This is where prisoners selected for slave labor were processed.
Often people would have to wait outside naked in any weather. Here they
would have to give up all their remaining possessions: money, jewels, even
wedding rings and photos. In short, the prisoner was left with only one
possession, his or her body. In this building planned humiliation was performed
on the confused and terrified new arrivals. Men and women were forced to
stand on stools, in a room crowded with people while heads, armpits and
other intimate parts of one's body were shaved by male prisoners and where
numbers were tattooed in each arm. It is also where prisoners already in
the camp were deloused., this because of the raging typhus epidemics. After
liberation at Bergen-Belsen, former Auschwitz and Birkenau prisoner Adolf
Gawalewicz said to British Army personal during a personal DDT session:
"It's not going to work. Even the Germans couldn't get rid of the
lice!"