Blueprints Reveal More Than Plans for Auschwitz

November has always been a busy time for Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party.

On Nov. 8, 1923, Hitler led the unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch. Although the coup d'etat failed, Hitler's life was changed. He wrote "Mein Kampf" while serving his prison sentence, and he emerged from the experience with a belief that, in order to seize power in the future, he had to follow the letter of the law — which he did, manipulating the law when necessary.

On Nov. 9, 1938, the first coordinated Nazi attack on Jews occurred in the form of Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass." Ninety-two Jews were murdered and perhaps as many as 30,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps.

And recently, the German newspaper Bild revealed that original blueprints for the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz had been found in an apartment in Berlin.

The blueprints documented a lot more than that. Well, actually, they appear to have proven some interesting points.

I have to rely on an English translation that often isn't clear to me — and perhaps someone who can translate German can clarify it for me — but my understanding of it is that the plans date to November 1941.

I don't see anything in the article that suggests that the systematic murder of the Jews, the so-called "Final Solution," had begun in November 1941 — only that preparations for (if not the actual construction of) the death camps had clearly begun by that time.

We've been told, for more than half a century, that the "Final Solution" was given the green light by senior Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.

But there seems to be something of a misunderstanding about the "Final Solution." The plan did refer to the extermination of the Jews, but the original plan approved at Wannsee had more of a purpose to it than that. It called for all the Jews to be deported to parts of eastern Europe that were populated by Germans, where they would build roads. Those Jews who did not die while the roads were being built would be exterminated after the projects were completed.

That plan, however, was based on the assumption that Germans would continue to occupy the Polish and Soviet lands they controlled at that time. But, because of the gradual loss of much of that territory to advancing Soviet troops, the Nazis sent most of the European Jews they had in custody to the death camps instead.

That's where most of the executions took place.

And it seems to have become clear rather rapidly to the conference attendees in 1942 — based on the few documents that survive — that they had been assembled to confirm a decision that had already been made.

Perhaps that was to give the proceedings the semblance of a legal framework.

We've also been told for many years that the first gassings of prisoners took place at Auschwitz in September 1941. The experiments led to the adoption of Zyklon B as the lethal agent of choice. The article in Bild appears to confirm both that selection and the fact that gassing experiments had been conducted by November 1941.

So what was new in the Bild report? Not much, really.

Except for the revelation of the existence of Auschwitz blueprint plans.

And perhaps evidence that will, as Ralf Georg Reuther says in Bild, "rebut ... the last Holocaust deniers."