Nuremberg Click - Short Edition

It's estimated that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis

in the Holocaust with millions of others, many in concentration camps.

To try and bring justice to the innocent civilians who died,

on November the 20th, 1945, the Nuremberg War Trials began.

71 years later, the prosecution of Nazi war criminals

And now, virtual reality is playing a part in the process.

Marc Cieslak travelled to Germany and Poland

The town of Oswiecim in Poland is the sight of perhaps the most

infamous of Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz.

Between May 1940 and the camp's liberation by the red Army

Between May 1940 and the camp's liberation by the Red Army

in January, 1945, 1.1 million people were killed here.

Most gassed by a cyanide-based pesticide, Zyklon B.

The Nuremberg Trials initially prosecuted 21 senior members

of the Nazi regime for war crimes, including the crimes in the camps.

But many of the perpetrators of these atrocities,

SS officers and camp guards, remained at large and they are still

being pursued by the authorities to this day.

Here at the Bavarian State Criminal Office in Munich,

they're working on new methods to assist with the prosecution

of war crimes committed over 70 years ago.

Ralf Breker is a digital imaging expert here.

He works with technology like 3-D printed re-creations of gunshot

wounds to assist in gathering evidence.

His team has created a 3-D model of Auschwitz,

which can be visited in virtual reality.

So Ralf, how long did you spend at Auschwitz capturing the data

TRANSLATION: We spent five days in Auschwitz.

We took stock of the buildings that are still standing,

Virtual reality is an incredibly powerful tool for immersing

the viewer in the experience they are having.

TRANSLATION: I think within five to ten years,

virtual reality will become a standard tool for police,

not just in Germany but all over the world.

Because it's a way to make scenes of crime access a pull

A version of the 3-D Auschwitz which doesn't use VR has already

But why is this model necessary in the first place?

To find out, I travelled to the town of Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart.

The building we're just coming up to, for 200 years,

And then in the 1960s, it took on a new role,

it became the Central Office for the Investigation

Essentially, the people that work here are Nazi hunters.

A former criminal prosecutor, Yens Rommel, now heads

Its files contain the names of thousands of possible suspects,

along with a staggering number of documents relating

What you find here is a paper database system, dealing really

with index cards, explaining which person, which location,

We have 1.7 million cards here, dealing alone with 700,000 persons.

So how does this 3-D model, virtual reality model of Auschwitz

When it comes to a specific line of defence, a defence strategy used

in almost all cases, the defendant admits

that he was exactly in Auschwitz, but generally he says I didn't know

anything about what was going on in Auschwitz.

It can help to understand what the person involved

For examples, from a watchtower over the camp, or from the fence

We saw a trial this year with Mr Hanning, an SS

Former SS guard Reinhold Hanning was convicted of access three

to 170,000 murders and sentenced to five years in prison.

The judge in this case pointed out the 3-D model made it clear

what he would have been able to see from his watchtower.

We're going to go inside one of the watchtowers and see

Using the virtual reality model of Auschwitz, I went

inside a watchtower to see what the lines of sight were and see

And you can see pretty much everything.

The virtual reality model of Auschwitz was uncannily accurate,

but there's one thing it can't recreate and that is the unusual

atmosphere of this place, perhaps the most notorious of all

A place where 1.1 million people were killed.

Ever tried to learn a language but never quite got round to it

or kept up the good work for long enough?

Well, some of the latest apps and software could be just

And in my quest to learn a little bit of Spanish, I've been

And here at the University of Westminster, this

Combining the ancient concept of the memory palace

This visual way of organising information aims to help you learn,

retain and recall things by picturing objects

and creating your own connections to remember them.

So why not do this with learning a language?

This exercise teaches how to conjugate the verb 'hablar',

The objects I'm seeing represent the ending,

so the 'O' for ostrich is hablo,

Hablan, so it's just a woman named Ann.

Ann? Hablan?

OK. Hablan, hablas, hablar.

When engrossed in it, it's easy to memorise and then

you've learned pattern are many of Spanish

So now, if you actually take off the headset...

So, how did I do once the headset was off?

OK. Don't help me.

OK, hablo, hablas, hablar, hablan. It is amazing because you do come

away from the experience, and I think that's partly VR,

you come away from the feeling I'm certainly visualising those

things. But it's a very slow way to learn

a language isn't it? People spend years trying

to learn these endings. The most important thing,

particularly as an adult learner, if you're looking to use

a language at a high level, is to understand the structure

and the grammar of the language. So those aren't actually,

it's not that much in terms of content, but it complex content

and it's all interrelated, The software's already

been created in Arabic, French, German, Italian,

Spanish and English. And after a few more tweaks,

will be available in beta by the end Of course, apps coaching

numerous languages have been But for the purpose of this piece,

I've looked at the Spanish lessons Mucho gusto.

Mucho gusto. Pursue pitches itself as a social

network for language learning. Its 60 million worldwide users can

communicate with and give or receive But the team behind the Memrise app

have prioritised the importance of learning conversational

language from locals, as well as giving the app

a bit of character. They recently returned

from a four-month road trip content for their Meet A Native

feature. Having this added feature

of a person actually talking to you in a conversational way,

I think, does help. In a way, it just makes you feel

that little bit more pleased with yourself that you've understood

a real person talking in a language As well as having big gaming

features and off-line mode similar to other apps, it also uses means

to help with Word association. Like this Chinese

symbol for the woman. Ultimately though, all apps take

commitment and whilst the memory palace has clearly etched place

in my mind now a week later, the only full sentence I think I've

actually learnt is "Lo siento, translation - "Sorry I

don't speak Spanish." That's it for the shortcut, click.

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