Central construction management of the Waffen SS and Police Auschwitz

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The central construction management of the Waffen-SS and Police Auschwitz (ZBL Auschwitz) under their temporary director Karl Bischoff was also responsible for the structural planning and construction of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination and concentration camp, including the gas chambers and crematoria during the German occupation of Poland between 1941 and 1941 1944. Your participation in it can be estimated relatively well from the files that have been preserved. This SS-internal planning office and construction management drafted the corresponding construction plans and ensured their implementation up to ongoing repair measures during the mass murders by other perpetrators who belonged to the camp SS .

SS division of the main camp

On April 27, 1940, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of a regional prison and transit camp for 10,000 men in Oświęcim (Auschwitz). In the suburb of Zasole there were several brick buildings that had previously served as barracks for the Polish artillery. For the expansion of the main camp was SS construction department Auschwitz / Upper Silesia responsible; it was run from May 1940 to November 1941 by the architect August Schlachter . Leading employees included Walter Urbanczyk as deputy, the architect Walter Dejaco and the structural engineer Fritz Ertl .

The camp commandant Rudolf Höß received weekly reports on the progress of the construction work. At first it was about drinking water supply, sewers and drainage of the site. One of the first construction measures was the conversion of a former ammunition depot ("bunker") into a crematorium ; a first oven from the Topf and Sons company was operational in August 1940. In September 1940, Oswald Pohl ordered the storage capacity to be increased by adding to the 14 one-story barracks. The construction plans prepared included the conversion of the building, later designated as Block 11 , in the basement of which there were dark cells .

On September 27, 1941, Hans Kammler from the SS Main Office for Households and Buildings ordered a new camp to be built in the “Auschwitz area of ​​interest” for initially 50,000 Soviet prisoners of war - what would later become the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp . Kammler believed that August Schlachter was not up to the upcoming larger tasks, and at the beginning of October 1941 he entrusted Karl Bischoff with this task.

Personnel and structure of the central construction management

U.S. aerial photo from January 14, 1945

On October 15, 1941, Karl Bischoff was appointed as the successor to butcher. A few weeks later, the new building department was elevated to the rank of central construction management, which Bischoff held until October 1943 and was then replaced by Werner Jothann . In a broader sense, the central construction management was subordinate to Office Group C (Department of Construction) in the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (SS-WVHA) in Berlin , the head of which was SS group leader Hans Kammler. Up until December 1943, the direct superior office was the SS-Bauinspektion Ost with its headquarters in Poznan and then the building inspection of the Waffen-SS and Police Silesia with its headquarters in Katowice . In addition, it was subordinate to the site elder and camp commanders responsible for the SS area of ​​interest and its buildings.

In 1941, the construction management consisted of 34 people, who were subsequently increased to around 90 with wall polishers, concrete skilled workers, draftsmen, construction and electrical engineers from the security team. Numerous prisoners were also used for extensive planning and drawing tasks. Overall, the ZBL Auschwitz belonged to more than 180 SS members between 1941 and the summer of 1944. They organized the deployment of around 8,000 prisoners and 1,000 civilian workers. Planning decisions were largely reserved for the twenty SS officers who served there between 1941 and January 1945.

The ZBL was structured as follows: construction office and the building construction, water supply, surveying and general departments. The ZBL Auschwitz was directly subordinate to five construction managers. Construction management 2 was directly involved in the planning of the mass murder; From 1943 onwards, the organization plan supplemented their task description with the addition "Carrying out the special treatment".

  • Construction management 1: Main camp (Hans Kirschneck): Increase in the number of prisoners' blocks, new construction of functional buildings in the commandant's area, accommodation barracks and housing developments.
  • Construction management 2: Birkenau prisoner-of-war camp ( Josef Janisch ): Construction of 343 prisoner barracks , 158 functional barracks , four crematoria, gas chambers and morgues.
  • Site management 3: Auschwitz industrial site (Werner Jothann): factory buildings for DAW , DEST and Friedrich Krupp AG
  • Site management 4: Main economic camp of the Waffen-SS and military economic camp Oderberg (Josef Pollok): warehouse building and office barracks
  • Site management 5: Gut Freudenthal and Partschendorf (SS-Unterscharführer Mayer): buildings for agricultural businesses - from 1944 amelioration (Josef Frenk)

Participation in the genocide

The Auschwitz Central Construction Office played an important role in the state-organized mass murder of European Jews by contributing to the implementation of the “ Final Solution ” as a “willing and largely smoothly functioning body” . Everyone who was involved in the construction of the four crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau knew from a certain point in time which criminal goals these buildings were supposed to serve.

Already during the first "test gassings" in the main camp in the basement of Block 11, construction management work details were involved in sealing. Several conversions were carried out in Crematorium I in the main camp, which required the planning involvement of the construction management.

Heinrich Himmler visited Auschwitz on July 17, 1942. Bischoff was allowed to accompany him and was commended for his performance in front of all officers. In a promotion proposal at the end of 1942, Bischoff's services to the "best organized and efficient large-scale construction site of the Waffen SS" were praised, in particular he had "created the technical prerequisites for carrying out the special action of the Reichführer SS in day and night work." Should the full purpose of the crematoria remain unnamed, Bischoff reported the imminent completion of "Crematorium II" to his superior Kammler in a letter dated January 29, 1943 with the following words:

“The ovens were inspected in the presence of the chief engineer examiner of the executing company, Topf u. Sons, Erfurt, cheered on and working perfectly. The reinforced concrete ceiling of the morgue could not be removed due to the frost. However, this is insignificant because the gas cellar can be used for this. "

Criminal prosecution

Although SS-Obersturmführer Josef Janisch was on the Allied wanted list in 1948 , he was never called to account. In 1959 and 1962, various public prosecutors started investigations against him, but there were no criminal proceedings before his death in 1964. With Walter Dejaco and Fritz Ertl , two other members of the ZBL Auschwitz were investigated. You were on trial in Vienna in 1972 . The trial ended in an acquittal. Bischoff died in 1950 without ever being bothered by law enforcement officials.

Planning documents and correspondence

Beginning November 1943 left Bischoff Auschwitz and became head of the Building Inspection of the Waffen-SS and Police Silesia , later due to the war from Katowice to Wroclaw was moved. In the course of the camp clearance, some of the ZBL members were transferred to the building inspection of the Waffen-SS and Police Silesia and others to the SS-WVHA or to the construction management of other concentration camps. The central construction management near the commandant's office was dissolved and the building was sealed in the course of 1944. When the documents from the concentration camp were destroyed by the SS in January 1945, the disused building of the Central Construction Office was forgotten as a service archive, and most of the documents were later moved to the state archives in Moscow . When the files were split up in the immediate post-war period, a smaller part of his files remained in Poland. The construction documents also contain orders for gas testing devices and special doors, the purpose of which is clear.

Original construction plans discovered in Germany in 2008 by the construction management of the Waffen SS and Auschwitz Police were transferred to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel in 2009 . The Central Construction Office's album has also survived, in which the progress of the construction work in the Auschwitz camp complex is documented by the member of the Central Construction Office, Dietrich Kamann.

literature

  • Michael Thad Allen: The Business of Genocide. The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps. The University of North Carolina Press, 2005, ISBN 0-8078-5615-0 . (English)
  • Wacław Długoborski , Franciszek Piper (eds.): Auschwitz 1940–1945. Studies on the history of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. Verlag Staatliches Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oswiecim 1999, 5 volumes: I. Construction and structure of the camp. II. The prisoners - conditions of existence, work and death. III. Destruction. IV. Resistance. V. Epilog., ISBN 83-85047-76-X .
  • Raul Hilberg , Michael Gerenbaum (Eds.); Yisrael Gutman : Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-253-32684-2 . (English)
  • Rainer Fröbe: Build and destroy. The central site management Auschwitz and the final solution. In: Christian Gerlach: "Average offender" - action and motivation. Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-922611-84-2 , pp. 155–209 (series: Contributions to the History of National Socialism No. 16).
  • Jean-Claude Pressac: The Auschwitz Crematoria. 2nd Edition. Piper, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-492-12193-4 .

Web links

Commons : Auschwitz-Birkenau  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the origin of the main camp see Robert-Jan van Pelt , Deborah Dwork: Auschwitz - From 1270 to today. Special edition of the Gutenberg Book Guild. Frankfurt am Main / Vienna 1999, ISBN 3-7632-4897-8 , pp. 181–190.
  2. ^ Jean-Claude Pressac : The crematoria of Auschwitz - The technique of genocide. New edition. Munich / Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-492-12193-4 , p. 175.
  3. ^ Jean-Claude Pressac: The crematoria of Auschwitz .... p. 175 / Spelling Walther U. in Robert-Jan van Pelt, Deborah Dwork: Auschwitz ... p. 184 (passim).
  4. ^ Jean-Claude Pressac: The crematoria of Auschwitz .... pp. 14/15, 19–24.
  5. ^ Robert Jan van Pelt, Deborah Dwork: Auschwitz. P. 192 / note 19 on p. 435 documents the allocation of funds on August 10, 1941.
  6. ↑ cf. Jan Erik Schulte : From labor to extermination camp. The history of the origins of Auschwitz-Birkenau 1941/42. In: VfZ . 50 (2002) (PDF; 7.5 MB), pp. 50/51. - Schulte dates this contrary to the statement by Höß, to which numerous standard works refer.
  7. ^ Robert-Jan van Pelt, Deborah Dwork: Auschwitz. P. 233.
  8. ^ Rainer Fröbe: Building and Destroying. The central site management Auschwitz and the final solution. In: Christian Gerlach: "Average offender" - action and motivation. Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-922611-84-2 , p. 165 and p. 163.
  9. ↑ Aleksander Lasik: The organizational structure of KL Auschwitz , in: Aleksander Lasik, Franciszek Piper, Piotr Setkiewicz, Irena Strzelecka: Auschwitz 1940–1945. Studies on the history of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp , Volume I: Structure and structure of the camp , Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oświęcim 1999, p. 300f.
  10. ^ Rainer Fröbe: Building and Destroying ... In: Christian Gerlach: "Average perpetrator" ... Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-922611-84-2 , pp. 165-169.
  11. ↑ Aleksander Lasik: The organizational structure of KL Auschwitz , in: Aleksander Lasik, Franciszek Piper, Piotr Setkiewicz, Irena Strzelecka: Auschwitz 1940–1945. Studies on the history of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp , Volume I: Structure and structure of the camp , Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oświęcim 1999, p. 302.
  12. ^ Rainer Fröbe: Building and Destroying ... In: Christian Gerlach: "Average perpetrator" ... Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-922611-84-2 , p. 183.
  13. ^ Rainer Fröbe: Building and Destroying ... In: Christian Gerlach: "Average perpetrator" ... Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-922611-84-2 , p. 174.
  14. ^ Rainer Fröbe: Building and Destroying ... In: Christian Gerlach: "Average perpetrator" ... Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-922611-84-2 , p. 177.
  15. ↑ There is no record of whether Bischoff was also present at the gassing of 449 Jews observed by Himmler.
  16. ^ Rainer Fröbe: Building and Destroying ... In: Christian Gerlach: "Average perpetrator" ... Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-922611-84-2 , p. 164.
  17. ^ Holocaust history: "Vergasungskeller" (letter from SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Bischoff to SS-Oberführer Hans Kammler, January 29, 1943).
  18. ^ Jean-Claude Pressac: The crematoria of Auschwitz . P. 179.
  19. ↑ Aleksander Lasik: The organizational structure of KL Auschwitz , in: Aleksander Lasik, Franciszek Piper, Piotr Setkiewicz, Irena Strzelecka: Auschwitz 1940–1945. Studies on the history of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp , Volume I: Structure and structure of the camp , Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oświęcim 1999, pp. 304f.
  20. ↑ FOCUS Magazine No. 17 (1994)
  21. ^ The Architecture of Murder: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Blueprints , video for the online exhibition, yadvashem.org
  22. ^ Niels Gutschow: Ordnungswahn. Architects plan in the "Germanized East" 1939–1945. Gütersloh 2001, ISBN 3-7643-6390-8 , p. 195.
  23. ^ Philipp Weigel: Terror does not educate: On the use of photographs in the exhibitions of Polish Shoah memorials . In: Jörg Ganzenmüller, Raphael Utz: Memorials between memorial and museum , Böhlau-Verlag, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2016, p. 61f.