“There are few buildings still in existence more associated with the horrors of the Holocaust than the entrance guard house at the gates of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau,” said Professor .
This part of the camp, he explained, was expanded in 1943 and ’44 as a new wing was added to accommodate more inmates—a clear indication of the Nazi regime’s confidence that its genocidal practices would continue for years to come.
It also marked the deadliest and final phase of the Holocaust, during which a total of some six million Jews were murdered over the course of the Second World War.
“But what happens if we move our attention from the overall symbolic significance that the building has taken on and think about its individual forms?” added Jaskot, a professor of art history and German studies at Duke University. This was, after all, a major construction project, he added.
“Bricks and mortar had to be brought to the site, along with cement; foundations were dug; pipes were laid,” said Jaskot. This was a clear example of the extent to which Nazi Germany’s architectural policy was inextricably linked with the regime’s genocidal plans.
Jaskot came to ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ on November 4, 2024, to deliver an address as part of the College’s (sponsored by the Gabry Family Fund). The lecture was titled “Architecture and the Holocaust.”
“The intersection of architecture and oppression is not unique to Auschwitz but haunts the entire Holocaust,” he said. The role of the wartime German construction industry generally is much more central to the oppression of the Jews than has previously been suggested by scholars, argued Jaskot.
His lecture explored the many different ways that architecture played a part in promoting, planning, and enacting the genocide. From propaganda to antisemitic housing policy and into the occupation of Eastern Europe during the war, architects and their buildings influenced specific changes to Nazi policies and were surprisingly prominent in the administrative process.
Hitler had a special interest in architecture, which became increasingly important to him through the 1930s, said Jaskot. “Tellingly, Hitler linked architectural quality with the question of political strength.”
As Nazi Germany’s construction industry started to boom in the prewar years, he explained, huge architectural projects—whether the building of factories, stadiums, motorways, government buildings, or death camps—were central to Nazi policy, said Jaskot. This also led to a brutal expansion of forced labor operations and the deaths of tens of thousands of workers, most of them Jewish—another aspect the Holocaust explored by Jaskot.
“We are only just now beginning to see literally the built environment and construction as a central aspect of planning and enacting the Holocaust, as well as its broader political and ideological significance,” he said.
Jaskot is a founding member of the an international collective of scholars working on how digital mapping and other computational methods could help to advance questions concerning the genocide of European Jews. This work promotes debates around the use of digital methods for the spatial analysis of the Holocaust.
After the war, said Jaskot, many of Nazi Germany’s leading architects went on to enjoy successful careers, and the architectural legacy of the Third Reich is clearly on display on many parts of the country—the Olympic Stadium in Berlin being just one example.
Jaskot ended his lecture with a quote from the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940): “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
“This is certainly the case when we analyze the long history of architecture and the Holocaust,” he concluded.
