THE SS TRANSFORMATION OF OŚWIĘCIM INTO KL Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II), and Monowitz (Auschwitz III) has a well-known history. Its roots extend back to Heinrich Himmler’s control over the prewar concentration camp system, in which he emphasized the system’s capacity to utilize forced labor simultaneous with oppression.1 After the war broke out in September 1939, the SS also developed ambitions at Oświęcim to extend its empire and support the military cause. With the Soviet campaign in 1941 and Nazi leaders’ decision to kill all European Jews, SS concentration camps played an increasingly brutal role in both the exploitation of labor and genocide, none more infamously than Auschwitz. Furthermore, due to its provision of forced labor for the IG Farben plant as well as its central geographic location in Nazi-controlled Europe, Auschwitz was a linchpin in carrying out the racist imperialist ideals at the heart of Hitler’s military drive.2
Crucial, of course, to these transformations was the construction of the appropriate built environment. In particular, from late 1942 through the spring of 1943, the design process for the planned development of the city of Auschwitz beyond the walls of the camp as well as the SS area of interest reached a fever pitch, involving multiple institutions in the finalization of hundreds of individual structures and the site as a whole. Hans Stosberg, a freelance architect commissioned by the Reich Ministry of Labor, finalized his plan of the city by January 1943 (see figure 6.1). On May 13, 1943, Stosberg met with SS officials to discuss how his proposal for the city meshed with Untersturmführer and architect Lothar Hartjenstein’s 1942 plans for the SS-specific areas, including the concentration camp complex at Auschwitz (see figure 6.2). After this meeting, with few changes, the major design developments of the physical plan for the city of Auschwitz and the vast SS concentration camp were set; the ideal form was ready for construction.3
By their very nature, however, ideal plans, even brutal ones backed by a vast military apparatus, are never fully realized. The plans visualized the perpetrators’ fantastically ambitious conception of the camp and the transformation of the surrounding city into a functioning monument to German empire in the East. However, a vast body of evidence reveals how the organization and uses of space at Auschwitz diverged from the 1943 plan. Significant portions of this evidence are visual. For example, photographs taken of the arrival of Hungarian Jews in 1944 show awkward juxtapositions of people and structures, mud-filled spaces, and unruly groups of figures that belie the order and visual unity of the plans, even as they also express elements of the same imperialist conception of Auschwitz that inspired both Stosberg and Hartjenstein.4 The photos and the plans are part of the extensive visual material that documents SS goals and actions at this concentration, labor, and death camp. They also highlight the spaces in which SS visions and ideas were put into action, both those that were imagined at the scale of the city and camp as well as those that were experienced at the level of the individual human being.
Yet the standard chronology of the physical development of the camp points to a significant gap in our understanding of Auschwitz: namely, what happened between the finalization of plans for the spaces of genocide and the ultimate use of those spaces, as exemplified by the SS urban schemes, on the one hand, and the photographs of Hungarian Jews, on the other? Did the material creation of the structures that were crucial to linking the ideal plan to the implementation of the racist goals play a significant role? From May 1943 to February 1944, the SS focused on constructing the physical infrastructure of genocide and imperialism. How fully were the plans realized? How exactly did ideology translate into function–or was the translation imperfect or incomplete? What were the experiential connections, and disconnections, between the spaces designated at the planning stage for SS personnel, prisoners, and civilian residents of Auschwitz? What happened between the “before” and the “after” of building a new Auschwitz, a question that arises if we isolate the third factor of construction?
6.1. Detail from Hans Stosberg’s design for the urban environment of the city of Auschwitz (1943). Note the train-station plaza, upper left, with newly designed road into the city. The ghostly hatching in the lower left indicates the location of the Auschwitz I main camp. Courtesy Niels Gutschow.
6.2. Lothar Hartjenstein, design for the SS environment of Auschwitz I (November 1942). The main camp is in the center of the image with SS housing and administrative buildings to either side. Courtesy Niels Gutschow.
In the historiography of Holocaust Studies, these are new questions. Scholarship has generally emphasized either the decision-making process and first stages of implementation or the devastating results of the genocide as revealed in survivors’ testimony and other documents.5 The few studies of the built environment have focused mainly on the decision-making and design stage, looking particularly at the role of architects and leaders within both the Nazi and the SS bureaucracy in conceiving and planning imperial and genocidal buildings.6 The most explicitly spatial aspect of studies of Auschwitz has been the close scrutiny of structures and sites directly related to the technology of genocide. Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt did pioneering work that explored the importance of the architecture of the crematoria, a subject on which van Pelt has continued to contribute.7 At the broader scale of the camp and surrounding area, Niels Gutschow has concentrated on the stages leading up to the finalization of plans in the spring of 1943.8 These and other key historical assessments of Auschwitz provide crucial information on the genesis and operation of the camp but contain little analysis of construction as it changed over time. Sybille Steinbacher has written the most comprehensive history of the camp’s administrative organization and overall development. The best information on physical changes from 1943 to 1944 is the monumental study by Wacław Długoborski and Franciszek Piper, one of several important publications of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum that present encyclopedic documentation of the structures and preservation of sites within the camp.9 However, neither Steinbacher nor Długoborski and Piper take an analytic approach to the spatial question of what the variety and density of construction may have meant, particularly after plans were finalized.
Nor have geographical studies of Holocaust landscapes addressed the complexity of this historical site. Andrew Charlesworth’s provocative essays on the “topography of genocide” show the revelatory power of noticing and thinking about the uses of the banal built forms and seemingly unimportant places and spaces where Jews were arrested, gathered, transported, imprisoned, and killed.10 His general observations on looking at “invisible” spaces in ghettos and labor camps, what we might characterize as the infrastructural spaces of power, point to the complex role that space plays in the historical processes of the Holocaust. Yet the places and spaces of genocide in Charlesworth’s work are given; it is precisely the permanence of courtyards, train stations, roads, sand pits, and other environmental features that enables them potentially to speak of the dreadful things they witnessed.
Charlesworth’s approach to landscape as evidence connects his work to the extensive scholarly literature inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s call for seeing representational space and productive space as inherently interrelated rather than distinct forms.11 In his focus on the manufacturing centers of a bourgeois economy, Lefebvre posits that both representational and productive uses are inherent in modern urban space. While Auschwitz encompasses many aspects of an urban economy, the heavy-handed political control and autarkic economic relations that governed the camp produced decidedly different material conditions that merit close examination. Though helpful, Lefebvre’s formulation is, in our opinion, too static. David Harvey’s view of the modern city in more relational and differentiated materialist terms is more useful for grasping the dynamics of space and power at Auschwitz. We particularly agree with his argument that analyzing space and buildings should include seeing how “a dialectical conception of both the individual ‘thing’ and the structured system of which it is a part rests entirely on an understanding of the processes and relations by which thing and structured system are constituted.”12 Interest in how social relations produce spaces of power has recently emerged in Holocaust Studies, as scholars have developed the spatial implications of Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of the concentration camp, past and present, as a space of exception.13 Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca explore the possibilities of a geographical reading of Auschwitz as a “spatial threshold,” where the physical camp, Nazi spatial planning, bureaucratic rationalities, and genocide became entangled. Nevertheless, Agamben’s work as well as Giaccaria and Minca’s notion of the topologies and topographies of the camp remain metaphorical and theoretical and, we would argue, of relatively little use in explaining the historical nuances and complexities of the site’s physical development.14
Our aim in this chapter is to interrogate the materiality of construction–the physical rendering of the spaces of power–as a separate activity that should be studied along with the much more thoroughly understood processes of genocide and industrial forced labor. Borrowing from the insight of urban geographer Edward Soja, we see construction as a third space that is an agglomeration of sites of activity and periods of time when and where the crucial work of translating plans into physical reality took place. For Soja, third spaces are those that exist simultaneously as real and imagined.15 Our examination of this third space begins with a review of this moment in the history of SS construction at Auschwitz as a narrative of events, as recorded in the tremendous cache of documents left by Nazi planners and architects in the archives of the Zentralbauleitung (Central Building Administration). In gathering evidence from these documents, we focused on a new angle, the importance of construction to the daily priorities and experiences of the SS, rather than treating them solely as evidence of genocidal or imperial ambitions. The documents reveal a number of modifications to the original plans that suggest how the SS adjusted to the exigencies of war and, in contrast to the current literature, how much of their job they perceived as management of construction activity. This first section uses an architectural historical analysis of the archival evidence to establish SS priorities within the intent to build and control the spaces of Auschwitz, particularly in the relatively understudied period of May 1943 to February 1944. It establishes what physical changes to the environment could be productively explored geographically. We then use cartographic methods to compare these SS intentions, as expressed in architectural and city plans, to what was (or what may have been) actually built at specific parts of the site. Last, we explore the dynamic geography of construction at Birkenau by interrogating a digital model of camp structures coded by time of construction. The second and third sections represent our effort to model the archive and to show, chiefly through visual argument, how an explicitly visual methodology can reveal previously unknown geographical and temporal patterns and relationships that raise new historical questions and begin to alter our understanding of Auschwitz.
Our study began with the initial goal of mapping specific segments of the Auschwitz environment in 2-D and 3-D form. Still, though that goal may be pedagogically useful, such a task in and of itself lacked a driving analytic focus. What geographical questions came out of a mapping and an analysis of the built environment? We could not determine that focus until we had a better sense of the material evidence that we could use to interrogate the spaces of the camp. Unlike many other studies in this volume, such as the concentration camp system analysis, we lacked a ready database or already established source for this work. Hence, for us, the archival research process to assess the kinds of spatial evidence took on a greater role, and the analysis of the priorities uncovered in the architectural archive forms the first part of our argument. What geographic problems worthy of visualization exist in the historical record of the Zentralbauleitung at Auschwitz? Learning from the archive meant identifying the tensions between the idealized plan and the actualized built environment, from the ideological goals to the physical realities of implementation.
Auschwitz had the complexity of an urban site, complete with the multifunctional buildings and myriad spatial uses necessary to sustain a civilian population dramatically expanded by the influx of German settlers and workers, as well as the military and prison populations. After the initial Nazi takeover on September 4, 1939, the SS took control as the governing institutional presence overseeing design and construction of the new Auschwitz.16 The SS ambitions required a growing staff of expert planners and architects (see figure 6.3). Stosberg represented the Labor Ministry and other state concerns, while Fritz Ertl, a Bauhaus-trained architect, arrived in May 1940 to set up the building administration (Neubauleitung, later Zentralbauleitung) for the SS. By October 1941, the SS had established a significant group of architects and planners under the leadership of Karl Bischoff. From the beginning, planners imagined the need to at least double the town’s residential capacity to accommodate the civilian and military workforce, along with the attendant roads, businesses, and necessary services. In the meantime, the tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners and other inmates who would enact this agenda also had to be accommodated. By the end of 1941, Bischoff’s architects had completed preliminary plans for the massive forced-labor settlement of Auschwitz-Birkenau as well as the four new large crematoria that would be “required” for the combined ideological and economic goals.17 In beginning with a view of Auschwitz as a complex administrative and urban entity, we hoped not only to bring the conjoined purposes of this place into clearer focus but also to explore analytical questions about space raised by this complicated history.
6.3. SS-Zentralbauleitung photo, circa 1944. The photograph’s composition emphasizes the table laden with architectural designs as much as the SS architects at work. Source: Yad Vashem.
The final form of the plans in 1943 combined idealist Nazi and SS architectural conceptions with a modernist emphasis on efficiency, visual separation of functions, and technological infrastructure. Stosberg’s city plan focused on a new ceremonial entrance plaza at the train station, from which a series of functionally defined residential, public, and business spaces extended, typical of the city-planning strategies of Albert Speer and other Nazi urban planners.18 Independent of Stosberg’s urban schemes, the SS also had exclusive control over its “area of interest,” an official zone incorporating the camps and much of the surrounding agricultural land. In this area, Ertl and Hartjenstein designed the residential settlement on the east side of Auschwitz I with a loose yet formal grouping of housing that followed slightly curving roads, showing a garden-city influence.19 In contrast, the rigid efficiency of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II) as a site for thousands of forced laborers and the industrialized murder of hundreds of thousands of people required no such complex planning traditions or theories. Ertl’s original institutional plan of a series of pavilions around individual roll-call plazas as well as the distribution of the gas chambers and crematoria along the far eastern side of the plan (away from the road, near surrounding farmland) followed penal designs extending back through Majdanek and Dachau, and beyond to common prison and industrial prototypes throughout the modern era. By early 1943, the SS had expanded this plan to include three major residential sections (BI, BII, and BIII, with a possible later addition of BIV) and ancillary inmate structures. The planners arranged a clear hierarchy of spaces around two major axes–one southern axis marked by the famous large entrance for inmates coming in to be processed or “selected” for death and one on the northern axis leading to the new SS monumental administrative pavilion with SS housing arranged symmetrically behind it (see figures 6.4 and 6.5).20 The plans for the camp as a whole evidence a rationalized distribution of function and a clear spatial hierarchy. They enabled the integrated operation of a vast penal industrial site on a scale appropriate to the imperial ambitions of a postwar Reich.21
Such plans, however, like any urban scheme, changed with the shifting interests of the SS, the needs of the war, and the Nazi prioritization of killing inmates. As we quickly discovered, the SS archive reveals many plans for individual sites within the “area of interest,” with complex and multifaceted handwritten corrections that indicate these developing concerns.22 Such changes mark the shift from planning to execution in May and June 1943, as Ertl for the SS and Stosberg for the state moved on to other duties and Bischoff ordered an intensive construction campaign with particular emphasis on Auschwitz-Birkenau. This order was part of the total mobilization of the economy, which now included the SS goal of a more coordinated use of forced laborers for the war economy. Other long-term planning objectives at Auschwitz would either have to wait or be prioritized in relation to short-term demand for labor and brutal productivity.23
6.4. Reconstruction of plan for Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, with cited buildings marked, circa 1942. Base map by Chester Harvey, interpreted by Benjamin Perry Blackshear and Paul B. Jaskot.
6.5. SS headquarters at Auschwitz-Birkenau at the entrance to the SS housing estate, 1943. The central tower, flanked by two wings, mirrored the inmates’ entrance pavilion a few hundred meters away at Birkenau. This building, like that pavilion, was designed by the SS-Zentralbauleitung. Photograph by Paul B. Jaskot.
We were struck in our research at how clearly the archival record reveals the shift from planning to construction. Of immediate note in the period after May 1943 is not only the transfer of key planning personnel but also the rise of new individuals, above all architect Walter Dejaco.24 Dejaco, along with a growing number of forced-labor designers and draftsmen, produced an explosive amount of drawings at this time, following Bischoff’s order to build. These included expansive plans for SS-owned industries, as Himmler turned forced-labor operations completely to the war economy, as well as infrastructure for related civilian labor operations. For example, in July 1943 the building administration finalized plans for four large-scale work halls on the west side of Auschwitz I for the SS-owned factory equipment manufacturer Deutsche Ausrüstungswerk (DAW). The DAW employed massive numbers of forced laborers at this time. The work halls were completed by May 1944, by which point the SS had added two more large halls and an important voltage relay station that provided power for the expanding industrial facilities.25 In addition, on the east side of Auschwitz I on the main road to the train station, the SS began construction of another DAW facility for foreign workers as early as January 1943, and, just to the north, a large civilian living and work camp arose from July 1943 to March 1944.26 This activity represents the renewed emphasis on orienting the concentration camps to the war economy but also the SS desire to align itself with state interests at this moment of crisis.
For inmates, in addition to their work on the construction sites, their day-to-day physical world also changed dramatically in this period. By June 1943, all four crematoria and gas chambers were in operation, making grim backdrops to the daily trudge to work for those who survived. In addition, Auschwitz-Birkenau saw a huge expansion, with more than 180 barracks built in the BII section alone. Although work started in BIIe as early as February 1943, the majority of construction was done in the summer and fall, to be completed in late 1943–early 1944.27 Work was also carried out on the inmates’ spaces in Auschwitz I, but not at the same scale of activity as at Birkenau.
Construction of administrative and private spaces for the SS also indicated specific priorities. The major new administrative center, the Kommandantur (SS Command Headquarters) at the west side of Auschwitz I, was meant to unify the command structure and present a powerful SS face to any visitors to the site. The Zentralbauleitung finished designs for this new and optimistic monumental center by May 1943.28 However, although foundations were begun, little more was completed on the site throughout the war as far as the records indicate. Instead, as our reading of the archive confirmed, SS construction focused on other structures that facilitated the day-to-day operation of the camp as well as the apparent need to entertain and distract the guards who were charged with increasingly brutal work. For example, work also continued through 1943 on the Deutsches Haus, the social center for the SS, at the main train station. The SS complemented these recreational facilities and monumental structures with equally important sites that supported the infrastructure of the complex: for example, the large potato storage halls completed in December 1943 just to the south of Birkenau (see figure 6.6).29 (Our reconstruction of that building gives some sense of the detail of the architectural drawings available for visualization and analysis in the archive.) It is telling that other structures more in keeping with the ideal vision of the pre–May 1943 plans were put on hold, such as large housing estates and monumental entrance plazas, in favor of building structures to please SS personnel and provide necessary services.
6.6. Digital reconstruction of the SS-Zentralbauleitung design for the potato storage hall south of Auschwitz-Birkenau. This structure is one of hundreds of rarely considered vernacular buildings at Auschwitz that were essential to the functioning of the camp. Building as of 1943, reconstruction 2009 by Chester Harvey.
The process of selecting what to construct and what not appears strategic rather than part of a consistent, linear planning logic. Where analysis of the architectural plans allows, the presence and absence of buildings that come in and out of the drawings highlight the dynamic decision-making process. The failure to build a structure–and its disappearance from the plan–can be just as revealing as what was actually constructed. As J. B. Harley has shown, the silence of maps can speak volumes about the mapmakers’ values and purpose.30 At Auschwitz, such silences and erasures not only evince the absence of the powerless (Harley’s concern); they also leave traces of SS decisions that may otherwise be invisible in the historical record. A telling example of this is the frequently reworked, reimagined, and reconstructed east side of Auschwitz I. In November 1943 and May 1944, the SS decided to construct two saunas here next to supposedly temporary guard housing and the provisional building offices of the camp architects. The saunas, like the Deutsches Haus, were made as sites of relaxation, complete with decorative carpentry typical of central European traditions (see figure 6.7). These familiar, somewhat whimsical forms signaled the desire to provide the intended users of the buildings–SS guards and building personnel–with an escape from the grim institutional world around them. In the Hartjenstein plan of late 1942, this part of Auschwitz I was to include completely new offices and troop housing organically arranged along the curve of the road. On the May 1943 plan, one can see utilitarian offices and troop housing, which reflected the short-term agenda of the SS, literally overlaid on the long-term idealist goals for new construction from the 1942 plan, which we have shown in our map that visualizes the simultaneous long-term and short-term planning process (see figure 6.8). A third smaller-scale SS drawing of the site from November 1943 shows the existing provisional housing and building offices as well as a new extension of the animal slaughterhouse and the two saunas. The traces of 1942 have vanished from this pragmatic plan. Long-term idealism had been replaced by a grotesque short-term cultural agenda in which the SS imagined and built a complex world of living, working, and recreation all within sight of the first gas chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz I (see figure 6.9).
6.7. SS-Zentralbauleitung design, troop sauna circa November 1943. The carpentry of the building shows that when the SS wanted to, their architects could think about the cultural implications of construction. Source: Yad Vashem.
6.8. The built environment of Auschwitz, idealized and realized, based on a detail of Lothar Hartjenstein’s design for the SS environment of Auschwitz I, with later additions, February 1943. The planned commandant’s headquarters, with a large ceremonial plaza, upper left, was begun but never completed, while new barracks that Hartjenstein had not planned (the purple rectangles in the lower center of the map) were built to accommodate hundreds of guards in anticipation of massive transports of prisoners in 1943–44 and into the future. The building and housing estates to the lower right were part of the long-term goals of the site. Map by Benjamin Perry Blackshear.
These plans not only indicate decision making by the SS or the ways in which the late-1943 drawings silence the 1942 idealist plans. Both our visualization of the multiple planning chronologies as well as an analysis of the site drawing for the smaller buildings reveal complementary agendas in addition to the functional need of the moment. They show a continuity with the idealist spatial and cultural ambitions of the more comprehensive earlier designs even while attending to the necessities at the time. Especially as evidenced in the temporal complexities of the palimpsestic May 1943 design that we have visualized, SS planners imagined the current variable site uses in relationship to the future site that shared that complicated organization. That is to say, in each case, the infrastructure relates to the ambitious aspiration of the SS as a support for the expansion of Germany but also for the cultural mission of building the new and purified East. In the Hartjenstein design, that future is a complex urban world supporting the control over a vast greater Germany; in the May 1943 design, the short-term needs remain future oriented, given that they support the still-optimistic Nazi leadership as it pursues German advancement through military means. The built and unbuilt, the need of the moment, and the planning for the future are simultaneous goals. Architecture and spatial planning evidence the immediate success of the Nazi agenda and promise its expansion.31
6.9. SS-Zentralbauleitung base map indicating the troop sauna location in relation to other buildings on the east side of Auschwitz I, circa November 1943, modified to indicate the dense variety of functions in one small part of the camp. This cluster of different functions has remained invisible in the scholarship, even though our color overlays make it clear that they were in fact visible to the SS and inmates at the site. Reconstruction by Benjamin Perry Blackshear.
This analysis of the architectural drawings and textual archival evidence has established the emphasis on the construction process as it included the inmate housing at Birkenau, forced-labor sites, SS infrastructure, and occasional leisure building from May 1943 to February 1944. Thus far in this chapter we have viewed Auschwitz from the ground level, observing individual buildings and groupings of buildings as well as rendering specific plans; however, this ground-level, predominantly archival view leads us to other spatial analytic problems. To obtain a more synoptic perspective on the integrated and complementary agendas of the site as a whole, one needs to visualize structures in their broader geographic context through mapping (see the spotlight section “Maps as Research”). Our first goal for visualization emphasizes the scale of the camp in relation to the town as well as the spatial foci of the variety of constructed projects during the period we are examining (see figure 6.4). The key base map for our visualization was a digital scan of the May 1943 SS plan, supplemented by the evidence in SS architectural records of what was built or under construction by February 1944.32 The hand-drawn additions include several SS houses built for officers and personnel on the Lagerstrasse near the train station as well as the addition of an SS hospital near the guards’ housing estate east of the northern axis of Birkenau. Thus far, we have been able to identify more than twelve hundred buildings as planned or built (or both), based on Zentralbauleitung documents. We placed them on the map as accurately as possible, noting in the building database whether we knew the accuracy of their locations with high, moderate, or only approximate certainty. Of these structures, those across the Soła, along the fringes of the surrounding SS agricultural areas, and some buildings around the train station belonged to the private or public patrons of the city and government.
Spotlight on Methods: Maps as Research
The Auschwitz chapter helps clarify how dynamic mapping tools become an active part of the research process. In this case study, we used GIS and Google SketchUp to visualize the development of our evidence and analysis, and the visualizations in turn raised new questions for research. This section explains some of the methodological concerns and practices behind our chapter, highlighting the construction of the GIS database that became central to our exploration.
Our initial goal of exploring visibility and invisibility at Auschwitz required a conventional, planimetric GIS base map of camp buildings and a three-dimensional representation of all or part of the camp in order to run sight-line and viewshed analyses. The key sources for both the 2-D and 3-D maps were the final ideal plan of Auschwitz-Birkenau completed by the SS Zentralbauleitung in the spring of 1943 (with some changes noted through early 1944) and an aerial photograph from 1945 that shows all of the buildings constructed by the end of the war. Notably, at this stage of the process, Jaskot thought these visualizations might be pedagogically useful to demonstrate the experiences of inmates and perpetrators at Auschwitz, but was uncertain how this approach might actually help in extending significant research questions. Harvey began by georectifying the plan and aerial photograph, using a recent high-resolution, geographically located aerial image of Auschwitz provided by the Polish national GIS office in Warsaw (the Main Geodetic and Cartographic Documentation Centre of the Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography). Once the historical images were correctly aligned, Harvey digitally traced each building’s outline, creating an entry for each structure in a geographically referenced database.
As Harvey was working on the base map, Jaskot began research in the SS building archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (microfilmed from the records held at the Russian State Military Archives, Moscow). As with any archival source, the quality of the information about structures at Auschwitz varied considerably. For some buildings, SS records provided very accurate start and end dates of construction as well as information about structures’ actual or intended use; for others, Jaskot found only one date. In some cases, records noted construction activity on a kind of building in a specific area at a particular time without identifying exactly which structure or structures were worked upon at that time. We thus had to parse the historical information, sometimes grouping buildings together based on Jaskot’s understanding of the general patterns in the archive and other times capturing many details for specific buildings. In addition, Jaskot made copies of architectural blueprints and other records that gave exact measurements for buildings. Harvey recognized that all of this additional information could be included in what he now reconceived as the Auschwitz building database–not just a base map, but a digital archive that stored dates, descriptions, functions, and other information, building by building. Organizing the information by building or building group would enable us to interrogate the architectural record through a GIS mapping interface. Harvey also used details from the duplicated architectural drawings to render key buildings using Google SketchUp.
Jaskot’s deeper probing of the architectural record, and his thinking about its contents in terms of visualizing data, prompted new discussions among our team. We initially struggled in communicating what our different approaches–historical, geographical, technical–might do for each other, and it took some time to reach a common grasp of spatial terms shared by each discipline but used in different ways. This became particularly clear as Jaskot and Knowles introduced the important conceptual literature on space to each other from their respective fields of geography and architectural history. However, in the process of these debates, Knowles and Jaskot began to move away from visibility-invisibility, determining that this work would have to wait for a later stage when more of the camp could be rendered in 3-D. Given the detail of evidence in the archival record on the building process, we decided to examine what the nature and timing of construction might reveal about the experience of inmates as well as the ideological goals of the SS.
We focused on Auschwitz-Birkenau in looking at the timing of construction and on Auschwitz I to compare SS goals to actual construction. We also decided to add a time signature to as many buildings as possible to study change over time through the process of construction. When time signatures were not available from the archival record, Jaskot relied on the general information on areas of construction available in the monumental five-volume analysis of Auschwitz edited by Wacław Długoborski and Franciszek Piper, Auschwitz, 1940–1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp (see note 27). It was the addition of time signatures that led to the major historical and geographic points we highlight in this chapter and also to a coming together of shared terminologies and approaches between our various interests. Through a simple animation, as well as coloring the various buildings under construction from late 1943 to the spring of 1944, the importance of the construction process became clear to us. Establishing the dimension of time also led to more iterative, exploratory use of the building database, because we could now visualize the state of certain parts of Auschwitz at certain times and compare the ideal plan to actual construction.
As we continue to gather archival evidence and develop this project in the future, we hope to make the analysis less abstract by including more information about particular buildings within the camp and, if possible, the town of Auschwitz. We want to expand the analysis as well by including myriad points of view of inmates, perpetrators, and bystanders to create a more comprehensive sense of the social history of the spaces, how they were used and experienced. At the structural level of the SS, the Auschwitz case study has also begun to intersect with the broader analysis of the SS concentration camp system as a whole, whose initial results are presented in chapter 2.
The first thing the map helps one see is that the SS buildings did not incorporate any of the major urban changes that Stosberg had planned (compare figures 6.1 and 6.4). Instead, the existing town and infrastructure were adapted and changed to suit the SS ideal conception. For example, the ceremonial entrance to the SS complex west of Auschwitz I on the lower left of the map involved the construction of an entirely new bridge approach from the town on the other side of the Soła River. Although this design did not call for getting rid of construction of other roads into the town, it reoriented the town’s main approach to the camp site with the bridge and visual focus of the plaza. In addition, the plan kept some of the preexisting buildings behind the new headquarters while erasing others in order to preserve the ideal ensemble. Further, as with our previous visualization, mapping the hand-drawn changes recorded on the SS plans results in a cartographic rendering that reveals both SS immediate priorities like their own housing and their own infrastructure and future goals like the entrance plaza in this still-optimistic phase of expansion.
Comparing the SS plan to what we know was built thus also reveals certain ideological and policy-driven goals of the SS, particularly the scale of SS ambitions. For example, as noted earlier, the area around the architectural office on the eastern side of Auschwitz I was an important piece of the idealized plan. The Hartjenstein design projected an administrative center with barracks for the single members of the SS that would be necessary when the urban site reached its full capacity of one hundred thousand laborers serving the needs of a victorious Reich. This ideal future remains as a presence (highlighted in orange in the detail of figure 6.8), picked up in our map, simultaneous with the buildings in our 1943–44 reconstruction. Though visually signaling the vast scale of the future plans for the site, nevertheless the SS focused on the needs of the moment, which included finishing construction on the expanded slaughterhouse (April 1943) and the two saunas (November 1943 and May 1944). They kept the building administration office, constructed on the site before 1943, while adding, just inside the fence of Auschwitz I, four new large barracks for the increased number of forced laborers involved in finalizing drawings and plans under Dejaco.33 The ideal plan lingered as a future goal, but expansion of the human and physical scale and capacity of the site required a different short-term emphasis at this part of the plan. These complementary but different moments of intended construction remain simultaneously visible in the base map and, hence, in our reconstruction and the rendered detail.
The rendering in figure 6.10 is an approximate representation of what we know was newly built or significantly repaired (in red) in Auschwitz-Birkenau between May 1943 and May 1944. The digital model does not include all structures in the camps and surrounding area; verifying their locations and time of construction constitutes another stage of documentary research. Even this partial mapping, however, shows the potential for comparative visual analysis to help us understand–and perceive–the decisions, choices, and scale of construction that manifested, and altered, the plans for Auschwitz. To our surprise, however, this was not the culmination of our visual analysis. In the course of designing the database of buildings that would become our digital model of Auschwitz, we decided to include the dates of construction for each structure, where those dates were provided in SS documents, so that we could map the temporal sequence of construction (see the spotlight section). This followed logically from our research into the archival evidence, as so much of what we found dealt with the fluid state of construction. When we tested this idea by creating an animation of construction in Auschwitz-Birkenau from May 1943 to February 1944, some quite unexpected questions materialized.
6.10. Plan of Auschwitz-Birkenau, with red shading indicating buildings under construction or significant repair from May 1943 to May 1944. The dash of white near the middle of the map indicates the approximate field of view for a person of average height standing in the center of that location. Reconstruction as of 2010; map by Chester Harvey.
Scholars have long known that Auschwitz-Birkenau underwent a massive transformation from the summer of 1943 onward, particularly the barracks, latrines, and kitchen and infirmary facilities of the section BII, a–f (see figure 6.4). While the SS continued to repair and enlarge the capacity of BI, the much larger facility at BII became the central means for the SS to house and control masses of labor to keep the Nazi war effort alive. Our mapping of the construction of Auschwitz-Birkenau, however, differs from some previous scholars’ reading of the architectural record, in part because it brings out much more strongly the temporal dynamics of construction at a much more granular scale. The rationally planned total environment evident in the clarity of the SS’s idealized conceptualization of the complex in May 1943 clashes with the messy reality of plans and buildings that were actualized in fits and starts over time. Strezelecka and Setkiewicz report that the sequence of constructing the structures in BII began in February 1943, with BIIe, and ended in September 1943, with BIIb, though they note that BIIc was not completed until June 1944.34 However, these scholars state that most of this construction occurred in a single month. Our graph of the archival data shows that construction was spread out from March 1943 until February 1944 (see figure 6.11). Our findings also differ on some particular points. For example, where Strezelecka and Setkiewicz claim that the men’s camp of BIId was built in July, the records show that forced laborers were still completing barracks there in November and December 1943.35 Similarly, BIIe, the so-called Gypsy Camp (a family camp for Sinti and Roma), was still an active construction site in December 1943. The new barracks added to BIIf, the infirmary section, by February 1944 numbered at least seven, not three, as Strezelecka and Setkiewicz state.
These and other changes to the site appear in our digital reconstruction as large and diverse fields of building activity that extended over many months and in significant parts of Birkenau. This included the completion in December 1943 of the thirty warehouse barracks in BIIg (“Canada”) and the large new camp processing center (the “Sauna”), which handled inmates not selected for immediate death, as well as the partial construction of BIII (“Mexico”) from the end of 1943 through April 1944. By visualizing the completion of structures over time, one sees that the physical scale and the pace of building in this part of Auschwitz dwarfed construction activity elsewhere in the camp-city.36 The digital animation, represented here as significant moments of particularly striking change but also stasis (see figure 6.12), helped us realize that Birkenau was essentially a massive but variable construction zone for much of the period of study. Both the spatial and the temporal dimensions are important here. That is to say, we can see the much more active and constant physical changes to the site that previous narrative accounts have not emphasized in their fairly broad generalizations about construction at this time. Taking BII as a case in point, one section of the densely populated living zones of the camp, we can see the variable effects in the five views from the dynamic map illustrated here. By September 1, 1943, for example, some structures were finished, though many remained incomplete. A large number of buildings were completed and handed over by the Zentralbauleitung by November 16 (our third view is from December 1). Construction continued through the end of the year; it was finished by our final view, April 1, 1944. Although we have not been able to determine the daily changes to all aspects of the site, especially in the last two months of 1943, those details that the SS records do contain suggest a visual density of construction that must have been an important factor in the lived experience of the inmates.
6.11. Number of buildings under construction at Auschwitz-Birkenau, April 1943 to May 1944. Graph by Benjamin Perry Blackshear.
Indeed, the erection of barracks altered the built landscape over and over. It was a highly unstable, even chaotic, site of activity, with delivery of supplies and the coming and going of labor, managers, contractors, and guards, all amid the swelling population of inmates and the constant arrival of new trainloads of prisoners. These conditions could explain what Steinbacher notes in a short sentence: that this period from 1943 to early 1944 accounted for two-thirds of all known escape attempts over the entire history of the camp.37 Although proving this relationship requires more research, we want to underscore that the question of how escape attempts might have been related to construction activity came from visualizing the archival evidence. With construction dominating the site at this time, Bischoff was perhaps right to complain to higher-ups that he needed more SS guard towers. The scale of construction and its duration probably meant that much of the camp was visually confusing, quite a different environment than the regimented, rational, static image of the camp that has become so familiar to us.
6.12. Phases of construction activity at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Section BIId. The light-pink shading indicates under construction during the stated period, dark red shading indicates construction completed, and empty building footprints indicate structures that were either planned but not yet built or whose construction status we have not yet ascertained for the period from July 1, 1943, to April 30, 1944. Maps by Benjamin Perry Blackshear from building database by Chester Harvey.
Seeing Birkenau in these terms brought us back to the questions of visibility that Jaskot and Knowles had first considered when they began conceptualizing how to research Auschwitz from a geographical point of view. Their first venture was a rudimentary version of viewshed analysis, a GIS method in which one uses a digital elevation model of a given region’s terrain to discover what areas would, and would not, be visible from specified viewpoints.38 We developed that idea much more fully in this project, by assigning structural dimensions to the barracks, crematoria, and other key features in Auschwitz-Birkenau (see the spotlight section), which was possible based on the detail of the archival evidence. This procedure gave us our quasi-three-dimensional model for the main parts of the camp. Because the structural dimensions were entered as numerical measurements in the model, we could also use visualization techniques to approximate fields of view from key locations, such as the ramp where prisoners were off-loaded from train cars (see figure 6.13). The resulting image shows a partial reconstruction of Birkenau as it existed in February 1944. These building sites formed a field of activity that changed dramatically from March 1943, even if they were mostly complete by February of the following year, forming a more stable physical environment.
6.13. Overhead simulated viewshed from the ramp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, circa February 1944. The viewshed analysis shows both spaces of relative visibility and invisibility looking up and down the ramp for those who experienced the site. Visualization by Chester Harvey.
One could use the three-dimensional digital model to investigate the particular avenues or areas visible to any individual, whether an SS guard or an inmate.39 If further research enables us to determine the state of construction with greater specificity, the model could support quite detailed analysis of the shifting angles and areas of relative exposure and concealment among the barracks and other buildings. We could then test the extent to which SS personnel’s ability to oversee the prisoner population may have been hampered by construction activities, further highlighting tensions between the ideal plan and the physical reality. The SS conceptualized the space of Birkenau as a comprehensive and total environment, but the fluidity of a construction site of this magnitude meant that inmates could occasionally take an opportunity to save themselves or perhaps have a precious moment of privacy. Of course, spatial confusion also meant that the SS could find new infractions to punish when inmates were caught unawares, exposed in new ways day to day.40 The camp may have posed more unknown dangers to inmates during the construction phase, for they lacked the synoptic geographical knowledge of the site possessed by their keepers.
These conditions pose many new questions for historical analysis. The dynamic representation of the archive raises the possibility that the density of construction activity over time significantly impacted the experiences of the inmates and the SS in this important period of development at Auschwitz. As such, it warrants further investigation. Our own future pursuit of this issue would include refining the base-map and building database, particularly to incorporate as many structures, and to date their construction, as precisely as possible.
Attending to construction at Auschwitz emphasizes the importance of several factors in our attempts to come to terms with this complicated and grotesque site. First, the construction archives are vast yet surprisingly underutilized resources for ascertaining the spatial implications of SS goals and the experience of inmates. Second, the archives indicate that the history of infrastructure forms a major activity in addition to planning and implementing forced labor and genocide. Third, visualizing the archive through digital geographical methods reveals the massive physical scale and the SS interests in a spatially dense construction site over a vast urban area that extended well beyond the most familiar spaces of murder. And finally, mapping the materiality of Auschwitz compels us to consider the temporal scale of construction in a new way. Seeing the construction of BII and other areas of the camp happen over time makes one powerfully aware that the activity on these enormous building sites must have affected everyone there, not least because of the ways construction constantly altered what, and who, was more or less visible at the site. These conclusions do not challenge the importance of previous studies that focused on the machinery of genocide, the testimony of survivors, or the administrative development of the SS. Rather, they add to these another differently textured way of seeing Auschwitz as a functional place during a crucial and often overlooked period in its development.
For historians, looking at the plans and construction together brings different chronologies, problems, and SS interests to the fore. Clearly, the amount of SS activity focused on preparing for, organizing, and overseeing the massive construction is much greater than scholarship has yet acknowledged.41 Inmates’ experience of Auschwitz must have been significantly more about survival in an ever-changing construction site than we have yet considered. Because the spaces over which the SS and managers exerted their control were fluid in both physical and temporal terms, their power may have been limited, or compromised, and the function of particular areas rapidly transformed at certain times. Bringing together the different historical moments of planning and construction by layering them within digital space enables telling comparisons. It also helps us remember that the ideal forms of Auschwitz remained as a mental substrate that inspired a grotesque optimism for the construction of an urban complex built on forced labor.
Our interrogation of the architectural plans and visualization of the archive point us to the important historiographic search for accuracy and detail when it comes to questions concerning the Holocaust and space. The methods we demonstrate in this chapter made us acutely aware of what geographers call the scale and the resolution of the data.42 For scale, our focus of study kept shifting with our archival research–from the individual inmate in a discrete space to the urban environment of hundreds of buildings–as different SS spatial priorities asserted themselves in the records. The archival research on the evidence of construction also led us to think about resolution, as certainly one can know no more than what the given extent and level of detail of the sources permit. Some of our sources were very precise, such as architectural plans specified to the centimeter, while others were far less so, such as plans in meters or plans that left time ambiguous because they did not clearly distinguish between buildings that had been completed versus buildings still in the planning stage. We also encountered issues of accuracy when we found discrepancies between documents. Was a particular structure actually planned? Actually built? Was it built according to plan? If so, which plan? Was a building begun or completed at the date noted on a plan, or is it impossible to know for certain? These basic questions were in some cases unanswerable, for even the vast SS record is partial and sometimes inconsistent. Because we were striving to create a detailed, building-level spatio-temporal database, we repeatedly confronted the problem of how to resolve discrepancies and to what degree we could generalize from our findings. We would argue, however, that grappling with the evidence at this level is both creative and cautionary. It showed very clearly the limits of what we knew (at this point in the project) while simultaneously revealing the very human stutter-step, historically contingent process of realizing grandiose visions in the material world of what became Auschwitz.
Using geographical and art historical tools also enabled us to discern spatial patterns of relative power and to intuit visual experiences that are not recorded in any document or captured in any historical photograph. Much work remains to determine whether the period and details studied here are important variations on the overall history of the site or whether they were the rule. Further work on accurately mapping more than a thousand buildings in space and time will be crucial to extend the project. Our analysis thus far suggests the need for a complete history of the building office and construction of the entire SS area of interest. In the course of this project, we have become convinced that only by jointly exploring both art historical and geographical questions can we hope to understand the importance of construction to the SS and its profound influence on the history of this most notorious of Holocaust sites. Art history gives us the “what” and “how” of the historical question, but the changing places that constituted Auschwitz become visible only by using geographical techniques. Any comprehensive analysis of the spaces of the Holocaust needs both.
Our thanks to Robert Buerglener, Niels Gutschow, Peter Hayes, members of the fall 2010 University of Chicago Material Culture Workshop, commentators at the Lessons & Legacies 2010 conference, Alberto Giordano for his editorial advice, and our fellow Holocaust Historical GIS Project colleagues for their critical suggestions on the various versions of this project and essay.
1. For the most systematic overview of the development of the SS concentration camp system, see Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: Eine politische Organisationsgeschichte (Hamburg: Hamburger, 1999). For the development of SS managers of forced labor and engineers of these camps, see Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
2. The classic study of IG Farben and the goals of forced labor at Monowitz remains Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era, new edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 [1987]), 325–76. For the exploitation of the East in relation to the war, see Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Viking, 2006).
3. Niels Gutschow, Ordnungswahn: Architekten planen im “eingedeutschten Osten,” 1939–1945 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001), 77–78, 98–102, 196–99. Stosberg disappears from any records at Auschwitz after this meeting. According to his postwar interviews, his planning work was done, and so he joined the army that September, returning to his hometown of Hannover after the war to take up city planning again.
4. Israel Gutman and Bellat Gutterman, eds., The Auschwitz Album: The Story of a Transport (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002). See the overview of the photographic office at Auschwitz, the SS Erkennungsdienst (part of the Politische Abteilung), headed by Berhard Walter and Ernst Hofmann in Wacław Długoborski and Franciszek Piper, eds., Auschwitz, 1940–1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000), 1:184–89.
5. See, for example, the important work on planning the Holocaust in Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Many broader approaches to the destruction of the European Jews naturally focus on the beginning of the campaign and the end, particular as the latter highlights testimonies as well as tribunals and other postwar events. This is not surprising, given that the vast majority of victims did not live to the postwar period, particularly if they were caught earlier than 1943–44 in the SS system. See, for example, the sources and general perspective in Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); or the excellent essays in Ulrich Herbert, ed., Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik, 1939–1945: Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen (Frankfurt: Fischer Tachenbuch Verlag, 1998). More recent work has focused on trial testimony, such as the compelling volume by Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), among others.
6. See Allen, Business of Genocide; and Paul B. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Monumental Nazi Building Economy (New York: Routledge, 2000). Allen’s analysis of the SS engineer Hans Kammler is particularly revealing in how Kammler mobilized construction and questions of infrastructure broadly within the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (Wirtschaftsund Verwaltungshauptamt) to expand the brutal capacity of the use of forced labor.
7. Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). See also, among other publications, his return to the subject of the crematoria and gas chambers in detail in Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
8. Gutschow, Ordnungswahn, esp. 127. He notes in addition that a comprehensive analysis of the spatial and built environment remains to be done. Much of the construction activity in 1943 is covered in one page, 140. Gutschow, though, remains one of the few architectural historians to take the site as a whole seriously, and his analysis of the planning in the East (including Auschwitz) in relation to the larger spatial manipulation necessary for the Nazi Generalplan Ost remains the best work on the topic.
9. Długoborski and Piper, Auschwitz, 1940–1945; Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz: Geschichte und Nachgeschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2004). This volume is a very good summary of her extensive treatment in Steinbacher, “Musterstadt” Auschwitz: Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2000). An excellent example of the forensic archaeological and archival work being done by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on specific aspects of the camp structures is Teresa Ewiebocka, ed., The Architecture of Crime: The “Central Camp Sauna” in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, translated by William Brand (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2001). See also the extraordinarily rich historical preservation materials in Marek Rawecki’s revised dissertation, Auschwitz-Birkenau Zone (Gliwice: Wydawnictwo Politechniki Elaskiej, 2003). Rawecki’s work is part of a project to analyze the historical structures remaining at the site to provide a basis of decisions about whether they should be preserved as part of the museum zone or turned over for local use. Our study is indebted to his general-use maps and detailed information on specific aspects of the site.
10. Andrew Charlesworth, “The Topography of Genocide,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, edited by Dan Stone (London: Palgrave, 2004), 216–52. More generally, see the introduction to problems of historical geography in Anne Kelly Knowles, “GIS and History,” in Placing History, edited by Knowles (Redlands, Calif.: ESRI Press, 2008), 1–26; as well as Charles W. J. Withers, “Place and the ‘Spatial Turn’ in Geography and in History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 4 (2009): 637–58.
11. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
12. David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 50.
13. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (New York: Zone Books, 2002) and State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). For a wide-ranging consideration of the spatial dimensions of Agamben’s work, see the theme issue of Geografiska Annaler B 88, no. 4 (2006).
14. Paulo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca, “Topographies/Topologies of the Camp: Auschwitz as a Spatial Threshold,” Political Geography 30, no. 1 (2010): 3–12.
15. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996).
16. See the discussion of the relationship between town and SS planners in Gutschow, Ordnungswahn, 88–127. As Gutschow indicates, town officials seem never to have been satisfied at the amount of space the SS used so near the train station, prime territory for their own goals. Even after Stosberg’s final plan and the meeting of the SS, they still talked about the awkward position of Auschwitz I in relation to the housing, public, and institutional plans of the city.
17. Gutschow, Ordnungswahn, 79–88; Steinbacher, Auschwitz, 37–42. See also the SS building record for start and completion dates of crematoria I–IV in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (hereafter CAHS), RG 11.001M.03, Reel 34: 502-1-210. This document series forms part of the archival evidence captured by the Soviet Union upon liberation of the camp, now housed at the Russian State Military Archives, a microfilmed copy of which exists at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Collections Division, Archives Branch.
18. See the foundational text on architecture and planning in National Socialist Germany, Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 185–216. Since then, several scholars have added key contributions to the literature. For monumental city planning and its importance to the state, see, for example, Alex Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990). Gutschow also has discussions of Nazi trends in relation to their implementation in eastern cities such as Warsaw and Krakow. Gutschow, Ordnungswahn, 43–57.
19. Gutschow remains the best in terms of the analysis of the various planning strategies involved at the site. Nevertheless, scholars have not yet remarked on the interesting cluster of modernist texts in the (partial) remains of the SS library. Selections from the SS library, including modernists such as Ernst Neufert, are available in the crucial records captured by the Soviets. We referenced the following microfilm copy of the Russian State Military Archive collection, microfilmed in CAHS, RG 11.001M.03, Reel 62: 502-2-87; Reel 63: 502-2-88, 502-2-89, 502-2-90, 502-2-91. For the importance of Neufert’s modernist planning ideas to Nazi architects more generally, see Werner Durth, Deutsche Architekten: Biographische Verflechtungen, 1900–1970 (Braunschweig: Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, 1986), 150–56.
20. Scholars have illustrated and discussed the inmate’s entrance gate at Birkenau repeatedly, so much so that it has become iconic for the genocidal process as a whole (as exemplified, for example, in its metonymic use in Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List). Oddly, though, the SS entrance structure is rarely if ever mentioned. Given that both structures were clearly planned together–they have similar scales, use a central tower, are both located symmetrically a quarter of the way from the presumed respective border of Birkenau, and are within easy sight of each other–this is a noticeable omission from the literature. Such a partial interest tends to belie the SS’s integrated approach to the area as a whole, given that the planners meant the vast SS activities and the use and abuse of the inmates to be distinct but related interests.
21. Jaskot, Architecture of Oppression, 114–39.
22. For example, the emendations on a February 1943 site drawing for Auschwitz I reveal just such a moment in the physical actualization of the plan, when active construction modified totalized ideology (CAHS, RG 11.001M.03, Reel 24: 502-1-88). This February 1943 plan (based on Hartjenstein’s November 1942 final ideal plan) has additions added by hand and a date stamp of January 28, 1944. We used a copy of this base map as the beginning of our spatial analysis.
23. See the overview of 1943 in Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 295–99. Notably, Czech focuses on daily orders and events that affected the prisoners and does not bring up much information on the building administration of the camp. For Ertl and Hartjenstein, see Gutschow, Ordnungswahn, 186–87, 190–91.
24. For more on Dejaco’s role, see Dwork and Van Pelt, Auschwitz, 214, 324–36. Note that Bischoff’s Zentralbauleitung issued an order on May 5, 1943, stating that all plans going in and out had to be registered with Dejaco, including any highly sensitive plans of military importance or documents to be held in strict secrecy, like the crematoria. CAHS, RG 11.001M.03, Reel 21: 502-1-39.
25. CAHS, RG 11.001M.03, Reel 38: 502-1-282. For the DAW, see Allen, Business of Genocide, 100–101; and Rawecki, Auschwitz-Birkenau Zone, 87–88.
26. CAHS, RG 11.001M.03, Reel 38: 502-1-285; Reel 59: 502-2-55.
27. The best source on construction of BII remains Irena Strezelecka and Piotr Setkiewicz, “The Construction, Expansion, and Development of the Camp and Its Branches,” in Auschwitz, 1940–1945, edited by Długoborski and Piper, 1:89–100, and the summary of activity on 82. We have followed the general parameters of the dates for each section of BII as laid out here. However, the archival evidence suggests a longer and more variable construction period, as noted below. Our analysis emphasizes this longer phase of construction as crucial. For the construction plans and completion data, see CAHS, RG 11.001M.03, Reel 59: 502-2-51, 502-2-52, 502-2-53, 502-2-56.
28. CAHS, RG 11.001M.03, Reel 34: 502-1-228.
29. CAHS, RG 11.001M.03, Reel 59: 502-2-50, 502-2-55, 502-2-56.
30. J. B. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy,” in The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, edited by Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 83–108.
31. Some insight into how the SS conceptualized its short-term spatial goals comes in a report by Bischoff in August 1943. This report summarized the visit of Oswald Pohl, the head of the SS-WVHA and a man of increasing importance within the upper echelons of the SS hierarchy. Note there is also evidence to suggest that the SS ordered photos made of completed buildings and organized them in presentation books to give to visiting elite like Pohl, which could explain the formal mounting of photographs left from after the war as well as the pride in architecture of the complex. See, for example, the Zentralbauleitung order for photos of particular buildings from June 25, 1942, and the report on Pohl’s visit (Aktenvermerk, August 17, 1943) in CAHS, RG 11.001M.03, Reel 20: 502-1-26 and 502-1-35. For more on Pohl’s roles within the SS, see the essay by Michael Allen in Ronald Smelser and Enrico Syring, eds., Die SS: Elite unter dem Totenkopf (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2000).
32. Note that, as of this writing, we have surveyed the architectural records for the majority of construction at Birkenau, Auschwitz I, and the forced-labor operations in the immediate area contiguous with the camps for our specific period of study. A systematic analysis of construction records for the city of Auschwitz as well as the complete SS “area of interest” during the entire history of the camp remains to be done.
33. CAHS, RG 11.001M.03, Reel 34: 502-1-211; Reel 59: 502-2-50; 502-2-55.
34. Strezelecka and Setkiewicz, “Construction, Expansion, and Development of the Camp,” 82.
35. Ibid., 92. CAHS, RG 11.001M.03, Reel 59: 502-5-51. The innumerable generic barracks designs left behind by the Zentralbauleitung featured specific keys that indicated exactly to which barracks and what part of BII the plans referred as well as further documentation for start and end dates of construction.
36. Ibid., 97–100. See also the overview of construction in Andrzej Strzelecki, “The History, Role, and Operation of the Central Camp Sauna in Auschwitz II–Birkenau,” in Architecture of Crime, edited by Ewiebocka, 24–29.
37. Steinbacher, Auschwitz, 31.
38. Waitman Wade Beorn et al., “Geographies of the Holocaust,” Geographical Review 99, no. 4 (2009): 571–72. Anne Kelly Knowles used viewshed analysis in her study of command decisions at the Battle of Gettysburg in the U.S. Civil War. See Knowles, “What Could Lee See at Gettysburg?” in Placing History, edited by Knowles, 236–65.
39. Keeping in mind the varying certainty and specificity of structures’ existence, or degree of completion, at any given point in time.
40. In a related point, Georges Didi-Huberman makes clear in his extraordinary book on the four known photographs taken by inmates at Auschwitz that the scale of the murder of the Hungarian Jews also disrupted the spatial patterns of genocide. In so doing, while tens of thousands were killed, the disruption also opened up a small possibility of resistance even for the inmates in the Sonderkommando. See Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, translated by Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
41. See, however, Allen’s important work on engineers in The Business of Genocide.
42. On the importance of scale, see the excellent recent overview by Andrew Herod, Scale (London: Routledge, 2011).