Netanyahu lied - Auschwitz expert: Blueprints found in Berlin not of death camp
Domingo the Avenger
Van Pelt also said the words "gas chamber" on one of the drawings
meant a room in which disinfection of clothing was done by means of
gas, and that the sketch is not of an extermination camp established
in 1942, but rather of earlier plans for a huge concentration camp in
which a force of 130,000 slave laborers was intended to work.
10/11/2008
Auschwitz expert: Blueprints found in Berlin not of death camp
By Assaf Uni
A leading expert on Auschwitz on Sunday denigrated the importance of
the finding of plans for the construction of the extermination camp,
which was reported this weekend in the German tabloid Bild. He said
the documents have been known to scholars for many years and that
they
were not plans to build the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau,
but rather earlier plans for the building of a forced labor camp.
Prof. Robert Jan van Pelt, a internationally acknowledged expert on
the planning and construction of Auschwitz, said that based on what
he had seen on the Internet, there seemed to be nothing new about the
documents. He was one of several scholars who expressed doubts about
the significance of the Bild story.
Van Pelt, an architectural historian, said that copies of the plans
of the stages of the camp's construction were also in the archive of
the Polish National Museum at Auschwitz and in an archive in Moscow.
He said that the source of the new copies was unclear since, according
to Bild, the plans were found in an apartment in Berlin, whereas
copies that were in the SS offices in Berlin were destroyed by Allied
bombing in 1944. Van Pelt said he also doubted the authenticity of the
signature of the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, since such a high-
ranking officer would not have signed such plans, and none of the
copies he had ever seen bore such a signature.
Van Pelt also said the words "gas chamber" on one of the drawings
meant a room in which disinfection of clothing was done by means of
gas, and that the sketch is not of an extermination camp established
in 1942, but rather of earlier plans for a huge concentration camp in
which a force of 130,000 slave laborers was intended to work.
Van Pelt suggested the plans might be fakes, motivated by the
lucrative market in Nazi memorabilia and documents.
Ralf Georg Reuth, the historian who wrote the piece in Bild, told
Haaretz yesterday that the existence of such plans in Russian
archives was known, "but German institutions have no originals, and
therefore the importance of the finding of such original material is
very great." Reuth would not elaborate on where and when the plans
were discovered, or whether they had been submitted to experts for
study.
RJ11
firm "Topf and Sons" stated that Auschwitz officials are not
satisfied with a cremation capacity of 2,650 corpses per day,
and "we should deliver more ovens as quickly as possible".
http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/topf/
RJ.