ARCHITECTURAL plans for the Auschwitz death camp that were found in Berlin last year were handed over to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday for display at the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
The 29 sketches of the death camp built in Nazi-occupied Poland date as far back as 1941. They include detailed blueprints for gas chambers, crematoria, barracks and delousing facilities and are considered important for understanding the beginnings
of the Nazi genocide.
The sketches are initialled by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess.
"There are those who deny that the Holocaust happened," Mr Netanyahu said. "Let them come to Jerusalem and look at these plans, these plans for the factory of death."
German publishers Axel Springer Verlag obtained the plans from a man who said he found them when cleaning out a flat in the former East Berlin.
The company and Germany's federal archive have confirmed blueprints' authenticity.
But the publisher said numbers on the backs of the plans indicated they may have been taken from an archive, possibly documents on the Third Reich kept by the East German secret service, the Stasi. Axel Springer Verlag said other documents from the archive surfaced after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.
While they are not the only Auschwitz blueprints that exist – others were captured by the Red Army and taken to Moscow – they will be a first for Yad Vashem, its chairman said.
"This set is a very early one, from the autumn of '41," Avner Shalev said. "It brings a better understanding of the whole process, and the intention of the planners of the complex."
The blueprints include plans for the original Auschwitz camp and the expansion of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where most of the killings were carried out.
More than a million people, mostly Jews, died in the gas chambers or through forced labour, disease or starvation at the camp.
Mr Netanyahu also visited a house on Berlin's Wannsee lake that was the site of the January 1942 "Wannsee Conference" – a watershed in Nazi policy against the Jews.
It now houses a museum on the Holocaust and the notorious meeting, which was once thought to be when the Nazis decided to stop deporting and randomly killing Jews and instead to industrialise their murder.
Most historians now agree the decision was made some months earlier, by Adolf Hitler.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been murdered by the time 15 civil servants, SS and party officials met at Wannsee. It is now believed by many that Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Nazi security police, called the meeting to make sure everybody knew what Hitler wanted done and to establish SS oversight of the process.
Mr Shalev said the blueprints showing that the construction of Auschwitz was already being planned in 1941 help to reinforce that argument.
"The conference ... was a kind of co-ordination," he said. "The Final Solution started to be implemented a few months before, so the plans found from late '41 are more evidence."
A large yellowed plan, dated 30 April, 1942 and titled "general building plan concentration camp Auschwitz" provides a wider view, showing the barracks but also roads, other buildings and the outlying area.
Another drawing, dated 14 October, 1941, shows the plans for construction of a "Waffen SS prisoner of war camp" with rows of what appear to be barracks.
