THE  STORY OF THE AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU CREMATORIA WHITE-PRINT: FROM HORROR TO HUMANITY

A Collector’s Acquisition

At the end of 2025, an eye-catching headline appeared in several major news outlets: Robin and Elliott Broidy had paid $ 1.5 million for an original architectural drawing of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria. 

 The fact behind the news was both significant and unusual. Private individuals rarely spend such a substantial amount on a single artifact, particularly one of such grave nature. In my 35 years working in this field, I can recall very few comparable acts. I wanted to understand the decision behind it in more detail. 

It is known that only two original versions of this document exist: the one recently acquired by Robin and Elliott Broidy for philanthropic and Holocaust-education purposes, and another that was seized by the Soviet Army when it liberated Auschwitz in January 1945. The latter has been sealed in a Russian state military archive ever since, aside from a brief de-classification period in the mid-1990s when researchers were allowed limited access. It has not been available for review since.  

Importantly, the amount the Broidys paid for the whiteprint was chosen to honor the one and a half million Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust. This dedication tells you everything about the significance of their acquisition. 

The above photograph of murdered Jewish children hangs in the centre of my husband, artist Michael Rogatchi’s studio, and always will. The children are at his side as he works, and he spends most of his time there. They are always with him. 

So we understand the power of Elliott and Robin Broidy’s gesture completely. 

 White-print of mass murder

Before me lies a typical product of a European architectural bureau or engineering office from the 1940s: clean, sophisticated, precise, confidently drawn lines, all executed by hand, lending the document an unsettling authenticity. 

You look casually at the document, yellowed with age. It appears to be a precise drawing of an ordinary house. Then your eyes reach the two vertical lines at its centre, and your heart stops: a chimney, disproportionally large. 

No wonder the Nazis tried to destroy all material evidence of their unspeakable crimes. Yet according to first-hand accounts I studied in the Simon Wiesenthal Archive, Soviet troops approaching Auschwitz in January 1945 were guided by the stench of burning bodies. The crematoria were operating until the very end. 

Once you recover your breath, you notice the German bureaucratic stamps surrounding the carefully drawn structure with its heartrending vertical lines. The images become much more than an architectural plan. 

As it is known, the first large-scale Zyklon B gassing experiment occurred on September 3, 1941, when 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick Polish prisoners were murdered in the basement of Block 11 at Auschwitz. Following the gassing, it became evident that the existing crematorium at the Auschwitz site could not adequately dispose of the bodies. Within seven weeks, SS architects from Berlin arrived in Auschwitz to address this ‘problem’. 

Architect Walter Dejaco and others spent two days – October 22 and 23 – with Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and others to determine the necessary scale of the new crematoria. The white-print in question is dated October 24, 1941. It is also known that the plans were later amended and expanded and presented at the Wannsee Conference on January 20th, 1942, as proof that their plan to eliminate all the Jews of Europe –  the “Final Solution” – was feasible.  

The aged white-print produced 85 years ago is clear evidence of the careful planning that made the worst crimes in human history possible. 

Today, sadly and alarmingly, the historic evidence of the crimes against humanity is seen with an additional gravity in a new context of the unleashed hatred that intensified after October 7th, 2023. 

We are now living in a time when irrational hatred of Jews is being normalized and spreading rapidly. Within days of the October 7,  2023 massacre – the worst mass-murder of Jews since the Holocaust – virulent antisemitic lies were spread across traditional and social media by the antisemitic zealots and those who are orchestrating the new “normality”.  

Within one year of the attacks, antisemitic incidents reached their highest level since the end of the Second World War. 

One recent disturbing example: at the 2026 Winter Olympics, the International Olympic Committee ordered, produced, and sold merchandise featuring imagery from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which were a triumph of Nazi propaganda. This is a profound insult to the victims of Nazism and their families. Yet today it is a new normal, or rather an old one returning, because we have seen it before. 

I have been to Auschwitz many times, to work, observe, film, and think. It is a difficult place to be, as is any Nazi camp. Without being there, one cannot grasp the meaning of Nazism. The horrors of what happened there are beyond rationality. They can only be understood through raw feeling after having seen such a place firsthand. 

It is for that reason that I worked with colleagues at the European Parliament to propose mandatory school visits to Auschwitz and the other extermination Nazi camps. The proposal failed, officially due to parental objections, although perhaps some countries were simply unwilling or uninterested. 

I work in Auschwitz, I think about the camp orchestras. Three large ensembles: two male orchestras and one female orchestra. The latter was led for a time by my great-aunt Alma Rosé. So, Auschwitz is personal to me. 

Prisoners recalled that the orchestras were forced to play, among the other grim compulsions, during selections, when SS men decided at a moment’s notice who would live and who would die. Who could forget such a thing? 

Professionals such as doctors and architects planned and implemented the extermination of millions of people. Many architects were never held accountable for their crimes, or were acquitted at their trials, despite knowingly designing facilities whose purpose was mass murder. 

An Acquitted  Holocaust perpetrator

The white-print’s author was Walter Dejaco, an Austrian architect with no notable career before the Second World War. An enthusiastic Nazi, he joined the SS in 1933, when it was still illegal in Austria, five years before the Anschluss.  

This unremarkable man – so many of them were unremarkable, including Rudolf Höss – thrived for the first time in his life during Nazi rule, and he proceeded with his tasks happily. He even joked on his architectural plans, writing ‘Auschwitz’ as  ‘Au / Schwitz’ , a pun suggesting sweat. Such ‘humor’ tells you a great deal about the atmosphere in which the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria were planned.  

My dear friend Simon Wiesenthal told me about Dejaco many years ago. Together with Auschwitz prisoner and writer Hermann Langbein, Wiesenthal tracked Dejaco for years. Dejaco had been held by the Red Army as a prisoner of war from 1945 in the camp in the USSR until 1949 or 1950, when he was inexplicably released. 

So, one of just four architects who had planned and constructed the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria returned home and resumed his profession. He built parish buildings and was thanked and rewarded by local clergy. 

 After persistent efforts by Wiesenthal and Langbein, the investigation started in 1962. It took ten years before it reached the courtroom. Dejaco and two of his assistants were finally brought to trial in 1972. 

It was a fiasco. One assistant’s case was dropped, and Dejaco and Fritz Ertl were acquitted on the grounds that they had acted under “duress”. 

Dejaco died peacefully in his bed in 1978. 

One detail from the trial still haunts me. The trial was public, but nobody attended it. 

“The hall was empty”, Simon Wiesenthal told me. “ Just empty. You understand?”

I did. And I did not. I still do not. 

“We did it for ourselves” – a couple ensures remembrance  

Elliott and Robin Broidy are well- known philanthropists and key supporters of the Auschwitz Research Centre on Hate, Extremism and  Radicalisation (ARCHER) at House 88, which is located in the former home of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. ARCHER, an initiative of the Counter Extremism Project, actively combats antisemitism, extremism, and terrorism while preserving historical memory. Elliott is co-chair of The Fund to End Antisemitism, Extremism and Hate, which fundraises for ARCHER. 

But the acquisition of the crematoria whiteprints was a personal decision for the Broidys. 

“We wanted to find a way to use the money spent on this terrible, but historically important, document for something good”, Elliott Broidy told me. “In conversations with Rabbi David Barton of the Temple of Arts in Beverly Hills, we decided to dedicate the sum, honoring the one and a half million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis, to fund the Temple’s creation of a global curriculum that would teach empathy and altruism to children under five, inoculating  them against the scourge of extremism”. 

I hope this new curriculum, teaching altruism, understanding, tolerance and humanity, will flourish. This is one of those rare stories showing that even the darkest history can, through human will, be transformed into something constructive.  

Evil can, and must, be answered and overcome by good, even generations later. It can prompt us to rethink, revisit, and reckon with the most painful lessons of history and to draw from them, against all odds, understanding and moral clarity. 

It is never too late, so long as the memory of every soul lost in the Holocaust remains alive.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)