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The bulldozers lumbered down the forest hillside in waves of ten. Dredges and scoops moved along the muddy creek bed and cut out a wide, deep river basin. Engineers worked on two dams at either end. Mobile workshops rolled into a newly hewn clearing. Portable generators were connected to lathes, saws and drills. The convoy of lumber trucks arrived on schedule. Three hundred carpenters did the cutting, two hundred the fitting and nailing and five hundred the erecting and assembling. Squads of soldiers began to enclose the buildings with a twelve-foot fence and built nine guard towers. Barbed wire was strung within the compound as electricians laid cable, spliced feed lines and started connecting the banks of floodlights. Powerful searchlights were hoisted into the guard towers, mounted and connected. The inner compound was completed three hours ahead of schedule. The eleven buildings on the outside of the wall and the electrified exterior barbed-wire fencing came in three hours and forty minutes before the deadline. Railroad crews began laying track along the freshly built roadbed on the western exterior of the compound. Only the paint crews were delayed. Their color charts had been misplaced, and others had to be sent for. They arrived an hour and ten minutes late. Yellow would be for stone, gray for concrete and brown for wood. The twelve-foot-high fence was sprayed gray, its nine guard towers brown, the buildings within yellow.

One of the dredges was stuck in the completed river bed. Salvage cranes were called for. When they had not arrived by the next day the engineers could wait no longer. The floodgate to the upper dam was thrown open. Water rushed into the basin, swirled about the abandoned machine and began backing up against the second barrier wall. Within an hour all but the top of the dredge lay submerged. The Sola River had been completed. The senior electrician threw the first master switch, and the buildings and the street lights were illuminated. The second switch came down. The full-scale reproduction of Auschwitz glowed in the misty twilight of Westerly.

The railroad gang continued laying a single line of track, which fanned out after three and a half miles into a triple-pronged siding. Here work continued on the second and more massive installation. More than two hundred buildings already stood complete within the fourteen fence-divided compounds. Another two hundred and fifty structures were at various stages of construction. When, shortly thereafter, work was completed, it was named Birkenau Concentration Camp. The name proved to be officially correct, although Extermination Camp would have been the more accurate title.