Robert Jan van Pelt: Architecture as Evidence – The Case of Auschwitz

okay so good evening and welcome to our online lecture by professor jan van pelt titled architecture as evidence the case of auschwitz my name is giuliani bishop and i'm a curator at a documentation center for the history of national socialism in munich working at the intersection between exhibition and education the lecture today takes place in the frame of the exhibition by heim butbecker which has been on display at the documentation center since november last year but only today actually marks the first day we are able to welcome our visitors due to the locked home we are very happy to offer the chance to you that you can see the exhibition in person now you only need to book a ticket in advance for our website tonight we are very delighted to have you here as online guest joining our lecture with robert yan von pelle a leading expert on the history of auschwitz who is tonight participating from canada welcome dear robert yan it is a great pleasure and honor to have you here and presenting an insight into your important architectural forensic research from the last decades before i give the floor to you i would like to briefly introduce the exhibition behind becca which sets the background of this event and of course also introduce you briefly to our audience but first of all some organizational remarks after rubadyan's lecture there will be a chance to ask questions you can write your questions in the q and a section below already during the lecture i will be happy to pass them on later however you can also ask the question directly and if you would like to do so please indicate this by using the raised hand option here in zoom my colleague jonas peter in the background and who i'm greatly thankful for the technical support will then unmute you and so you'll be able to ask your question directly so now let me briefly introduce the exhibition rebecca's exhibition it is possible that they won't kill us and they might allow us to live lands its title from a diary entry of an unknown offer in the lodge ghetto of the 25th of july 1944 which is quoted in heinrich beckham's publication from 1997. heim rebecca was a writer and a publisher and a key figure in the literary avant-garde in austria after 1945. he was born in vienna in 1925 at the age of 18 age of 18 sorry he joined the nazi party but illness prevented him from doing active military service after the war he was confronted with the atrocities of the nazi regime in a murderous system of the concentration camps when he was applied to participating in cleaning up the area of the mount housing camp becker later on studied philosophy sociology and ethnology in vienna he worked as a publisher and developed an artistic body of work that is based on decades of critical investigation of national socialism and his own self-critical reflection of his involvement in the nazi regime as a young man in his work he addressed the history of national socialism through concrete poetry through photographs and a collection of found objects long before there was any public attempt in austria empire becca died in linz in 2003. the exhibition at the documentation center was conceived by the museum of modern art in vienna which today administers the photographic estate of heim rebecca the show presents a selection of his photographs as well as notes texts and found objects from the sites of the former concentration camps in mount hausen and in houston with the collection of original artifacts becca also attempted to bring these objects from the peripheral and forgotten sites of the former concentration camps to site and into spaces where people spend everyday life his photographs show deserted buildings overground by plants and deliberately repurposed they were produced during a large number of regular site visits and document a slow transformation of the camps with their workshops barracks and memorial sites large parts were left to decay while others were re-dedicated for other purposes the photographs document moments of transition when former forgotten sides of nazi crimes started to play a new role and a central role in public perception as memorial sites becker's visual documents ask questions about memory about preservation and about oblivion in the frame of the exhibition we already hosted several discussion events that dealt with the question of the transformation of historic sites through the examples of the concentration camp in northhausen and in dachau as well as the historic site of the former forced labour camp in munich now albing which is currently developed into a memorial site which will be open in the upcoming years in tonight's event we will shed light on the concentration camp auschwitz and trace the transformation from an ordinary polish town to the most significant nazi side of the holocaust and i'm glad to welcome again and introduce our speaker briefly uber diane von pelle has taught at the university of waterloo at the school of architecture since 1987 and held appointments at many institutions among others the architectural association in london and a technical university in vienna he is the recipient of many academic honors including the national jewish book award and the guggenheim fellowship he has published 12 books dealing with the architectural history among others especially also the history of auschwitz and holocaust denial governor van pelt also chaired the university of waterloo school of architecture team they developed a master plan for the preservation of oceans because of his expertise on the architectural evidence of auschwitz he also has been very much involved in the struggle against holocaust denial and served as an expert witness for the defense of the liberal case of a holocaust denier against scholar deborah esther lipster today over diane van per will present a project that resulted from his extensive architectural forensic investigation of auctions the installation the evidence room which was shown first at the 2016 venice architectural biennium following by presentations in toronto and washington dc and now i give the virtual stage to hobartyan and i look forward to your lecture thank you very much for joining us thank you juliana can you hear me i guess you can i would like welcome to everyone in the audience uh one of the things of the zoom of course is is that i can see who's there and my friend belarusky from vienna as he has just joined uh bella i really would wish to be able to go out for drinks afterwards with you but i guess it's early afternoon in toronto and i'm not allowed to drink until 6 p.m so have a drink later on my behalf in our favorite knight so i'm going um i tried to uh i tried to do things within the time frame that i was given but i cannot always guarantee that i will be totally successful so i have this this watch and i'm going just to um tell you a little bit about this watch because uh it actually um its origins it actually it comes from munich the millstrous munich 1946 which was actually a black market and my watch was bought in this black market in 1946 uh it was actually made to watch in 1938 here we have the man who bought it is my father-in-law who had ended up in in may 1945 as a result of a death march from flossenburg and he had escaped this death march and was hidden by a farming family anointing for a couple of weeks before the americans survived he was a tailor from krakow and here we see actually his um his diploma uh from 1950 that he's registered in the huntrex camera over byron but it also says that the 11th of october 1946 he got his uh his his um his permission to work as a tailor in alterting or in bavaria so he bought this watch and uh and this watch uh is supposed to keep the time for this lecture i thought that uh i would be a little later right now i thought that juliana would have talked a little longer so we're five minutes ahead but i will try to monitor time with this watch which actually is here in my hand so i'm just talking about uh about jakob grimbaum this is the back of the cart uh that basically uh uh uh is a proof of uh of the fact that he has registered for video good machon in 1949 and you see then typically what a survivor they basically divided would come for basically the places where you've been imprisoned from the krakow ghetto to a couple of labor camps and then ultimately the concentration camps of pleasure of auschwitz glybiz iranian work with the saxonhausen flossenburg's regensburg and then finally alf marsh and then he he ends up in in so uh he was in auschwitz only for a very short time between uh pljoff and uh and and and being on the death march to zachsenhausen but we're going to talk about outfits over a longer period at least initially 1940 1945 the dates that this camp was in operation of course it started out as an ordinary concentration camps created to sow terror amongst the polish population of the area but it became particularly notorious because in 1942 it became the terminus of deportations of jews and from 1943 also roma and sinti people from all over europe and in fact it was the main death camp for west european and southern european jews and so uh from of all the death camps belzed so we bore treblinka and then maidanak and auschwitz it is the camp that had in some way the greatest variety of of victims not only that it reduced from all over europe and that makes it different from gullsets for example but also because there were many non-zeus victims so here just to uh to remind you probably many of you know already at the topography of auschwitz subwad um basically it is located at an inter a at an intersection of a number of railroad lines uh the uh ferdinand northbound that runs from vienna to life today but it was in the 19th century lambert the capital of austrian galicia which basically is the uh the the railway line that goes diego lived from bottom to top then with a branch going to katowice and berlin to the left top and then uh another branch that basically uh also goes to krakow and to lev uh to the at the center to the right an old town auschwitz and then in the 1940s uh the creation of a large synthetic rubber factory by ig farben brings a lot of money into that area the ss wants to profit from it and this then also pays for the expansion of the originally small auschwitz camp the main camp into the larger camp of auschwitz beer canal and the satellite camp of auschwitz monavie it's creating the largest single camp concentration camp in the ss concentration camp system important sites are the selection places uh from 1942 for 43 the altijudem ramp as it's called along the main line from vienna to lev and then from 1944 onwards within uh the birkenau camp the selection place that has become very well known thanks to a series of photos that were made there in june 1944 of the arrival of a number of hungarian transports as we see right here and you see then in the back the gate of beer canal which is today known as the gate of death so um it is a it is a murder operation that that is that that is that we notice as a result of a lot of eyewitness testimony unlike in belzetz where only two uh jews actually survived the uh the murder of around 550 000 other jews so so be bored where it was only a couple of hundred and nixon case in treblinka in auschwitz um ultimately there were more than a hundred thousand survivors and uh and uh many people could have testimony or certainly about the arrival there of life in auschwitz very few of these survivors however were survivors of the zonder commandos who were the slave workers who were forced to work in the crematoria and in the gas chambers here we have a drawing by david o'lear a french holocaust survivor auschwitz survivor who for two years worked as a zonda commando in crematorium 3 and this is a drawing he made shortly after his liberation in 1945 of the arrival of a group of jews to be murdered in the underground gas chambers these buildings were were designed by by architects by professional architects and here we have a photo of the architects all of the architects in front of the architect's office and the porch and i'm going to name three of them first of all carl bischoff i understand no family of juliana bischoff the chief architect before he came to auschwitz he was an architect employed by the luftwaffe his chief designer walter diaco an austrian coming from reuter in tyrol and he basically is the chief designer of the gas chambers and the third person is fritz ertel from liens again the austrians have a great impact on the construction of auschwitz coming from an old family of builders and architects what makes airtel interesting is that he's the architect of birkenau of course the center of the holocaust but also he's a bauhaus graduate so this makes very clear that a good education doesn't prevent you from doing criminal things just would like to show you a an original blueprint that is preserved in the auschwitz museum's archive this is a section of crematorium number two you see the ovens left of center you see the chimney with the kind of underground fluke connecting it and to the right of the chimney you see a trash incinerator trash incineration and incineration of corpses it was all part of the same operation in auschwitz here a model of that same building that shows uh in the back you see three of the five triple muffle ovens and then in the front center uh a morgue originally an underground morgue that was adapted in early 1943 to become a gas chamber and we're going to talk more about this particular morgue a few more images by olaire here the undressing room and women and children be let in the gas chamber and then he also draws uh in a kind of combined drawing the emptying of the gas chamber after the gassing in the top right and then actually he combines the oven to the left in fact they were in two different rooms and they're two different levels but for the sake of bringing a whole narrative together in a single image it works well enough and then ultimately uh here we have a drawing and a forensically correct drawing of the incineration room you see in the back an elevator uh that brings the corpses from the basement to the ground floor we are here at the ground floor and what's important to note that in this case uh there are a lot of children uh who were the victims and uh if if one tries to understand how these uh these ovens incineration work uh it is it is important to remember that on average five corpses could be fed into each incinerator at the same time and that was also because of course many children belonged to the victims um here we have then the uh the gas chamber as it is today at least in the winter time uh the uh the the uh these places were dynamited in late 1944 as the russians were approaching and as the killing installations in auschwitz were dismantled at the time here just a statistic basically uh the jews are the largest group of victims 1.1 million jews were brought to auschwitz and a million were murdered most on arrival then around 150 000 non-jews polls ended up in auschwitz whom around half died around 25 000 roma uh of which uh four fifths died around 20 000 were killed soviet pows 15 000 and almost every one of the soviet pows were murdered and then around 25 000 others that is that is non-jewish uh non-polish concentration camp prisoners brought from other concentration camps in europe and you see them very clearly uh also the kind of survival rate in the case of the zeus that was one out of ten in the case of the roma one out of five in the case of non-zeus polls around half in 1944 in the summer of 1944 the two slovaks um to the left and alfred wessler escaped austria actually it was in the spring of 44 to warn the hungarian zoos that auschwitz was being prepared for that they were debriefed uh in uh zielinski in slovakia and as part of their report which became known as the auschwitz protocols they drew a plan of what they thought was actually the the crematoria in auschwitz now um what is important is that we see a chimney with incinerators now they got the wrong number they were in fact five incinerators or 15 dependent on your account there was some large hole but then they had this gas chamber with roof traps they thought there were three roof traps but in fact um there were four and so here we see basically the model of the correct situation and you see that they basically got it wrong in the details but what's important is what you see in the front of you is that underground basement and you see there are four kind of columns that are located to the left and the right and the left and the right of the central beam that basically have some kind of introduction devices on top that actually uh that that that that pumps through the roof so to speak and these are those roof traps that the auschwitz protocols refer to now basically in the 1970s a um a a movement began or an effort began to try to deny what had happened in auschwitz as part of a larger uh program of holocaust denial um they used these deniers they used a scandal from the first world war in which the british times had run a number of articles that the germans had created soap factories behind the western front to boil to basically use the fat of soldiers who had been killed at the western front and to basically make soap out of them in order to improve the soap supply to germany at the time this was all a lie it was actually a propaganda exercise developed to uh convince china to join actually the war uh at the war as as as an ally and and and the chinese were they the british secret server thought that the chinese would be particularly uh reversed by the idea that germans would make soap of their own soldiers and um but in the 1970s and and these kind of rumors that you know that that that that the that the uh auschwitz uh uh the concentration camps that soap was made from bodies also in the second world war these rumors were circulating uh particularly uh in relationship also to an instituted downstick in 1945 um there were there were there were large barrels were found with some kind of soapy content and the assumption was that they had been made of corpses from the uh stutthof concentration camp but in 1975 this man the french academic robert forresta uh basically came up with the theory that all all stories about auschwitz all that testimonies the evidence that auschwitz had been a major extermination camp which was versions of the soap stories from the first world war that this was all a lie created by a british secret service student second world war to embarrass the germans in 1988 um foreign organized a trip of an american engineer named fred loester to auschwitz to do a forensic investigation of the remains of the gas chambers of the crematoria and to basically he wanted him to determine if these places could have ever been used and fred went there he was an engineer who had standing in issues related to um to execution equipment because he was a designer of electric chairs in the united states and he holds here a helmet of an electric chair and he also he was doing the maintenance on gallows and uh lethal injection machines you know in order to operate these uh these these machines you need uh somebody to sign off on quote unquote the safety of the equipment that is for the executioner and so that was his business so he had the standing in court to basically um to have an expert opinion on execution equipment so sent him to auschwitz and he indeed comes back with a report and says that the alleged gas chambers in auschwitz could never have worked in the alleged and the orphans could never have incinerated the alleged number of victims and uh very important in his whole uh research is actually this room it is a delousing chamber for uh clothing uh that used the zyklon cyanide product that was supplied to auschwitz wisley for de-lousing but later to be adapted for uh killing for the murder of jews and and roma and sinti and he did took samples from this wall had him analyzed and came to all kinds of conclusions when he did compare and contrast between the samples from these blue walls from the de-lousing rooms and then samples from the walls of the homicidal gas chambers and he took the samples then under this collapsed roof and i will not go into the chemistry of this he was shown to be completely mistaken in his chemistry uh and you can read on that in in my book the case for auschwitz what is important is that his report attracted the attention of a well-known writer on on historical books on the second world war david irving he is sitting in his office with his latest uh publication hitler's war irving had already been kind of hovering on the uh on the edge of the abyss of denial he had been always a hitler sympathizer believed the holocaust had happened behind hitler's back but in some way he became convinced by the forensic work of loister that indeed indeed this was the greatest discovery of the 20th century that auschwitz had been a hoax and by implication the whole of the holocaust this alarmed in the early 1990s an american scholar named deborah lipstadt who in 1993 produced her book denying the holocaust in which he identified irving as the most dangerous of holocaust deniers because he had access he had the public he had readers he was salonfeigh as one say in germany then in response irving because he started to lose income sued lipstick in a british court for libel and in a british court the uh burden of proof is on the defendant that was going to be on lipstick and lipstick asked me to join as an expert on auschwitz he had five experts to work for her but i was going to be particularly about auschwitz because irving's conversion to denial had been based on a forensic report on auschwitz and the reason that i was a kind of demand to do this was because i just published my own book with the board at work i'll switch 1270 to the present so i was considered to be an expert so in order to prepare my expert report which was 750 pages i went back through the forensic investigations that had been done in auschwitz in 1945 first by the russians the red army and then by a polish commission of investigation you see that second commission here led by judge janzine in the center and then professor davidowski to the right was the uh with the with his hands in the side and the the little busk cap they basically had led a very professional forensic investigation but and i was starting to collect all of the material all of the evidence that was found by them that was also produced at the time itself for example by david olaire at that time not yet known here we have for example a gas tight door found in 1945 in the builder's yard taken out of a gas chamber when the gas chamber was was basically dismantled in october 1944 after the gassings had come to an end and then this gas door was stored here we have the perpetrator side the outside and on the other side we have the inside with then very importantly the peephole having a protection of wire mesh and we actually have to build for the creation of this wire mesh cap in order that the victims when the gas comes into the gas chamber cannot break the class of the people which seemed to have happened a few times too many according to the ss also the the the committee took eyewitness statements more and more importantly of this zonda commando uh hendrik tauber fuchs bruno who had been for two years working in the crematorium number two and had a photographic memory and it was also with his help that a draftsman created the basic drawing set of the uh crematorium showing in this case crematorium number two with one of the morgues being an undressing room and the other morgue being the gas chamber komara gazova and then also there are the four introduction devices three of which already had appeared in the verbal batzler report i did for my report i created reconstruction drawings in this case of the gas chamber and you see the structural columns going through the center carrying the beam that carries the roof and then to the left and the right of the of these these kind of cages these kind of gas columns as they're called through which the zyklon b material was introduced into the room the reason that these gas columns existed was that the gas itself was actually came from a granular substance in which a kind of gypsum substance in which the cyanide liquid cyanide was uh was soaked uh in the factory then the tin was closed and then whenever it would be opened at the side that the launching was needed um then the the cyanide would degas from this uh gypsum-like substratum and so uh it had to so it's a kind of it's a granular substance that's introduced into the room specially developed for delousing of clothing but also of of foodstuffs like rain so this was my reconstruction that was part of a report you see there these gas columns and the reason that they were created is that it was not only the problem of how to introduce this gas into the room this granular substance and basically you could have pumped it in the room if you really wanted but the more important question was how to remove it from the room after it done its work because uh people typically in a gas chamber if you used uh two tins of cyanide of the cyclone material would be murdered within 15 minutes everyone would be dead but the degassing continued for 24 hours that was part of the patent so that when it's used for lice it also destroys the eggs mitts of the lice it would destroy the the shells around it and so this continuous degassing of the zyklon material in the gas chamber when everyone is already dead actually interrupted the process of continuous murder because when another train arrives uh 24 hours later you want already the gas chamber to be emptied all the corpses to have been disposed of in the in in in the cremation ovens so you want to be able to the ss wanted to clean out the gas chambers immediately after everyone had been killed and the presence of degassing zyklon stood in the way of it so the idea was to create a column in which the degassing cyclone could be lowered then it spreads through the room and after 15 minutes when all the victims are dead then it can be hoisted out of the central column and discarded on the roof in the open air the problem however of these columns is that they do not appear in the blueprints this is uh the blueprint of the section of the of the seller so here we have the plan i already showed you the detail of the section i'm now going to look at the section of the two morgues lichen color here we have the number one that has a ventilation system in the walls when number two not number two becomes ultimately the uh the the undressing room number one the gas chamber and so here we're looking at number one and if we're looking now in detail at it you see there is no gas column it only shows the structural column supporting the central beam and there is actually no drawing that shows those gas columns we know them on the basis of eyewitness evidence here a plan of the basement we're now looking at the structural columns in uh leicester number one what becomes the gas chamber and if we look in this plan in detail we see only the structural columns but we do not see those four columns to the left and the right that were the gas columns and so deniers are using this as an argument to say they never existed however if we're looking here at the photo taken in early 1943 then you see actually that before the gas chamber was covered with dirt you actually see the top of these gas columns and you can actually mathematically prove that they were actually of four columns that are at a regular distance from the left and the right going down the length of that space and i had actually people engineers at the technion in israel do those calculations for the trial any case so this supports the eyewitness testimony about those columns by tauber but also we have other sources like here um yehuda bacon who was in the trezenstadt family camp deported to auschwitz in 1943 and became after the liquidation of the teresian stop camp he survived that liquidation part of a commando of boys that had to bring papers from all over the camp to be burnt in the trash incinerator of crematorium two and i talked about the relationship of trash insurance incineration and corporate incineration so he at times when it was not used for murder was inside crematorium number two and here we have a drawing which he drew in mauthausen in may 1945 immediately after his liberation and you see to the left in the top left you see the roof of the gas chamber where four squares on it four introduction devices and also he went into the gas chamber to actually the couple uh showed him the gas chamber which was very cold the boys could warm themselves there when it was nothing used and bacon also sketched one of those gas columns and the fake shower heads so he testified about that in the achman trial but also had his drawings on 45 which he had done when everything was still fresh in his memory oh here the testimony by by david o'leary here's a self-portrait as he's working in the gas chamber after the killing here we have a section of crematorium number three and very importantly is he draws four gas columns and i have here one shown in pink and here at a greater scale so we have drawn evidence by david lelaire of these introduction devices and then he creates a plan of crematorium number three um he shows here the gas chamber and he shows uh four introduction devices in a zigzag pattern and then we have an american air photo from 1944 crematorium number three where the yellow dot is enlarged gas chamber four introduction devices in a zigzag pattern always because they need to be on one or the other side of that central beam which is created which is carried by the structural columns that are not shown in this uh in this drawing so an air photo taken a 44 and a drawing made in 1945 showed a convergent evidence about the existence of these columns now this all became a real battleground in the trial itself here we see irving at the time of the trial in 1999 at the end of 99 was behind him a photo of the roof of crematorum number two the roof of the uh gas chamber and there was this big battle about you know where are the holes through which these uh the tops of these columns would have arisen in the open air and we were able to identify them by looking actually at the rebars because the roof itself is completely destroyed and identify with a certainty three of the holes and and approximately the fourth hole of course that roof is full of holes because it was dynamited now the deniers say no holes no holocaust these are the holes through which these columns would have penetrated into the open air we could show that the halls had existed so i wrote a book the case for auschwitz which basically brought all of this forensic research together and also it is a book that that that basically then shows how it is played in the trial you see here all kind of different kind of evidence from aerial photo in the top right to the diagram uh from 1944 by vuba and and wetzler at in orange at the bottom and uh and then soviet soldiers interviewing survivors and documents and so on and in this book as i was preparing for the final drawing set i really struggled with how actually that gas column would have looked like this is a first version that that i created in 2001 so it is it is a more realistic version it's an internal cage with an outer one to protect that case but when i with an engineer looked at it and also a couple of my students worked on that one of them being scott barker we ended up at an even more solid gas column that would have been able to really withstand all the pressure of bodies and would have been firm enough for many years of of of work of murderous work and so this is the final drawing that was published and you see here uh the ss man ready to introduce the cyclone into the uh central the central kind of basket almost number c that is that can be lowered inside the the gas column and be hoisted out so you see very clearly the the thing became a little fatter in the final version that was published now columns are very important in architecture i mean they're a symbol of architecture they of course you know architects is about gravity and holding the roof up and so columns and walls are very important but you can say in some way that it's not for nothing that much of architectural theory is really theory about columns certainly in the renaissance and so when you deal with an architectural element that is a column a gas column you're actually very close to what you would call is a core concern in architecture and then here we have of course very famously the greek temples the parthenon where columns become really the the articulation of the body of the living body of the of the church but here in the case of munich uh the house the deutsche koons today the house de coons of course hitler was obsessed with buildings with columns and um and i must say that when i started with my first article i ever wrote on actually the architects of the holocaust and this was in the mid-1980s it was an article after the falls i've worn down i actually had a student draw for me a single drawing that combined my arch by my argument more or less and it is the house tier kunst you see that is the container with the columns there and then there is a barrack and then there is the ovens but at the back was the most infernal piece which in some way was the answer the auschwitz answer to the columns in front of the house terkoons that were four gas columns so i i had already and kind of obsession with these gas columns um basically 35 years ago and and i thought since the i've never shown this drawing but since uh officially this is a munich location where we are i thought it would be nice to uh at least show it the light of dave once more so i published this book and then i got in july 2015 an invitation from a reader of the book and his name was alejandro radvena an architect famous architect from chile who had met once had given a copy of the book around 10 years earlier shortly after his publication he was unknown i was unknown i'm still unknown he then became very famous in chile 2015 he became he was appointed as the curator of the 2016 16 venice biennale and he wrote to me and he said i would like to give you a room in the italian pavilion in the central pavilion and i would like you to do an exhibition on that book whatever it is forensic architecture and so here is the the large international exhibition that was the main curated kind of exhibition there are other pavilions but those are curated by individual national committees and he gave me a room where i could have a single exhibition he didn't want to mix my exhibition with another one so i got the yellow room there sitting right at the center of things and as i conceived of the room um i was thinking of my phd supervisor my teacher francis case dave francis yates who worked on uh on memory memory structures a very famous book the art of memory about medieval and renaissance memory systems particularly about the memory theater of giulio camillo created in venice in the early 16th century a place in which basically you get on stage and you look up into the where the seats would be and through images you can remember the history of the world even before creation and after its end i also was inspired by evidence rooms that is the places in police stations where evidence of trials of of crimes is kept until uh it is the time to be for these evidence to be shown uh in court when indeed a court case follows and so um i got a few of my colleagues at waterloo together and and a number of students and we created the basis idea to create a wunderkammer a room and to focus it on three monuments and these were this is donald mackay our chief designer colleague of mine a great architect and he basically worked on this problem of the design of the room itself and the idea was to have at the center of the room the three major elements that were contested in the irving trial that is the gas door and maybe you remember the photos of that gas store that had been found in 1945 but had since disappeared the gas column and the gas hatch of crematorium number five to surround them these three monuments and i will come back to their designation as monument by two walls that would have the evidence for the existence of these monuments that is the blueprints the drawings drawings like i've shown you before but then created as casts represented as castes and then a roof over everything to pull it together into a single room so that we do not have evidence in a room that we have the evidence room so the single work of art or a single word of evidence so here you see this was a very much a professional architectural project done in very little time uh because i was only asked at the end of july and we needed to have everything finished by march but we went at it as a full-fledged architectural project and uh also of course very difficult uh how to raise funds for it we budgeted the whole thing at around half a million canadian dollars to get it made up transported to italy up and then ultimately dismantled them back to canada and so fundraising was one of my major drops so here we have a team that is that is basically getting instructions we ran it also like a seminar mostly students but also in this case a father of one of our of our students who was a retired engineer tom nugent you see him at the background to the left basically pitching in because he loved this project and talking about all kinds of engineering aspects and one of the big things that we had to deal with was actually the creation of the gas column so donald mackay started out with my version from 2002 and then basically redesigned it again in consultation with some engineers and here you see the drawings for it and the details so we really did quite a forensic scientific study but then this young man the son of tom nugent michael nugent basically volunteered to make the gas column because he is also a trained blacksmith student at my school trained blacksmith i mean absolutely ideal and when he and his dad started working on actually making the column the first time since 1942 last time these columns had been made uh he michael was talking about how he had to channel the the in some way the mind of of the architect who designed that walter de jakob but also the man who had actually produced them prisoners like this one and so this became a very intensive a very emotional uh process for him uh he said actually it cost him a lot of nightmares to make these gas columns and let's not forget eight gas columns were together responsible for the murder of around eight hundred thousand uh jews in the gas chambers of premature two and three and another two hundred thousand in four and five so these were really absolutely evil things and uh as he was working on the gas column and trying to make it using also his best knowledge and the knowledge of a number of other fabricators you see that the gas column started to change to the left we have donald mackay's version as designed and to the right we have a sturdier version as ultimately was produced and it was actually very interesting to see how in the production itself and the engagement actually the very very intense engagement is the history of the gas column that gas column started to basically change its shape here we have brad paddock working on the gas door this recycled root of a 19th century ontario barn and then here we have analogue and we have um we have anna uh uh two annas here uh working on the cast trying how to make actually blueprints and documents and photos into plaster casts and i want to go into that that that piece of the project now in greater detail so my colleague ann bordello she's now director of the school of architects at the university of waterloo uh he's interested she's an architect she has a phd in architectural history but she's very much interested in casting of course these are the cast as they ultimately ended up in the on the walls of the of the evidence room you see at the bottom and in the center already two images that we saw before this is the section devoted to um two layers drawings now presented as casts course there is uh quite a tradition in casting now in relationship to memorials rachel whiteread very important english artist this is a cast of a chicken coop but of course she's very famous for her uh monument uh to the jewish victims of the holocaust in vienna on the judean platz casting to make something present that is absent and of course forensic casting coming out of basically you know make a cast of the imprint of a shoe at the uh at the scene of a crime can be a break-in it can be a murder a beating whatever like that but you can preserve the shoe by making the shoe imprint by making a cast of it or in the case of victims of murder typically uh the the face of the victim or the place that if if if bone was broken or some kind of the body was damaged in a particular way a caste would be made for it so that this could be preserved for later analysis very important in case of archaeological research fiorelli the great the great excavator at pompeii in the 19th century who created castes of people and animals who had died during the eruption here we see it because when they died and the ash came over then the ash hardened in them and the body disintegrated it became basically a cavity which he then would fill with plaster and the result of that is that we have in pompeii all of these plastic sculptures of animals and people at the moment basically that they've died and that the ashes covered them um cass courts 19th century part of the imperial colonial project bring from all over the world into a single room plaster casts of important monuments of art and architecture here the victoria and albert museum and so we were working within this kind of context and the question was now would we be able to make casts of these drawings of all of the evidence that was introduced into the irving trial using the material of evidence that is the caste of course we couldn't have the originals they're all in the auschwitz archives in moscow and other archives we couldn't bring them we didn't want to have photographic reproduction so here we have a photo shown it before important evidence about the tops of the gas columns and then various attempts to see how you make a cast out of a photo it has to become three-dimensional of course but in the end we end up with a cast that looks like this and this then is a cast that can be touched you can feel it actually you can as a blind person can in some way discover the photo it's all three-dimensional and so photos are more difficult here we have the photo of the architects of auschwitz and we have the cast we have photos that show how the way that doors are re-hung which shows how a morgue to the left becomes a gas chamber to the right because you do not want to have doors opening into a gas chamber because after the murder you cannot then retrieve the bodies of those people who are being killed because many of them will die closest to the door as they try to escape or hear the famous uh by now famous i hope a section of cremature number three by olaire and the cast of course drawings are more easily or texts are more easily to cast than photographs because photographs is always a kind of arrangement of grace and so the walls became this collection of cars cars that simultaneously have a presence a very clear presence but also one that's kind of ambiguous you you cannot see them that clearly initially when you come to the wall initially the walls seem to be totally white you cannot see anything but when you move in front of the cast the shadow the way the shadow starts to play actually allows you to read them so in late march 2016 uh 12 big big big crates uh contained the whole of the evidence room here in the student lounge at waterloo loaded into a truck you see anne completely to the left and then you see michael nugent next to her uh sent by dhl to to to first uh to uh mestre and then very expensive to get it into venice here we are actually at the giardini in in venice itself the team arrives for installation they had a great time i must say the installation of the matrix that's going to hold up the uh the casts uh very happy all the casts survived the the the travel the the cases were very well made but we by by now we have shown the evidence room three times and all the casts are still in a perfect condition but michael and piper are very happy as you see when another cast comes out of the box uh touching up the gas column after it has been finished anna longer and piper birnbaum here uh final inspection donald mackay walking now through the evidence room cleaning that's the day that we cleaned up that the final scaffolding was taken out then we had a camera which um basically recorded every moment every minute of our construction it took us two weeks to do this and the final result with the three monuments and the castes on the wall so this evidence room talks to other rooms as i said it talks to evidence rooms in in police stations it talks to the rooms where fred lorster took his samples to the lousing rooms in auschwitz it talks to the courtroom in england where the case was heard where all of this evidence was contested by irving you seem to write it talks to the 19th century cast court in the victoria and albert museum it talks to the memory theater of julia of of of guillaude giuliano camilla sorry in in venice in 1506 and then it talks maybe to the most important room of all the room of the imagination here we have robert flood trying to draw the powers the faculties of the imagination and when i walked into that room for the first time after it was cleaned and when the lights were on i felt that i was in the mind of the designer of the guest chambers walter de jakob the promising young architect from reuter t hall so um yeah it was an it was a surreal experience to be actually in the mind of the architect of auschwitz but that was the first thing that came up so now the question of course is what what what kind of monument is the evidence room itself is it actually a monument and so this is how i would like to end my talk by considering very quickly what we create monuments for for whom these are the three monuments so we call them monuments and we still call them monuments in the evidence room the gas door the gas column and the gas hatch now here we have a an elector from bavaria maximilian and when you are in munich you find a statue for maximilian yeah the elector of bavaria not that far from uh from from from the documentation center traditionally we have created memorials to quote and quote our heroes whatever we may define as a hero more recently we have started to create monuments to the victims here we have jews from munich being deported to riga in 1941 and so there is a memorial for the victims of national socialism munich the older memorial created in memory of victims or the memorial uh at the uh at the underground connection between the jewish community home and the synagogue in munich or in this case not coming to munich very soon the stalperstein of course uh you know it doesn't mean always that the way we memorialize victims is going to be agreeable to everything like in this case many people in munich do not want to see the stoppers diner in their city these are from berlin but now what about memorials to perpetrators to people who we recognize as criminals here we have a gathering in 1938 at at at the felt handheld of course of the ss and we do agree that the ss is not a very nice lot at time already and they are honoring the victims slash heroes of the 1923 coup the pooch yeah you still have one that was the idea they were first victims and ultimately after 33 they had been resurrected in the third trial but then i want to focus on those guys in front in the black coats and of course that goes directly back to the location of the documentation center here its relationship to the remnants of the in this case the aeron temple one of the iran temple in which eight of those uh quarterback martyrs of of the um of november 1923 were buried and of course the furore bow right next to it now it's very clear that the documentation center does not want to be a monument it doesn't want to glorify the perpetrators it is there to document them and this has been basically the approach that when we deal with criminals with perpetrators with genocide we do not create monuments to them but we document what they do what they did and we do that in as neutral a way as possible in order to frame to to not frame them with glory with approval but basically to make accessible through views or information very very effectively i think especially in the frame views of the documentation center of basically what they did without putting them on a pedestal now of course in the munich the new magnificent memorial memory loops i created michaela milian of the city of munich which i think is one of the best kind of monuments memorials in the world of course perpetrators and victims they get mixed up because quite often the sites actually carry the the the words the deeds of the perpetrators when both are remembered in the same place we get something of a problem and and i think this is i would say the only problem in the in the memory loops problem project is that sometimes it is difficult to make out who is actually speaking and why we come around commemorate them but you can actually say that this evidence room is um maybe the first memorial in history to criminals to perpetrators to walter de jakob the man who designed this who thought this up uh and it's kind of an uncomfortable idea that maybe from an epistemological or a moral point of view that we crossed a particular boundary in this project so that's where i would like to end my friend mark pottwall and i've written a little book on two space and i asked him we we which honored certi four short stories and 134 images and when i wrote the story about the gas chamber and he had to draw an image of it this is what he came up with to the left the gate of death to the right the smoking chimneys of crematorium four and of course the image in the middle is white thank you thank you very much for this insightful presentation and connecting to one of your last remarks i'm very happy to also announce that we will soon install michael amelian's memory permanently at the documentation center so everyone can listen to them online already but we'll also be able to listen to them when visiting the documentation center um yeah thank you so much i think you illustrated very powerfully your forensic research you had a spatial dimension of the nazi system of the mass murder of the nazi system and yeah how you expose the evidence through objects and documents and i think you also showed very well how you do from various disciplines and thereby connecting architecture with history and with technology and human rights and i think one could say also pathed away for the discipline of architectural forensics in in that way um and yeah the question of how um one can present um research results and actually putting facts on display is something very relevant today um especially in times where we where we see again trivialization of the holocaust and conspiracy rising and also the contesting of science and scholarships worldwide so i would have a couple of questions but i would before i do that offer again to the audience to to ask questions to either write them in the chat or also raise your hand and we will unmute you to ask directly but maybe i can begin with the first question i'm very interested in how you actually chose the artifacts that you showed in the evidence room so could you please unfold a little bit more the editorial process of this project and how you decided to to bring that into this space uh so the short answers i didn't chose from david irving chosen that is that when i created my when i created uh you know i i i studied naval history in an earlier life i did a minor in naval history uh in in the netherlands i always want to become director of a naval museum so if you find if there's any naval museum in hamburg or so and the job opens to send me the job ad but um but but so when i had to design my report it became 750 pages i decided to basically follow the design principles of a battleship that is that it is it it's going to be a report that can take beating upon beating up on beating because i've been told by the lawyers you're not going to win every argument when you're on the cross-examination it's impossible but at the end of it when you come out of cross-examination there was a total of five days on the cross-examination by irving as long as your general credibility is intact as long as the judge still believes that you know what you're talking about and that you're honest and so the report uh has a lot of evidence dozens and dozens and dozens of important arguments pieces of evidence issues that i focus on but when we came into the trial irving decided to focus on only a few pieces that's where he tried to break me that's why he tried to create a breach in the wall and it is those pieces that became central to the evidence room so it is not the evidence presented in the report itself but it is the evidence that was contested in the courtroom and very from the very beginning irevane actually wanted he suggested when he invited me and we had the telephone conversation uh you asked what is a telephone but you know that was before zoom that was an old kind of 19th century tool and he suggested in the telephone conversation that actually we would reconstruct the courtroom in which the cross-section the presentation and the cross-examination of the material had taken place and so i said now that's kind of ridiculous i don't really want to do that but the idea that the courtroom would be basically the editor you know or the the the events in the courtroom would just would provide the editorial principle remained intact and so once we have those those three big things then what the the rest was basically what was the documentation that we introduced to deal with the attacks on those pieces of evidence thank you we have the guest who would like to ask a question a lucas nifal my colleague will on youtube now thank you very much uh can you hear me yes uh thank you for this fascinating talk it's it was really really interesting uh so many new things and uh basically i want to ask a couple of questions uh so you uh talked a little bit about varta de akko uh who was uh yeah one could say a key figure in this whole thing um as far as i understand it this was like being an architect at auschwitz was a big like big thing he had like a lot of people working for him is that right and um and what i wanted to know is how does his kind of spatial conception of of auschwitz how does it shape our shoots and how does it relate to violence and um the only thing i know about bartoliako is that there was a trial and i'm from austria and there was a trial in 1972 uh against um bartodeako and uh etlu and both were acquitted um in 72 in austria which yeah um i'm not going to say any more about that because yeah i can say something about that studied please do please you did actually yeah yeah this is very interesting it was actually i i started my whole work on this in the 80s uh you know before even the wall came down when research in eastern europe became much easier but i started actually in the landscape and because i had been to yat vashem uh in like 87 uh to start my research in the uh yat hashem library and archive i want to know about the architects for auschwitz i just started my position at waterloo as a professor of architecture and i was really interested in the worst thing that the architect had ever done to create a kind of baseline of more of moral action in architecture so it was very much part of the kind of you know architectural ethics investigation and so i i found the unclogger shift the the indictment of the ako and airtel in the london street for staffs traveled to vienna and spent four weeks in vienna the problem was at the time that i couldn't actually make any photocopies of any of the underlying because they had been acquitted and so i could only see them but i was actually able to to photocopy things secretly a little bit like the nasty girl the the story of the woman who also finds uh material about nazis and passo i think and and smuggle it out of austria um and and so this was yeah the jaco was not head of the whole architect's office cal bishop last call bishop was the manager of the operation by 1943 there were around 120 people that means 120 ss people or civilian workers in the office and then there were of course many uh inmate draftsmen who also were working there but what the jacob was important because he was the head of the design room he was basically the chief designer now the office itself worked in very close collaboration with the office of the next level up in the ss hierarchy which was run by a man called hans kamler in stake leads kamler who becomes later very important because he runs he creates basically the underground factories for the v2 uh program the problem is that we know very little about that stake leads operation because uh the all the office was bombed in 1944 and all the papers burned and so we only have really one part of the operation that is the local central ball lighting and you know all every camp at the centaurbao latin well every larger camp but or sometimes design jobs were also basically done in berlin so for example the architecture of crematorium number two the kind of the the aesthetic part uh was originally done by diaco in 1940 october 41 in um in in auschwitz then the drawings were sent to berlin there they were redrawn by a a civilian architect and then sent back again in an approved version to auschwitz where then the yaakov did all of the engineering so it was rather a complex process but diako is an interesting man because you know he was he had graduated he went to school in salzburg graduated in the middle of the depression in austria in 1935 couldn't find any job his only job was teaching skiing i was a ski instructor in the winter seems to be an attractive and popular young man then after the anschluss joins css and is then able to make a career uh as an ss architect up to 1944 at the end of it he's drafted into a pioneer battalion and then in 45 re-emerges of 46 in reuters and then basically has a career a relatively small town architect by the way his summer grandson they're still running the diaco firm you can check it on the internet but he gets he is discovered when he gets a papal medal because he's built a number of churches catholic churches so the pope gives him in 1960 the order of saint gregory that's published in the press and then the name de jakos and there's a kind of art name at least for ex-outfits prisoners and one ex-austria's prisoner herbert lungbein who was from vienna a communist was in auschwitz remember to name diaco as being that of the quote-unquote architect of the gas chambers and then lungbine sets the process in motion for the trial it takes then the austrians 10 years to pick up on it and i must say that certainly uh you know researching this trial uh i must say that uh you know the the slowness of austrian justice uh certainly i've got a real impression of that much worse than anything dickens describes in bleak house i must say and then of course the the uh the um the acquittal uh it was an absolute scandal because they had all the evidence there to condemn him but it was the cold war much of the evidence came from moscow was sent by let's call it the kcb from basically the part of the auschwitz archive that is in moscow taken by the red army and in austria nobody really trusted that can i say if you have more questions please do not hesitate to ask i would have one more question which relates to exposing objects as material witnesses and also the importance of preservation yeah at a time where there are fewer and fewer time witnesses survivors that can speak directly about the experience i think objects become more relevant in terms of telling the stories and also fostering a dialogue of people to engage with topics of history um and i would be interested in how you evaluate this importance of material witnesses and also in relation to the role of memorial sites and yeah okay so i right right now um i have an exhibition uh that i helped create uh in new york it's an big outfits exhibition obviously it opened in madrid initiative was by a spanish company small spanish company missilea they have a titanic exhibition that travels and so on and they want to an auschwitz exhibition approach me in 2013 and with the auschwitz-birkenau state museum we created an exhibition of around 2 500 square meters with two 750 artifacts which we got mostly from the ausvis museum and and and then we have also of course images we have texts we have we have television screens with testimonies and so on now when when you create an exhibition uh with original the way we work with the original artifacts first of all we we are of course in a kind of walter benjamin kind of situation of the aura we have to trust that when you say this is an original from auschwitz it was brought here by a this was touched by a person who was deported there carried into the camp and so on that already the uh the visitor will in some way be willing to open him or herself up to let's call it the aura of the object yeah the authenticity and of course in a time in which everything can be manipulated in with any no photo that we are seeing that we can trust it anymore that this was not photoshopped the artifact of course the artifact seems to be more sturdy in preserving a sense of authenticity than an image has than a photo has what the way we do it in the exhibition is that we basically allow the artifacts to raise questions so what we do when we have when a witness tells a story the witness already knows what he or she is going to say and why they want to say this so you're at the mercy of the witness you are not in an active role you're in a somewhat passive role you're listening to the witness you get the testimony is in some way ready made for you but we have in the exhibition and audio tour with around 80 stops and every stop is at an artifact and what we start doing and this is my colleague paul sammons who is a master in this he he uh he is a holocaust educator and he ditty the holocaust the the educational part of the holocaust exhibition imperial war museum in london is that he brings you to an artifact and starts asking questions what do you see you know so you have a shoe and then you see that the shoe is worn in a certain way and the shoe is clearly a hand me down already three or other feet before the foot of the child that ultimately had that shoe when that shoe was taken off in the in in auschwitz in the in the undressing room for example and so for me the power of artifact is is not what tor story it tells but in its ability to teach us how what questions to ask and that i think is where the enduring power of heart flexes and then of course we ultimately you know it will not speak it will not directly speak but we can always use the artifact as a touchstone to see if the answers that we are given are actually uh answers that that that have any weight that have any kind of make any sense so it's almost as if the artifacts will very simultly say no that's not the right answer yeah but ultimately it's not about answers about the questions thank you so much i think that was a beautiful closing remark i don't see any more questions and looking at the time i think i would close our event tonight here the only thing i have to say before we end is that we would be very happy to see you soon at documentation center which is again possible in person if you book a ticket for our website and hope to also see you at our forever online program thank you very much for joining us thank you

Channel: NS-Dokumentationszentrum München

Views: 16,679

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Id: XgHEOOnUySs

Length: 82min 46sec (4966 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021