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little grey rabbit wrote:

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Incidently Dr Terry, would you care to give an opinion as to why bischoff was constructing such large underground morgues for a POW camp back in 1941? As a POW camp was what was being planned back then.

Are there any other POW camps that have a similiar structure?

I answered much of this with my last reply to shyster, but since then have refreshed my memory of the paper trail. The decision to install 15 muffles was very probably the result of scaling up requirements based on the planned 125,000 capacity, compared to existing KZ norms, which Topf were quite used to dealing with. It is also not unreasonable, given the later history with Topf, to presume that Pruefer did a good sales job, since ultimately he and his company were going to get paid more if they installed more ovens. Nobody had ever planned a KZ of that size before or indeed any single camp of that size, so it's a bit of a 'first time skyscrapers collapsed after planes hit them' scenario here. The whole thing was unprecedented.

At this stage nobody knew how fast the ovens could work, so the fact that they could outpace morgue capacity need not have occurred to anyone at this stage. As I explained to shyster, it is a bit of a stretch to assume that architects are automatically perfect planners, and designing a prestige object like a crematorium may simply have given Dejaco a hard-on, so he made it more complex than it need have been. This is a much more plausible explanation than the coulda-woulda-shoulda struggling to get out from your post.

Note that the plans went to Berlin and came back with adjustments to the cellars, rather than a telling-off not to waste money.

Quite likely Dejaco did not think too hard on the issue when he sized the morgues, which were probably intended to be (a) scaled up from the existing Krema I morgue, (b) to replace or centralise the newly created morgue barracks and (c) to house certain Standesamt functions - the latter seems to have been one of the reasons for the temporary addition of a 3rd morgue as a registration space in the early 1942 blueprints. The size of the morgues suggests to me that replacing the morgue barracks aboveground was a strong priority.

The ventilation system was definitely a consequence of the experiences with Krema I. Pressac 1993/1994 has an interesting speculation that the plan from the outset to install both Belueftung and Entlueftung was done to make one of the morgues more pleasant to work in, possibly to accomodate Grabner, who had yapped about Krema I being a bit grim. Since there were executions undertaken in Krema I then perhaps some of the 'odd' features which have led certain commentators to see a pre-design of a gas chamber in the original blueprints can be explained by this. In particular, the immuring of the ventilation system behind masonry, which is hardly necessary with corpses but is maybe a good idea if live prisoners are being taken downstairs to be shot. With small batch executions there is not much need for deception. I would say the idea of locating the crematorium in the main camp indicates something nefarious, although not necessarily a gas chamber (yet). If the facility was purely intended for the KGL then it would have been located there from the outset, whereas there were all manner of naughty things going on involving commissars in the Stammlager. Plus, the Auschwitz SS were well aware of things like the Genickschussanlage in Sachsenhausen.

Other planned KGLs of the SS - which basically means Stutthof and Majdanek - were also involved in 14 f 14, but they were much less advanced as camps, and did not get crematoria until much later on. Majdanek was hardly even up and running, and was still a bit Globocniked in late 1941, whereas Auschwitz was already earmarked as Kammler's baby. Stutthof was little more than a fence with some barracks inside it, and Uncle Heinrich didn't even designate it as a site of special interest until November 1941, i.e. after Auschwitz had been given the halo of KGL status.