Auschwitz blueprints given to Israel

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This article was published 28/08/2009 (6114 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BERLIN — Architectural plans for the Auschwitz death camp that were discovered in Berlin last year were handed over to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday for display at Israel’s Holocaust memorial.

The 29 sketches of the death camp built in Nazi-occupied Poland date as far back as 1941. They include detailed blueprints for living barracks, delousing facilities and crematoria, including gas chambers, and are considered important for understanding the genesis of the Nazi genocide.

The sketches are initialed by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess.

"There are those who deny that the Holocaust happened," Netanyahu said. "Let them come to Jerusalem and look at these plans, these plans for the factory of death."

The Axel Springer Verlag, publisher of the mass circulation Bild newspaper, obtained the plans from a private person who said he found them when cleaning out a flat in what was formerly East Berlin. The company and Germany’s federal archive have confirmed blueprints’ authenticity.

But the publisher said the numbering found on the backs of the plans indicate they may have been taken from an archive, possibly the collection of documents on the Third Reich kept by the East German secret service, the Stasi. Axel Springer Verlag said several other documents from the same archive had surfaced after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.

Bild editor Kai Diekmann told Netanyahu and Avner Shalev, the chairman of Israel’s Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, he decided to give them the sketches because they wanted to ensure that as many people as possible could see them.

"These plans have an important function — they remind us of a crime that, with the passing of time, seems ever more incomprehensible," Diekmann said.

While they are not the only original Auschwitz blueprints that still exist — others were captured by the Soviet Red Army and brought back to Moscow — they will be the first for Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial, its chairman told The Associated Press.

"This set is a very early one, which was found here in Berlin, from the autumn of ’41," Shalev said. "It brings a better understanding of the whole process, and the intention of the planners of the complex, and from this perspective it is important."

Shalev said the sketches will be on display at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem beginning Jan. 27, 2010, as part of a special exhibit marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The blueprints include general plans for the original Auschwitz camp and the expansion of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where most of the killings were carried out.

More than 1 million people, mostly Jews, died in the gas chambers or through forced labour, disease or starvation at the camp, which the Nazis built after occupying Poland.

 

— The Associated Press