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Former Auschwitz commandant house to host anti-Semitism research centre

AFP
AFP - news@thelocal.de
Former Auschwitz commandant house to host anti-Semitism research centre
The words "Arbeit macht frei" (Work sets you free) on the gate to the former Auschwitz I concentration camp. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Kay Nietfeld

A house once inhabited by a Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz extermination camp will be turned into a research centre fighting against anti-Semitism and extremism, a US non-profit said on Wednesday.

The former house of Rudolf Hoess, the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz camp, will open to the public on January 27, the 80th anniversary of the camp's liberation by the Red Army.

Since World War II, the house has belonged to a private owner, according to the media.

The "CEP (Counter Extremism Project) will transform the former Commandant's House into the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism, and Radicalisation (ARCHER)," the non-profit said in a press release.

"The ordinary house of the greatest mass murderer will now be converted into the extraordinary symbol" of the fight against extremism and anti-Semitism, CEP's Mark Wallace said.

Directly adjacent to the camp that has become a symbol of the Holocaust, the house with a large garden where Hoess and his family lived was recently featured in Jonathan Glazer's Oscar-winning film "The Zone of Interest".

The centre will be designed and developed in collaboration with the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind, best known for his work on the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

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Italian conductor Francesco Lotoro, who has been collecting music written in various death camps for more than 30 years, has been tasked with the sound design for the future centre.

"I can think of no more fitting destination for the works I have collected than to be recorded and always playing in rooms that once housed the ultimate evil," Lotoro was quoted as saying in the press release.

More than one million people died at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp built by Nazi Germany when it occupied Poland in World War II - most of them Jews, but also non-Jewish Poles, Roma and Soviet soldiers.

READ ALSO: How the world discovered Nazi death camps

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