A couple of days ago I heard the end of a news story on the radio saying that authorities in Berlin had recently discovered blueprints for concentration camp gas chambers dated 1941, the earliest hard evidence for the formal plans for the extermination of the Jews and others. I didn’t hear the whole story and I couldn’t find anything in the newspapers. A search of the internet also failed to turn up the story. Can anyone refer me to an account of the discovery?
Here’s one story. Lots of others with a quick Google for “death camp blueprints”.
Some online articles in German papers:
Auschwitz – Die Baupläne: BILD druckt Dokumente des Grauens, die jetzt in Berlin gefunden wurden | News | BILD.de
(Bild, a large tabloid, had the original scoop)
KZ-Pläne: Auschwitz auf dem Reißbrett - Bilder & Fotos - WELT
(a better-quality picture gallery showing important parts of the diagrams)
Be aware that Bild’s treatment of the story and the way this has been repeated by other news outlets has been criticised by Holocaust experts. The most striking of the plans are already known in other copies or are variants of known series, all already prominently published in such standard works on the development of the camp and its buildings as Dwork and van Pelt’s Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (Norton, 1996) and Pressac’s Les crématoires d’Auschwitz (CNRS, 1993; 2007). Nor are the dates on them surprising. Hence reactions like van Pelt’s in this story.
Which isn’t to dismiss them. This is precisely a case where the specialists have argued about exactly how the bureaucracy generated and distributed such documents. Additional copies, originally filed elsewhere, may help refine the details of this process.