could be rolled, turned and shoved into the ovens with efficiency.
![[photo]](/photos/auschwitz1_cremo1_interior+large.jpg)