By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Despite the now-infamous wrought iron sign at the entry gates, translated as “Work makes one free,” for more than a million people who came there between 1941 and 1945, work at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland emphatically did not make them free.
Yet 60 years after the liberation of the Polish death camps, the purpose and the role of Auschwitz has taken center stage in the ongoing debate over evidence of one of the darkest moments in modern history.
It may appear obscene to even question the authenticity of so many witnesses—both the living survivors of the camps and those who witnessed them from outside. Yet Holocaust deniers have, time and again, seized on the design of Auschwitz to press their claim that the systematic destruction of a people could not have really been the Germans’ intent.
Robert-Jan van Pelt, however, a quiet man with a friendly demeanor and a soft Dutch accent, has become one of the leading voices for the dead in debunking Holocaust deniers. Van Pelt recently spent several days as a scholar-in-residence at the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center in Seattle, in conjunction with PBS’s airing of the three-part BBC documentary, “Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State,” in which he took part.
A professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo in Canada, van Pelt came to his current prominence not from an overarching interest in the Holocaust but through work on architectural history and an interest in the biographies of the architects of Auschwitz. He said his interest was first peaked by the fact that Auschwitz was the only instance where the architects ultimately might have hanged for their participation in the project.
“When I got interested in this, it became clear that no one was paying attention to it and I was interested in the silence of architectural critics about this topic,” van Pelt explained.
In 1989 he traveled to Vienna to delve into the archives of the1970 trial of the architects who designed the death factories of Auschwitz. The two men were found not guilty in that trial, a result van Pelt disagreed with.
“They should have been hanged in 1970. They should have been convicted because they knew exactly what they were doing,” he said. “The gas chambers were constructed using all the intelligence they used to make modifications…to make systems for the cyanide to be brought in and taken out againÖ.This was the nadir in the history of architecture.”
Van Pelt also went to Poland to look at the papers that had been preserved from the war period. He said this was the first time that many of the documents were made widely available because of the changes taking place in the Soviet bloc at that time. Most of the blueprints and other documentation had been left behind by the retreating Germans as an oversight because the architects’ offices were several miles away from the camp itself.
What he found was that “the construction in Auschwitz was not really only about crematoria and barracks for prisoners but that, in fact, Auschwitz was part of an enormous project to re-Germanize the area and that they were building a city there … to replace the old town with a new town following the newest kind of urban principles.”
The traditional version of the history of Auschwitz, he said, “starts out that ‘for thousands of years death lived here,’ that this was a cursed place and when the Germans chose that place to build Hell on Earth.” To the contrary, he said, he discovered that in 1940 the Germans came to Auschwitz and “thought it was a wonderful place to live.”
“The story,” he continued, “gets the structure of a tragedy of hubris—the attempt to create a perfect town that somehow disintegrates into the creation of the worst place on Earth.”
In 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, the country was divided into sections: one reserved for the ethnic Poles, the easternmost area assigned to the Soviet Union and western Poland annexed by the Third Reich as part of the expanded Germany.
The problem van Pelt said they faced was that, in contrast with farming areas, where German farmers replaced Polish ones, Auschwitz was at the edge of an industrial area and German peasants and farmers were no replacement for the skilled industrial workers being displaced.
“They realized that the Poles had to stay and they had to create this camp to terrorize the Poles so they would do their jobs and not revolt,” he said.
Originally Himmler’s plan was to import forced labor in the form of Soviet POWs he anticipated would be coming once the Nazis attacked Russia. That plan had to be abandoned when, in 1942, all POW labor was reassigned to the armaments industry. Initially Jews were brought in from neighboring Slovakia to replace the expected Red Army soldiers. Only able-bodied men between 20 and 40 were to be sent there as laborers, but the Slovakian authorities balked at the idea of being left holding large numbers of old people and children, insisting that the Germans take all the Jews they had rounded up instead.
Having coauthored the definitive history of the town, Auschwitz 1270 to the Present, van Pelt was recruited by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris to appear in his 1998 film, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. He explained where Herr Leuchter, who claimed that the absence of cyanide residues on the walls of the gas chambers proved that they had not actually been used as murder centers, had gotten his evidence wrong. While working on that project, he was also contacted by the lawyers for Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, who was defending herself in a British court against a libel claim by Holocaust denier David Irving. Irving lost his case.
“To prove that the world is round is kind of a tedious activity, actually,” he said of that experience. Still, he is motivated by a belief that the discussion is essential.
“If we have no place for it in the history of architects and architecture, maybe we should have a different plot to that history,” he said. “I think with any kind of human activity you should also talk about the shadow. This is the ultimate shadow of my discipline.”