 Prisoners' hair in the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz, which may have been preparing for an expansion. Pic: Katarina Stoltz
November 9, 2008 9:41 PM
Auschwitz Nazi death camp expansion
BERLIN (Reuters) - The original construction plans believed used for a major expansion of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in 1941 have been found in a Berlin flat.
Uncovered were three architect's drawings on yellowing paper from the batch of 28 pages of blueprints it obtained. One has an 11.66 meter by 11.20 meter room marked "Gaskammer" (gas chamber) that was part of a "delousing facility".
No one from the federal government's archives was immediately available for comment on the authenticity or importance of the documents.
The plans, published ahead of the 70th anniversary of the "Kristallnacht" or the Nazi pogrom that was a harbinger of the Holocaust, also include a crematorium and a "L. Keller" - an abbreviation for "Leichenkeller" or corpse cellar.
A drawing of the building for Auschwitz's main gate was also found in the documents that were believed to have been discovered when a Berlin flat was cleaned out.
Hans-Dieter Kreikamp, head of the federal archives office in Berlin, said the blueprints offered "authentic evidence of the systematically planned genocide of European Jews".
There were mass killings of about one million Jews before the Nazi's "Final Solution" was formulated in late 1941. The decision to kill Europe's 11 million Jews was made at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.
A copy of the minutes, known as the "Wannsee Protocol," is one of the most important documents from the war.
The newly found Auschwitz blueprints are dated October 23,
1941 and could offer historians earlier evidence of Nazi plans
to kill Jews on a mass scale.
Germany's national daily Bild said: "These documents reveal
that everyone who had even anything remotely to do with
the planning and construction of the concentration camp
must have know that people were to be gassed to death
in assembly-line fashion."
"The documents refute once and for all claims by those who
deny the Holocaust even took place," it added.
The concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland
was the largest - at least 1.1 million Jews were killed there.
Auschwitz I was set up in May 1940 in an old Polish army
barracks. The first victims were gassed in September 1941.
Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, opened in October 1941. Four
large gas chambers were added to the camp in January
1942.
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