Blueprints of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex have today gone on display at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. Discovered in a Berlin flat during 2008 and latterly presented to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the plans chart, according to Yad Vashem’s chairman Avner Shalev, the evolution of Auschwitz from a concentration camp to a death camp. One of the drawings is even claimed to have been initialled by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.
One of the world’s leading authorities on Auschwitz, however, has not only raised doubts over the authenticity of Himmler’s scrawl but also over whether the plans are even of the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau at all. Professor Robert Jan van Pelt considers them, instead, to be earlier blueprints of a forced labour camp, which have been known about for many years. He suggested to Haaretz that this particular set of plans might even be fakes, motivated by the lucrative market in Nazi memorabilia and documents. The term gaskammer (gas chamber), which appears on one of the prints, actually, Professor van Pelt emphasised, refers to disinfecting rooms where clothing was sterilised by means of gas.
Had such scepticism over these blueprints come from the denial/revisionist front, I’d be inclined to dismiss it, but given its source I’d take the Architecture Of Murder Exhibition with a pinch of salt . . . .
[...] is the original: Architecture Of Murder « Robert Bonnett's Blog Connect and [...]