The following is an excerpt from Paul Jaskot's article on The Architecture of the Holocaust
"Untersturmführer Lothar Hartjenstein finished this plan for Auschwitz I on November 12, 1942. Hartjenstein worked under Hans Kammler in Amt (Division) C of the Economic- and Administrative Main Office (WVHA) of the SS, located in Berlin and led by Oswald Pohl. This division managed all of the SS’s administrative duties, including building activity and forced labor.7 The plan shows changes to the main camp (Auschwitz I) along with the surrounding area. While it is a largely finished drawing, it remains one among thousands, with some coming from the Central Office of the WVHA but most created in the Central Building Office (or Zentralbauleitung) of the camp itself.
This plan is also quite particular, coming as it does at a very specific moment of the camp’s history and the building activities of the Central Building Office. It gives us insight into the dynamic between architecture and oppression, culture and genocide. Certainly it is not a particularly innovative or surprising design. The curved roads of the SS settlements on each side of the camp were standard in housing-estate planning since the garden city movement of the late nineteenth century; the regular, institutional layout of the inmate spaces as well as the alignment of the forced- labor sites along a central access road (the diagonally arrayed buildings extending from the barracks in the center of the plan) represent the kind of “rational” planning typical of industrial and penal sites in the modern era. But the use of color as well as the spatial and temporal scales of the plan are worth noting, since such formal characteristics help us understand the genocide from the perpetrator’s perspective. For example, in the original there are orange and green-blue complementary colors, used only in the central diagonal section of the plan, drawing our special attention. These are the areas focused on industrial forced labor, like the Krupp Works (to the left, inside the camp), the new SS administrative headquarters, and original or expanded housing for the inmate population. But these areas are not only visually prioritized, they are temporally prioritized as well. The key indicates that the building office was concerned to indicate which buildings were planned, under construction, or finished—it uses different colors and shading to designate each stage.
Finally, the plan also makes us think of time in multiple scales: it offers the micro focus on the prioritized buildings in the middle, but it also offers a macro view by indicating finished buildings, those currently being rushed, and as well those planned for a future in which the SS would be an institutional power in Central and Eastern Europe. The housing estates on each side of the main camp, for example, are all about that future. The SS conceived of immediate needs, strategically highlighting the construction that was being prioritized in connection with the war, the expansion of administrative spaces, and the desire to gather more inmates. At the same time, however, it kept in focus its ambition for a dominant future, one marked by cities and settlements in “Eastern lands” freed of Jews, Slavs, and others deemed inferior.9 The implementation of this plan required genocide. Spatial thought here is deeply genocidal thought, genocidal thought spatial. Tactical time and strategic time cannot be separated: building the future required building the present, genocide required forced labor.
The large area encompassed in Hartjenstein’s drawing, as well as the drawing’s reflection of SS interests in a variety of purposes for the site, reflects the urban-scale of the architect’s thinking. The SS was concerned with design at the smallest spatial scale, evidenced by thousands of drawings and details;11 but they also were interested in urban and regional planning, as indicated in this plan. Indeed, they organized building activity at the continental-scale, as seen in the mobile forced labor construction brigades that traveled all over Nazi-dominated Europe.12 Hartjenstein’s plan evidences that kind of thinking: for such architects the scale of the present and of the future was vast, and scale—for them—measured control over building and space."
