The drawing on Photo 20 is a real godsend for the revisionists. Concerning the initial arrangement for the third construction stage at Birkenau [KGL Bauabschnitt III, it formally states that this was to serve only as a mixed quarantine and hospital camp. There is INCOMPATIBILITY in the creation of a health camp a few hundred yards from four Krematorien where, according to official history, people were exterminated on a large scale. Drawing 2471 of a barracks for sick prisoners planned for BA.III [Photo 21] showing in detail the arrangement of the bunks, supports this demonstration. The two drawings date from June 1943. when the Bauleitung was completing the construction of the four new Krematorien, and it is obvious that KGL Birkenau cannot have had at one and the same time two opposing functions: health care and extermination. The plan for building a very large hospital section in BA.III thus shows that the Krematorien were built purely for incineration, without any homicidal gassings, because the SS wanted to “maintain” its concentration camp labor force.
This argument seems logical and is not easy to counter. The drawings exist, and what is more they come from the SS Economic Administration Head Office in Berlin, so it was no local humanitarian initiative.
One remark, however, and above all another Bauleitung drawing [Photo 22], contradict this plausible, but theoretical, reasoning. Life and death were such close neighbours in Birkenau that the only functioning hospital sector, B.IIf, was right next to Krematorien III and IV. The sick prisoners placed in the front row of this demential theatre knew that it there was a selection, or if they died, they would be reduced to ashes in these buildings.
It may appear paradoxical that prisoners should have received even a semblance of medical care just outside the Krematorien which had anihilated their relatives and could do the same to them at any moment, but this would be to disregard the capacity for “doublethink” [to use the term coined by George Orwell in “1984”] of the SS hierarchy, who blindly executed orders even when they were totally contradictory.
The decisive argument proving that drawing 2521 was only a PROJECT, is to compare it with an overall plan of Birkenau, drawing 3764 of 23/3/44 [Photo 22], where BA.III no longer has 16,600 occupants as planned. but 60,000, i.e. the occupancy rate of the barracks has increased fourfold, the degree of crowding now being comparable to that of BA.II. Under these circumstances it becomes nonsense to talk of “hospital barracks”.
The third construction stage at Birkenau, “Mexico” in camp parlance, was on the one hand never completed, which brought about apalling sanitary conditions, and on the other hand the part that did exist became a transit camp in May-June 1944 for the Hungarian transports when the Krematorien could not keep up with the influx.
The barracks erected in BA.III, which were scarcely half the number originally planned, were dismantled in November-December 1944 and their components apparently transported to Gross Rosen. The majority of those of BA.II and all those of Monowitz, were dismantled after the liberation of the camp and taken to the outskirts of Warsaw, to serve as emergency housing for the surviving inhabitants who returned to this city, and pending the painful rebuilding process that has continued until today.
A comparison of these drawings (the project of 30/6/43 and the actual stituation as at 23/3/44) shows that planned construction was not necessarily carried out and that plans EVOLVED according to needs. This process was virtually systematic, and can be seen in the overall planning of Birkenau, in the modifications in BW 5a and 5b to create disinfestation gas chambers and in the adaptation of the Krematorien to carry out mass murders.
The fact that some drawings for Auschwitz were produced in Berlin, an unusual procedure, was used after the war, for example by Untersturmführer Walter Dejaco, one of the principal “architects” of the Krematorien to exculpate himself and claim that the design of these criminal installations came from the SS Main Office in Berlin [trial of Dr Georg Meyer and others at Reutte, hearing of 3/4/62], WHICH WAS NOT THE CASE, as can be seen by studying and comparing the majority of the remaining drawings of these buildings. |
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Photo 20:
Bauleitung drawing 2521
[PMO neg. no. 20943/18]
Auschwitz conccntrarion camp —
Third construction stage
Quarantine section and prisoners' hospital
Drawn in Berlin on 4/6/43
Received by Auschwitz Bauleitung on 30/6/43
Classified as drawing No 2521
Countersigned by Bischoff
Capacity for housing 16,596 prisoners. |
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