Interpreting Visual Evidence

The Architecture of Mass Murder

He camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the German concentration camps whose central purpose was the murder of Europe's Jews. Al most

1.1 million people, of whom 1 million were Jews, were murdered in Auschwitz.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was in fact a complex of three camps: an extermination center, a prisoner-of-war camp, and a labor camp built with the cooperation of German industrial firms such as IG Farben. Forty other smaller installations and work camps in the surrounding area were also run by the camp's administration. The construction of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex occupied thousands of workers and continued throughout the war. When the Soviet army arrived in January 1945, they found that the Germans had burned the camp archives before fleeing, but they had not burned the construction archive, which was kept separately. Hundreds of

A. Blueprint for Crematorium II, Birkenau, dated November 1941. The five shaded squares in the lower drawing are the gas ovens in the structure's underground level, and the area to the right is labeled "Corpses Room."

Many people did not want to know and did their best to ignore evidence and carry on with their lives. Many who continued to support the Nazis did so for other reasons, out of personal opportunism or because they opposed communism and wanted order restored. Yet mere popular indifference does not provide a satisfactory explanation for the Nazis’ ability to accomplish the murder of so many people. Many Europeans—German, French, Dutch, Polish, Swiss, and Russian—had come to believe that there was a “Jewish problem” that had to be “solved.” The Nazis tried to conceal the death camps. Yet they knew they could count on vocal support for requiring Jews to be specially identified, for restrictions on marriage and property ownership, and for other kinds of discrimination. For reasons that had to do with both traditional Christian anti-Semitism and modern, racialized nationalism, many Europeans had come to see Jewish Europeans as “foreign,” no longer members of their national communities.

What of other governments? Their level of cooperation with the Nazis’ plans varied. The French Vichy regime, on its

Technical drawings were found in this archive, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, these drawings became accessible to historians. A further cache of such documents was discovered in an abandoned building in Berlin in 2008. They are now held by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust archive in Jerusalem, Israel.

The discovery of these drawings did not add substantially to what was already known about the murder of Jews and other prisoners at Auschwitz, but they provide an arresting example of the bureaucratic apparatus-and the chilling coldness of the planning-that went into the Nazi extermination policy.

Questions for Analysis

1.  Who would have seen these plans and been made aware of their purpose?

2.  What do these images tell us about the nature of the effort that went into the Nazi extermination policy?

3.  Is there a way to understand the relationship between the careful renderings, the precise measurements, and the rectilinear lines, and the ultimate purpose of the buildings depicted?

B. Blueprint for the "Delousing Facility" at Auschwitz-Birkenau, showing a room of 11.6 meters by 11.2 meters marked "Gaskammer" (gas chamber).

Own initiative, passed laws that required Jews to wear identifying stars and strictly limited their movements and activities. When the German government demanded roundups and deportations of Jews, Vichy cooperated. On the other hand, Italy, though a fascist country, participated less actively. Not until the Germans occupied the north of Italy in 1943 were drastic anti-Semitic measures implemented. The Hungarian government, also fascist and allied with the Nazis, persecuted Jews but dragged its heels about deportations. Thus, the Hungarian Jewish community survived—until March 1944, when Germans, disgusted with their Hungarian collaborators, took direct control and immediately began mass deportations. So determined were the Nazis to carry out their “final solution” that they killed up to 12,000 Hungarian Jews a day at Auschwitz in May 1944, contributing to a total death toll of 600,000 Jews from Hungary.

In the face of this Nazi determination, little resistance was possible. The concentration camps were designed to numb and incapacitate their inmates, making them acquiesce in their own slow deaths even if they were not

DEPORTATION RAILWAYS. Between March 1942 and November 1944, Jews are known to have been deported from every location on this map-as well as from numerous other locales. Note the effort made by the Nazis to transport Jews from the very frontiers of the empire at the height of a two-front war. ¦ According to the map, to which site were most Jews deported? ¦ Looking back at Hitler's "Final Solution" map on page 895, why was Auschwitz in Poland chosen as the main deportation site? ¦ What does this say about the Nazi regime in particular and about other states willing to collaborate with the Nazis?