Ep. 46: Nazi Architecture with Paui Jaskot

Architecture (and architects) played a critical role in not just the Third Reich, but also the Holocaust.  Nazi architects helped embody the Nazi worldview in their monumental work but also in the designs of concentration camps.  They were willing collaborators in the use of slave labor and, ultimately, in the construction of the apparatuses of genocide.  In this episode, I talk with architecture and Holocaust historian Paul Jaskot about all these facets of architecture in the Third Reich.

Paul Jaskot is Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies and co-director of the Digital Art History and Visual Culture Research Lab at Duke University.

Jaskot, Paul. The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (1999)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.002)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today we are talking about architecture and the Nazis and architecture and the Holocaust. both sort of the aesthetics of design, but also the ways in which architecture and architects in Germany, really became complicit in the nitty gritty of the Holocaust on the ground. And I couldn't think of a better person.

to join us to talk about that. Then Paul Jaskot, is an architectural historian and historian of the Holocaust. Paul, thanks so much for coming on.

Paul Jaskot (00:38.723)
Thanks, Waittman. It's a great pleasure to be here. Very interested in this conversation.

Waitman Beorn (00:42.664)
And of course I should note that Paul and I go way back. So I'm really happy to have him on the podcast. and I guess we should start by, like, I always ask people, how did you get interested in the Holocaust? I guess in architecture and the Holocaust, but how did, how, what was your path to where you are today?

Paul Jaskot (01:02.23)
Yeah, well that really does go way back. You know, when I started being an art historian some years ago, and art historians were not doing Nazi Germany, let alone doing the Holocaust. So I went to grad school and I thought I would be doing French 19th century painting because that's what a good art historian does, Impressionism.

Waitman Beorn (01:04.105)
You

Paul Jaskot (01:24.91)
But what happened was that I worked through a series of dissertation topics that I thought were dissertation topics and that didn't work. And then I stumbled into a class on Hitler and Stalin as patrons of the arts. This was not a popular class in the late 80s, I can guarantee you that. And we were doing, we were in this class and I was thinking about this and I thought, you know, I'd done a lot of papers on...

artists in revolution, artists in critique, but what really wasn't being done was artists and conservative movements, artists in the right wing in particular, sort of kind of authoritarianism. And so I decided that that was the political history I wanted to do. And I decided I wanted to work on Hitler. And that led me to the archives in Germany where I had a very broad topic, but I kept, as part of that topic, there was always a kind of architectural.

angle there and I kept coming across letters in the archive between Albert Speer, Hitler's main architect, very, very famous architect, and Heinrich Himmler, which always really surprised me. That is the head of the SS. And, you know, these letters were kind of sprinkled about every now and then. And it took me a while to realize the very deep connection between the two, particularly in the SS.

German earth and stone works, that was the name of their business that they set up after 1936 in some of the camps, such as Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen and Flossenburg and Mauthausen. And these were really, these were brick works and stone quarry operations. And I thought, well, that's really interesting. And no one had written on that. Or I should say historians had written on it, but they had written about it as, well, here's forced labor. And it was all about,

killing people and hurting people, communists, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, a whole slew of different categories that the SS was arresting at the time. But the historians never followed the building materials. said, well, you because they said, this was just busy work, essentially, work for the enslaved. But I started following the building materials, and those building materials led me to...

Paul Jaskot (03:36.258)
the two major building projects of the Nazi period. That is the rebuilding of Berlin and the Reich Party rally grounds in Nuremberg. And so that really, that really blew my mind. It really opened up the fact that there was a political story to be told that was deeply, not a side interest of architecture, but deeply embedded in architecture and architectural history. So that was my first major project is doing the forced labor quarry and brick working camps and brick making camps. And that was...

a really productive way to go. But even then I wasn't thinking Holocaust, I was thinking Nazi construction forced labor. I wasn't thinking Jewish forced labor in particular, but as not surprisingly as part of that work, I had to become more more familiar with the way the Jewish prisoners in particular were treated and then the relationship of the building economy to the German Jewish history in specific and then the broader occupied history.

after the war starts in 1939. And there a much broader pattern emerged that I really did think that this is what we need to do. This is what really, it really fascinated me that we don't know that we didn't know this history at the time. And it really angered me actually that we weren't looking at these kinds of connections, which really.

meant the cultural goals that we think of as neutral and they were thought of as neutral in the Nuremberg tribunals. I Speer was considered to be a very cultured architect who, he indulged in forced labor after he was Minister of Armaments in 1942. But you he was really, his architectural side was always seen to be something good, something positive. And what I was really seeing was the way in which those so-called positive goals of culture

were not only dependent, but promoting and indeed implementing certain elements of the Holocaust. And that's when the Holocaust really became important to me. That happened through my work on Berlin. And so after I did the book on forced labor, I started looking much more deeply into Holocaust related topics related to the building economy. And I haven't stopped. So right now I'm working on occupied Europe.

Paul Jaskot (05:55.49)
but that also once that is done, there's a lot more to be done within Nazi Germany itself in this area as well.

Waitman Beorn (06:03.87)
Well, and then that's a good, that's a good segue, I think, into sort of the, the first area of discussion, which is kind of, because, you know, we, your work too, and I had noticed having talked to you before, you know, there's, there's always sort of the, the art historical aesthetic discussion. And this is in art history in general about sort of what does the painting look like and, know, what, what genre does it fall in and that kind of stuff. And then there's also the, the sort of Robert meets the road piece, the economics of it or the.

the practicalities of who's buying this, who's commissioning this, that kind of stuff. And I think the same thing is obviously happening in terms of Third Reich as well. And I know that, I think I agree with you, for me sometimes the more interesting piece is the piece about how does this happen on the ground and how does this impact.

actual people's lives. But before we get there, can you give us an overview of kind of the Nazi aesthetic as it relates to architecture and what are they trying to do? What are their models for this? What do they hate? These kinds of things. And then we can move on from there.

Paul Jaskot (07:18.158)
Well, I'm gonna go a little school marm you here in the sense that I often tell my students you're never allowed to use the phrase Nazi aesthetic or Nazi art because there was no such consistent category.

Waitman Beorn (07:26.856)
Okay.

Paul Jaskot (07:31.006)
they didn't have one aesthetic. If you talk to Goebbels, head of propaganda, he thought that modernism that is more stylized, more abstract works were perfectly fine. But if you talk to Rosenberg, who was head of the newspaper, he was like, my God, this is the worst thing ever and it's degenerate and terrible. So the idea of consistency, aesthetic consistency is not there. That said, after...

yelling at my students about this. I also, of course, encouraged them to explore this in more detail. Let's be nuanced about this. And the real nuance, and where your question is absolutely right, the nuance there is to say that a set of categories were instrumentalized or strategically used by different factions within the Nazi party at different times. And those were quite consistent. So for example, there was nothing wrong to do what we call modernism, that is...

steel and glass, a form that embraces industrial material, if you were doing factory design. Even Albert Speer said that in one of his writings, like, sure, go ahead, use it. Or if you were trying to make a kind of more efficient business space, that was absolutely fine. But if you were doing a housing complex, that better not be a flat roof, it better not be concrete, it better have a pitched roof, and it better be wood or wooden brick or something like that. So they...

their ideology that was inconsistent, not surprisingly, as often happens with racism, which is inconsistent as an ideology, but it was also a strategic. They really did have a quite successful mobilization of specific kinds of categories of art for their interests. And one great example is of course, the main party buildings of the state. So in that regard, they absolutely were

monumental neoclassicism. So lots of stone facades, definitely use of classical forms like cornice lines and Doric columns and pediments. So things you would see in ancient Greece and Rome, that was absolutely the 100 % if you were doing a prestige project in downtown Munich like the Königsplatz or the Nuremberg Pride Rally Grounds or the redesign of Berlin, that's what you saw.

Paul Jaskot (09:45.902)
Now, again, we have to be a little careful here. often, again, fool my students by showing them the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and compare that to the House of German Art in Munich. House of German Art opened in 1937, National Gallery of Art in 1942. Well, they're both monumental neoclassicism. And if you don't tell them what there is, the students are like, oh, it's a government building, because they know that classicism equals government.

But as soon as you say like, actually this one is by, you know, was patronized by Hitler. And this one is in Washington, DC. Suddenly the DC building looks very democratic and the Munich building is very oppressive. And it's a very useful way of saying that indeed there were differences, in scale. Nazi monumental building tended to be larger in scale than building in the United States or in the Soviet Union, who was also using neoclassicism at the time.

But nevertheless, I really think that what I would like to emphasize is that the strategic use of aesthetics means it's really about the context of the way they're using art and the function of how they're using art. And those two things are very much aesthetically determined. So Hitler, sorry, go ahead.

Waitman Beorn (11:02.62)
And I think it, no, it reminds me of the, it's a really good point that I hadn't thought of that, you know, it's, there are sort of rules, but the rules are applied differently depending on what the context of the building is. And I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about now, I'm skipping ahead a bit, but I'm thinking about now the, the, the ideal sort of German rural architecture.

in the East, which is this old, it's like a pre-modern almost, like fortified farm from the, almost from the middle ages. And so like, again, there's another, there's a specific context there too, that it needs to look like this because of what the people that are going to inhabit it are supposed to be, which are these sort of warrior farmer types, right?

Paul Jaskot (11:32.942)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Jaskot (11:47.139)
Right. one of the, absolutely, and one of the results of this is that because Hitler really cared about art and architecture, he styled himself as an architect, he did architectural drawings, he went to art openings. So he really was very much in this aesthetic world. It meant that everyone around him was also becoming interested in art and architecture. And so suddenly the aesthetic of a building and that farmhouse in the East means something.

And even the SS, Jaime Kimlo, he wasn't trained in any artistic tradition, but he decided that for the SS it was going to be medieval, because they were the new generation of German knights. And so the walls of Mauthausen, the outside walls, not the walls that you can't see, but the outside walls, this massive kind of stone fortress that even has turret holes.

as though you could shoot out, but they make no sense to the actual interior because it's all meant to be symbolic. Or the town of Quedlinburg in Eastern Germany, a beautiful medieval town with an absolutely pristine, Atonian cathedral in which Henry the first, Henry the first died. And the SS bought that because they were going to reestablish that cult 100 years or 1,000 years later.

This shows you that, again, that strategic thinking. Imler didn't want classicism, because classicism wasn't exactly what he was going after in terms of his particular party unit, that is the SS.

Waitman Beorn (13:24.702)
Yeah. And so if we have sort of, and I guess we're reading this, of course, in contrast to the Weimar period, you know, which is this period of explosive new thought, you know, Bauhaus and all kinds of other forms of art, against which, in a certain sense, the Nazis are designing, right? What happens to the discipline?

of architecture. now looking at the architects themselves and, you know, the working towards the Fuhrer sort of piece of this.

Paul Jaskot (14:02.936)
That's a good question. It's a complicated one as well because what happens to the discipline or the profession, again, that's multiple answers to that question. On the one hand, you have the purge. So that's the easy part. In 1933, when Hitler comes to power,

You have a purge of the civil servants, civil service, excuse me, and that means that some people lose their jobs and they lose their job because they are not because they're Jewish necessarily, but because they're supposedly undesirable.

Hold on.

Paul Jaskot (14:49.368)
Let me start that again.

Waitman Beorn (14:50.804)
Sure.

Paul Jaskot (14:55.182)
So it's a complicated question because it really affected the profession in multiple ways. On the one hand, in 1933, you had the purge, so the purge of the civil service, and that was because you were politically suspicious. It could be that you were Jewish, but was more likely you were a Jewish communist. And that was allowing the alignment of architectural shops with Hitler's main goals.

So that was a really important kind of moment, but most architects went straight on in their jobs. It was not really a problem as with most other professions in Nazi Germany, but with particularly the four year plan in 1936. And when they started to try to control the resources of Germany and also the infrastructure, because what we often forget is that in our focus on things like armament production,

that crops might decide that it's going to build a factory and that it's going to make these incredibly important armaments, but the building of the factory might take two years, it might take 30,000 people, it might take railroad car after railroad car of steel and cement, and these things, labor, materials, they were all, they were under gooding shop, meaning they were also being mobilized by the four-year plan. And so that,

That moment of 36 to 39 in particular is when you really see the alignment of the construction industry and of course then architects with the goals of the state. And it's really almost impossible, I would say, by 1939 to work outside of that because actually after the war you needed to be given a permission to build a building. It had to be war important.

Now, what's interesting there is war important was not only the factory for tanks, war important also meant the Nuremberg Party rally grounds. So that drive of Hitler to think about culture as part of genocide and the military, that all of these things are one picture, meant that you had by the war years an incredible kind of apparatus that our system of construction that favored high-end architectural design at the same time.

Paul Jaskot (17:20.544)
It was deeply involved in the quite literally millions of people and millions of Reich, Reich marks with the resources in the construction industry.

Waitman Beorn (17:31.848)
And so talk a little about about spare because who is this guy? you know, how does he reach the position that he does? and then kind of, what is, how, how do we categorize him? Because he, does a good job of categorizing himself, but we probably shouldn't believe everything he says.

Paul Jaskot (17:53.496)
Well, Albert Speer is the great enigma at the center of this equation. I couldn't believe it after seeing how deeply involved he was in the forced labor concentration camps that he got off with his life at Nuremberg. I really could not believe it. And part of that is because, as you say, he was very successful at writing his own story after the war.

Now, it was also the fact that it took decades, literally decades, for the cultural story of the Nazi period, its use of architecture as propaganda, the Degenerate Art Show, to be connected with other parts of the state, particularly policy and policy implementation. That literally was decades. So for 50 years or so, no one was even looking at Albert Speer, because why would you? He was an architect.

So that story took a long time to break down. But what's really surprising is that it still lingers. It still lingers as this idea that Speer was a cultivated architectural genius. Now, he was a Weimar-era architect. He was trained in the Weimar Republic, worked in Berlin at the technical university there. And he was a very young man.

So like many of the most ambitious members of the Nazi state, he was in his 30s, in the early 30s, and came to power and was really ambitious, like many young men. So this was the first opportunity he'd ever had to build anything as monumental as this. So he came to the attention of Goebbels to redesign one of the interior, one of his buildings. And it was in 34 that he was given the task of doing one of the buildings at the Reich's party rally grounds.

And from there, very quickly, Hitler decided to make him the main designer of the Reich Party Rally grounds, which was a massive, really a massive building site. And that was quite a coup for someone his age and it was not expected. So he kind of came out of the blue, but it also really connected to the way that we know Hitler liked to have people close to him that were really.

Paul Jaskot (20:14.528)
loyal to him and that also were outside of the main apparatus, the main administrative powers of the state. So Speer was a relative unknown. He was not part of the large architectural circles of the Weimar Republic. And he was young and he was directly reporting to Hitler. So that was really quite a powerful position. There are times, for example, when he was redesigning Berlin, which he started in 1936.

that he would just ignore the mayor of Berlin. And the mayor Berlin was, although he was a very good Nazi party member, he would just ignore him. That was irrelevant because Speer was going to go directly to Hitler and Hitler had decided that this was really his most important peacetime goals. So Speer, through his direct relationship to Hitler, to his willingness to do the kind of architecture and the kind of planning that Hitler wanted, became very close.

But it also meant that he was involved in the largest projects of the state, in this case, the redesigning of Berlin, which inevitably meant that he also became deeply involved with other elements of the state and the Nazi party. So it's through Berlin, for example, that he really becomes involved with Himmler and the SS. This would also lead him into antisemitic housing policy, which he was very much one of the first people to try to implement.

So before even the Gestapo, before the SS, Speer was having ideas about how to deprive Jews of housing, for example. And he did this because it served his architectural agenda. It served his desire to build. And not surprisingly, then, when the war... sorry, go ahead.

Waitman Beorn (21:49.866)
Do we, sorry, is there any, do we have any indication of his, of his ideological leanings? I mean, even before, mean, like, is he, is he one of these sort of ruthless pragmatist opportunist careerist types or, know, is he, you know, because it's, you're suggesting it sounds like that he's sort of leaning forward in the

Paul Jaskot (21:58.176)
yeah.

Waitman Beorn (22:14.416)
anti-Semitic housing, you know, taking the initiative and things they didn't need to be necessarily doing, but may have been doing because he actually cared about it in a different way other than just the architecture.

Paul Jaskot (22:28.43)
As far as we know, as far as I know, there is no really overtly anti-Semitic statement that Speer ever makes. He's not like Rosenberg. He's not like the People's Observer, the Völkischer Beerbachter. This is not the kind of anti-Semite that Speer was.

He was very much a believer in though the German effort, the Nazi effort and the idea of German superiority. And so those are the terms, he would put it in German terms, right? He wouldn't put it in racial terms, quote unquote, he would put it in national terms. And that, to that degree, he was very, very effective. And it was also what in many ways got him off the hook in the Nuremberg tribunals.

and in other post-war testimony. He was always thought of as someone that was more cultivated and wouldn't fall into the kind of vulgar racism that was so apparent in other elements of the party. So it's interesting the way that he is nevertheless not only willing, but quite able and interested in using antisemitic policy to his benefit.

So what that says to me is he may not have made a statement or a speech about anti-Semitism to his staff, but did he care about German Jews, let alone the millions of European Jews that he was using as part, for example, of the war economy? I would say absolutely not. There's no evidence that he thought for five seconds about whether depriving someone of his house

or forcing a woman to carry bricks for 10 hours a day, seven days a week, bothered him in the least.

Waitman Beorn (24:14.12)
And so is, is what is his sort of portfolio in terms of like, what is, what is his area of control that he has his hands directly in, the sense of things he's responsible for?

Paul Jaskot (24:29.656)
Well, in the early days of the regime, it's just specific individual building projects, actually individual building. So one building at Nuremberg. And then he gets the whole party rally grounds. And then he gets Berlin. Berlin is the big prize. And by that time you would think like, well, that's probably enough for any one architect. mean, redesigning Berlin, which again began in 1936, the idea was that a third, a third of a city of millions would be torn down.

you were redesigning a third of a city. So think about that, think about New York or Berlin today and just say, we're gonna tear down a third of it and we're gonna rebuild it. So it was a massive, massive endeavor.

Waitman Beorn (25:06.922)
Well, and some of the stuff was just insanely big, wasn't it? mean, like the, like the Nazi Congress hall was going to be what the largest building on earth or something. mean, and there's, I saw something someplace I was online and they, guess someplace in Berlin, they had done it. They'd done a test about the footers for this building by basically taking like a really, really heavy piece of concrete and sitting in it.

Paul Jaskot (25:17.407)
Yeah.

Paul Jaskot (25:27.81)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (25:32.712)
And the end result was that it never would have stood up because it was just too big and too heavy.

Paul Jaskot (25:39.446)
It never would have stood up at the time, but that also shows you their ambition. And by the way, that footer is still stuck in the middle of Berlin. It's within a patch of weeds. So you can't get to it, but it's still there because it was so big. You just can't get rid of it. I mean, you might blow it up, but the kind of force of that bomb would destroy a lot of, you know, that part of Berlin. But I think what you're, that ambition is...

What's really amazing, I the domed space of the Great Hall, which was the centerpiece of Berlin, it was designed after a kind of preliminary sketch of Hitler. So it was this big kind of homage to Hitler's great architectural skills. And then Speer kind of turned it into this wonderful building. They knew, yes, at the time they knew that it was not buildable because the span was too big, it would collapse. They didn't have the infrastructure. Now we could do it. Now we have the kind of...

of steel skeletons that really could be done. But that wasn't going to stop them. After all, the idea was that the war would go very quickly, that they would get back to their peacetime initiative of Berlin, and the whole thing could be finished by 1950. That was the goal, 1950. But it was not only the dome that was the problem in terms of the span, but quite famously, they knew the dome was so big, there might be its own weather pattern.

So there might be, you might be able to get rain because of the condensation of the air and if you had a hundred thousand people in there. so there were a lot of technical problems they hadn't solved. But that's often used by art historians to say like, this is all fantasy architecture. So it's just on paper. It's all about propaganda and ideology.

And I would point to that big piece of cement in Berlin and I would say, well, it is definitely propaganda and ideology, but it's also, they were putting this into place. They were making millions of bricks at Sachsenhausen. They were quarrying stone with forced labor at Mauthausen and they were moving east and they were trying to get every single granite work in occupied Europe that was going to help feed Berlin. So they were active.

Paul Jaskot (27:55.534)
even during the war, even during the war, at least till 1943, trying to achieve that agenda in any way they could. I would say that just one final footnote here, it's not surprising then when Fritz Tote, who was head of the organization Tote, which was the main kind of construction wing, particularly the four year plan, that when he died in February of 1942, it's not at all surprising that Albert Speer then became that leader of Armament's

for the war effort, because what did Albert Speer know? He knew design, but he also knew how to mobilize thousands of laborers. He knew how to mobilize resources. He knew how to move those resources, centralize them. That is to say, his experience in redesigning Berlin was very much perfect for his then taking over the war economy as the Minister of Armaments.

Waitman Beorn (28:48.931)
And then that kind of gives us a little segue then into the camps, which is kind of decreasing our scale a little bit from sort of the national Nazi scale to one of these individual places. I guess my first question is, it's an honest one that I don't even know the answer to, but were there people that specialized, architects that specialized in designing?

concentration camps who moved from place to place or was each one designed by a separate group of architects? And obviously some of them, know, like Tachau are not sort of purpose built from the beginning. They're amalgamations of existing buildings, but then you have places like Sachsenhausen, which is sort of purpose built from nothing. And can you talk a little about that and sort of how, who designs these places?

Paul Jaskot (29:43.07)
The design of concentration camps on the one hand just follows institutional designs that have been around in the whole modern period. That is you have a series of pavilions, you have centralized spaces, you have functional arrangements of space, nothing unusual here in terms of the actual design. But you're absolutely right to point to the kind of who and how they came up with these.

because on the one hand it was absolutely centralized in Berlin. So you had to get any architectural plan had to be approved by Oswald Pohl who was the head of the economic and administrative main office of the SS. So he was the kind of economic parallel to Reinhard Heydrich who was the security wing of the SS. So any design, so we have correspondence for example with Flossenberg which used stone for some of his watch towers.

and they sent those designs off to Berlin and it comes back with Pol's comments that, know, this is all very well and good, but really the stone should have a kind of more playful feel to it. Playful is the word, spielerisch, yeah? And it's like, there you go. He's not an architect at all. No, he's a bureaucrat, he's an administrator and he's part of this forced labor operation. But that tells you, so they're really, they're approving of Berlin in a lot of different ways.

Waitman Beorn (30:49.482)
And of course he's not an architect, he's just some guy. Yeah.

Paul Jaskot (31:04.034)
I would also point out that shows you that even at the level of the camp, they're thinking in cultural terms. That building the camp, it's not just a political or an economic project, it's also a cultural one. Nevertheless, that approval in Berlin, while it was important, the major camps had their own architectural offices. So they had their own, what we call bauleitung, or bau building administration.

If you were big camp like Auschwitz, had a central bar light, you had a large centralized building administration. But these building administrators, sometimes they went through the system. So they would start like many SS officers in Dachau, they'd get their training there and they would kind of move through the system. But often they were also, they are members of the SS, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (31:48.084)
So these are these are members of the SS. They're like uniforms. But their job title is architect.

Paul Jaskot (31:56.822)
Architect, right. So building administrator, they're doing resources, they're doing construction activity. And I should say they're supported locally by a number of businesses. So they might be a designer, but they're more than likely to work with a local cement firm or to use even some local labor if the forced labor wasn't skilled enough for what they wanted you to do. So it could be localized as well within a particular kind of economy.

Mott Talzin, for example, worked with some local quarries to train some of their stonemasons, the stonemasons who were forced laborers. And so this interconnection of architectural interests and business interests and labor interests were really quite common throughout the system. Nevertheless, in the bigger camps, you definitely had

architects that were appointed by the Central SS and that they as I say they tended to go through the system in They could be moved around the system in different ways

Waitman Beorn (33:03.828)
So like, were they, I mean, was it a case of like, you're an SS architect and, you your task right now is this camp, but then later on you might build something else totally unrelated, or was it sort of like, I mean, know it's sort of at Auschwitz, it's a whole different, because it's in kind of a constant state of massive construction throughout, which lots of camps were, but would they move sort of from,

you know, designing a barracks someplace to designing a concentration camp and then and then back and forth. It wasn't more like this is a guy who knows how to do concentration camps. And so we're going to do that.

Paul Jaskot (33:47.018)
That's a good question. I think it's more that this is a guy that knows how to lay a foundation. This is a guy that knows how to work with prefab housing. So the barracks, for example, the barracks were mostly shipped to the camps. They were not built on site. So you had to be able to know how to construct pieces that come to you on the railroad car. So it's people that were really involved in construction. That's where you saw the real knowledge.

But there was at the top, the cream, you will, were designers. And they were the ones that were doing things like the entrance pavilion, and they were doing all the other infrastructure. So we should remember at Auschwitz, there are hundreds of barracks, of course, in Birkenau, this terrible environment. But there were also hundreds, hundreds of houses that were designed for camp personnel. These were meant to be, there was a hotel. They had plans for a kindergarten.

You know, this was all kinds of construction that required quote unquote more architectural design. And these designs were also coming out of the central building administration. So it wasn't just the camp, it was the camp and its infrastructure, which meant building the world for the SS at that site. And we shouldn't forget that what building that world meant was also often killing people in the process of construction. That the genocidal impulse, it wasn't just about

gassing people, shooting people, was also working them to death.

Waitman Beorn (35:17.854)
Yeah. And I want to, I want to come back to Auschwitz. I just had, I have a selfish question because it's, something that, you know, I'm doing this project of, you know, reconstructing a camp, the Inoskwe camp and, in doing so, I'm always looking at other camps for, you know, potential ideas, I suppose, about how things might've been done. And one of the things that sort of springs to mind is that there isn't, there isn't a uniform aesthetic or even like a uniform design.

for like some very basic things like guard towers, which all seem to be different in every camp. so I'm just, can you talk, mean, is that a useful observation or is that just, mean, cause it seems like the Nazis would have like, okay, this is what a guard tower looks like. This is you build a guard tower. And here it is, you know, and, but it seems like that again, on the one hand they have, there's a centralized system, but on the other hand, it's very localized in how things end up.

Paul Jaskot (36:13.262)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about it quite in those terms, but I think you're right that there, the guard tower in particular, I can think of all different kinds of guard towers that were being used here. know, a Flossamberg, I mean, it was massive stone guard towers for no reason whatsoever, like absolutely unnecessary, except that you've got a lot of stone and that's how people know how to build, right, locally. But I think there are two exceptions that to...

Waitman Beorn (36:24.35)
Yeah.

Paul Jaskot (36:44.45)
this idea that it's all localized. One is the plan itself. The pavilion plan, which is the set of pavilions in a row with a central axis and centered on a roll call plaza. This is absolutely set. This is something they were trained to do. This is something that was part of common architectural practice, but also was implemented by the SS. So the SS wasn't going to let you design your camp in any old way you want.

And I should say this is definitely for the labor camps. It's a little bit different obviously for the Operation Reinhardt camps, which were much more in profit story. So, but that plan, that pavilion plan was really important and that was something that was repeated and that I would say was required. I mean, I don't have the memo that says that, but it's certainly something that came from Berlin. And the second exception to that is the entrance pavilion.

Now, entrance pavilions might be in local vernacular, so local different kinds of styles based on the local, just the local traditions, but the importance of having an entrance pavilion that has some kind of symbolic form, so it has better building materials, it has a gate with a script in it, it has a guard tower, which really isn't that functional, but gives you a presence on the landscape.

that could be seen from outside. These are all things that also I think are pretty consistent through the major camps. Now, when we get down to the much smaller camps, we are talking about an environment that is much less planned. And a lot of those smaller camps were in sites that were found or were industrial facilities that were adapted. But the major camps, you could pretty consistently say that that pavilion plan and that main

exclamation point of the entrance tower were really important parts of what made that built environment.

Waitman Beorn (38:43.252)
That's really interesting because I hadn't thought about it obviously like this until now, but even at Yanovska, right? Which is this out of the way place on the edge of empire. we know that. The house, the commandant moved the main entrance of his camp about 300 meters out and then did build this for, for, for where it was a monumental imposing sort of concrete,

concrete, big concrete gate with big iron worked gates on it. hadn't thought about that, but I mean, even at a place like that, there was this recognition or desire to have this sort of imposing main entrance, you know, even at sort of the lowest level.

Paul Jaskot (39:27.406)
That's what I think is also really important about your reconstruction, is that the reconstruction is going to build the prominence, recapture the prominence of that gate and the sight lines and where it was visible from, that all of those things become important that have been lost or that have been obscured. This happened actually at Dachau. If you'd been to Dachau 20 years ago, you would approach the main gate from

from inside, you wouldn't approach it from outside. And it's only in the last decade when they re-did the external, the external surroundings of the camp, that you approach it from that direction. And suddenly that gate, it's this Abed-Makhfray, that gate is much more prominent. It's just because they've tried to be more historical about the built environment.

Waitman Beorn (40:22.313)
It's a really good point. And it's one that sort of, again, I'm not going to talk about this isn't about, you know, off skid, but the, the, the wall, in other words, the outer boundary of the camp, they moved it partially because there was a railway embankment and civilian. was, there was a path along all along that had pre-existed before the war and people would walk along the path and because it was elevated, they could see. Into the camp. And so they moved the, they moved the boundary out and they build a massive sort of stone wall.

that intersects with the main gate. But then the rest of it is just regular old barbed wire fence, much like Mauthausen, which has a facade created for public consumption and then just functional boundaries around the rest of it.

Paul Jaskot (41:07.458)
Yeah, but I really, think Janowska, I decided not to go back there, but it is in that sense very much like Auschwitz. And what's important there is in your story is that they're taking their environment and they've got to like avoid this ditch or work around this water or they've got to work around within the conditions they have. But even there.

Even there, while they're thinking totally functionally, how can we build an oppressive environment that extracts labor and kills people? This is the goal. How do we build that functional space? But within that, they still are thinking culturally. So famously, Auschwitz-Birkenau, this massive camp, the plan of the camp with the famous entrance pavilion, which in its last iteration led to the gas chamber, the famous ramp.

that was built into the camp in 43, that this axis of death, that there was a symmetrical other axis that went out of the camp and led straight to the monumental housing estate of the SS. And my point is these are symmetrical. So some architect is thinking, how does this plan?

create a visual unity. How can I see these things together? I know. I'll use this design strategy to put on the one hand an axis that leads to the gas chambers and on the other hand an axis which promotes the SS. And so they're both thought of as part of the plan. These are not separate things. They're not hiding them. This is not two agendas. This is a positive view from their perspective of what the world should look like, which is genocide and SS housing.

Waitman Beorn (42:50.792)
Yeah. And let's talk about that more because, you know, one of the things that one of my introduction to you, you know, professionally was, was with your work on Auschwitz and the, and the Baoli Tung there and the central Baoli Tung. So can you, can you talk a little bit about like the Nazi vision architecturally for Auschwitz and how that, how that fits into the sort of the larger Nazi worldview really, because in some ways Auschwitz can sort of serve as a, as a microcosm for

for the state itself in a certain sense and its relationship between forced labor, genocide, SS life and culture, these kinds of things.

Paul Jaskot (43:30.976)
I mean, certainly there's been some wonderful work on Auschwitz, Schubert Steinbacher, for example, but also the fundamental book by Deborah Dvorak and Robert Jan van Pelt on Auschwitz. These are really, really important texts and they're really wonderful and they really tell you something about that building and that built environment. But.

One of the things that I think is interesting is the way that those texts also skew in the sense that they quite naturally talk specifically and particularly about the victim spaces and the importance of those spaces. And I would second that and third that and fourth that, meaning the spaces of Birkenau or the spaces of Auschwitz 1, which was more of the labor camp, not so much the death camp, although there was also a gas chamber there operational at some time.

But I think that what work needed to be done and what surprised me when I also went to the Auschwitz archive was to, it was the much more expansive infrastructure that went around that camp. was the world that that camp included. So while we rightfully focus on the architecture of Auschwitz and the way that that was part of the Holocaust,

I would say we also need to scale that up to see the local, urban, and even regional dimensions of the planning. And that's where the architecture office really becomes crucial. Because it's not just Carl Bischoff, who was the main architect, who was designing some plans, or Fritz Ertl, famously a Bauhaus graduate, so this prestigious German art school, who designed the plan for Birkenau.

It wasn't just these names. was 150 other architects plus on top of that 150 other forced labor, predominantly Jewish architects.

Paul Jaskot (45:38.542)
that were building a city. So that's an architectural office of 300. That is a huge, huge architectural office for 1942. In fact, I don't know a bigger one in Germany. I really don't. I mean, if you said Speer's Armaments Ministry was an architectural office, I suppose you could go there. But in terms of one site, that is a massive number of specialists. And of course, there's also administrators supporting them.

And so it's just the complexity of that world that I, that's what I tried to study. I tried to think more about the way that the housing and the hotel and the urban environment related to the genocide. So to really bring these perpetrator and victim stories into relationship one another and to think about them as what we like to call an intersecting history. That is they intersect in space.

So it's not just integrated, which is this wonderful idea from Saul Friedlander, but they also intersect at very specific points. And those points are not only the ramp at Birkenau, which was after all constructed, but it's also the housing and it's the hotel and it's the railroad system. It's the whole infrastructure around it that was important.

Waitman Beorn (46:53.578)
Well, and I think another thing that's always struck me about your work and then others about the architecture of of Auschwitz the camp is that this is a it's not something to be ashamed of or hidden. It's not something that's intended to be temporary, like the Reinhard camps were basically, you know, the Reiner camps are basically just drop their

the SS live in whatever barracks they can build, you know, even, but I mean, there is, is aesthetic aesthetics there too. And, and Nesobibor and how it's designed obviously is aesthetically designed. It's not just happenstance. but you don't get the sense that this is a long, there's a plan for this to exist for a long period of time. whereas at Auschwitz, you know, it's, these are, these are nice houses. These are nice housing estates.

you know, with all of the associated infrastructure for families, you know, and Himmler has his own apartment that he's going to have, you know, and, this is, so it's this, it's this intersection of the genocidal apparatus with the sort of resettling of the East, model city sort of desire, but it's all being done by the same people that are building the gas chambers.

Paul Jaskot (48:11.09)
In that regard, I think if you just shift a little bit further east, that is to Krakow, of course, the capital of the general government, which is right down the road, literally from Auschwitz. And you think about Hans Frank, who is the head of that general government and the importance of building. I mean, they were building housing estates in Krakow as the same time they're building the ghetto or they're populating the ghetto and building that wall. So this idea of just redistributing people in spaces,

building for the future. This is, I think you're absolutely right, is to emphasize that this is for that post-war world. And Himmler was quite specific. He gave a speech in the early 40s in which he said, look, once the piece is done, we are gonna need, you know, hundreds of thousands of building workers because Hitler has these goals. So what is the SS gonna do?

And literally he's challenging the SS to get more involved in the building economy, to think about forced labor as central to peacetime goals that are construction goals. And so I think that that's also what you see in the occupation of these major cities. Heidrich in 41, he calls Speer to Prague. Why? Because he needs some advice from Speer about how to redesign Prague to make it his German capital.

because Heidrich was going to be the kind of center of Prague after the war. This future-oriented thinking, is, to us it seems like this incredible, crazy pipe dream, but I think what we have to see is that the future-oriented dreaming is simultaneous with the war and that these things are being thought of together, like, I can use these barracks now to hold hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews before I kill them.

but I can also use them to house other Eastern Europeans and Slavs after the war for my building economy. These two things are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they're having dinner and having them in the same conversation. They're thinking about them and talking about them at the same time.

Waitman Beorn (50:19.338)
Yeah. I mean, and of course that fits into the larger, the general plan, OST, like if, if, the Nazis win, right. And, they, they pushed the boundaries of Europe to the boundaries of European Russia, along the Ural mountains. And then they basically enslave all the remaining, you know, Slavic populations who will have to replace all Jewish slave labor, which will presumably be murdered by that point or ultimately by that point.

So, but again, know, Auschwitz is not, is not going to go away. It's just the population is meant to change. Just as it was at the beginning, because the population was supposed to be POWs. And then that didn't work out. And yeah, sorry.

Paul Jaskot (51:00.64)
And I would, well, the period I would put at the end of that sentence is something like the scale of the Generalplan Ost, which was going to create a huge new living space and occupation, which is, course, an incredible part of the war effort, that these always have a cultural dimension. That, think, is where we're missing the architectural story, that when we really start thinking about moving people, we're also talking about building for people and building with people.

So labor and resources and those kinds of mass migration and kind of eugenic projects, those are also cultural ones. And if I just might add a plug there that Joshua Hagen and Robert Ostergen's Building Nazi Germany is a really great introduction to that broader view of architecture and urban planning as part of the Nazi, both peacetime and wartime efforts.

Waitman Beorn (51:39.7)
And it makes me, yeah, no, go ahead.

Waitman Beorn (51:56.798)
I mean, it makes me think of those Betteger guides to the general government, where basically anything, any building that's coded as good was clearly built by Germans at some point. And so it's like, you visit Krakow, as a German tourist in 1944, whatever, which is crazy to think about, but you're in this sort of Holocausty war zone, but like,

Paul Jaskot (52:01.239)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (52:24.724)
Check out the church here, which is clearly made by Germans because it's, it's of this kind of architectural. And, and I guess what you're suggesting is that in a world in which the Third Reich is successful and goes on, it's going to build German style churches and German style town halls to replace the Lithuanian style or whatever, you know, because that that's part of the colonization is the cultural piece.

Paul Jaskot (52:52.244)
Absolutely, right. And to emphasize that, they were still publishing about plans, housing plans, urban plans, building plans, as late as early 1945. That is, they're using precious resources like paper to do architecture journals. They're still going out. That's still considered important enough that it's allowed.

Waitman Beorn (53:18.89)
Yeah, I mean, I think, you again, one of the things that's that's fascinating and we've sort of this conversation we've sort of gone, we sort of modeled going from larger scales to smaller scales. But if we go down to the sort of scale of the out of the crematories at Auschwitz, right, the the buildings of the actual gas chambers. So, first of all, there are actual human beings, architects. With a pen in their hand who are drawing.

planning, deciding how big the gas chamber building or the gas chamber room in the building should be, et cetera. And then there are engineers solving problems like evacuating the poison gas and everything else. And they're all working together with businesses.

Waitman Beorn (54:11.39)
which I think is just, you're good. Yeah, go ahead.

Paul Jaskot (54:11.63)
And they have an architecture library that they're pulling books off the shelf to see how they might use other people's ideas and really kind of, they're being creative and innovative. Some of their designs, the designs particularly for crematorium two and three, the building designs, they're actually quite beautiful. They've got trees in the foreground and some of the corners are nicely detailed. So it's just astounding.

I mean, I, to this day, I just can't imagine sitting down and saying, yeah, you're going to design exactly what you said, this space which has to evacuate the gas quickly, but it has to look good too. Like, what does that, what could that possibly mean, you know?

Waitman Beorn (54:57.318)
or rather it doesn't have to look good, you think it does. For you, it does have to look good because the buildings that you design look good. And so I'm not just going to build a Minecraft like square building. It's going to be a nice, pretty building. And of course, for those of listeners that are more interested, you can listen to the episode with Karen Bartler, where she does a whole thing about Topfensons, which is the company.

Paul Jaskot (55:00.13)
Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (55:24.488)
that installs the ovens. But getting back to one of Paul's earlier points, it's also important to remember that I think there was something like seven to 10 different companies directly involved in elements of the gas chambers, providing various features or whatnot. And quite often, they sent their own civilian employees to install various pieces or build things. And certainly in the context of

of the gas chambers, Taupensons literally sent an engineer out to make sure everything worked. And of course, what that means when you say make sure everything worked is he had to literally watch a group of people be murdered and go through the entire process to make sure that his particular equipment was functioning properly. And if you expand that out to all kinds of what we call the, guess, general contractors who are building things at Auschwitz, you know, they're doing this next to

Auschwitz. And of some of them are slave laborers but some of them are German companies too, right?

Paul Jaskot (56:29.662)
And for me, what you're pointing to there is one of the problems with much of the art history. So here I'll critique my own discipline is that many, people in art history tend to think about architecture from exclusively the point of view of design. So the person at the desk drawing.

But what you're pointing to is architecture's process. That is, as construction, as something that is in the landscape that takes time, that has to be tried, is trial and error sometimes. And when you start thinking about architecture as process, then the idea of the individual designer, of course, goes out the window. at least the ideology that someone is just doing this alone or is separate, is gone.

And there you see, you just see the involvement of the whole system. And when I say the system, mean architects, mean builders, but also, as you say, those private construction firms. We know, for example, that in Krakow, there were at least 30 different German construction firms that were involved in the occupation. And what they were building is they were building this new German capital. We also know that there were Danish firms involved, that there were local firms involved.

and that all these people were using not only conscripted labor through what was called the Baudienst, the building service, that was Polish Christian labor, but they were also using Jewish forced labor to do things. Well, sometimes it was building a house. Sometimes it was moving the banks of the Vistula River because that's the scale, right? It's constantly, it's the scale of everything. And when you're talking about everything, some businesses are involved because it's a really good profit-making opportunity.

And others are involved because it is absolutely something they believe in, for example, is a German firm. Holti, Philipp Holzmann, Dickolf Wittmann, these are major German construction firms. And they were all involved in not only building the quote unquote positive buildings of the Nazi state, such as the party rally grounds, but also the war effort and in using forced labor. So it's seamless. These people are part of

Paul Jaskot (58:45.262)
of both of these worlds, but they don't see them as two worlds. They see them as one German Nazi goal. And that goal is cultural and military and genocidal.

Waitman Beorn (58:58.728)
Yeah, I mean, can you talk a little about about this project that you're working on in Krakow? It's sort of like what you're what you're trying to investigate there.

Paul Jaskot (59:09.528)
Well, I've always wanted to take the attention away from design just as design. I've always wanted to put the attention, as we were just talking about, on process. And so for me, one frustration has been that we haven't really been able to break away from the perpetrator documents, which of course are design documents, but also construction documents.

and really include the whole process that is we haven't gotten labor. We haven't really gotten the labor piece. We know how many laborers were used and killed. Well, we know approximately, but we don't have that perspective. We don't have that voice. Partially, we can get at this through things like the Shoah Foundation testimony. I was really shocked a few years ago when I started looking for women.

and forced labor construction and thought I would stumble upon a few. And I stumbled on hundreds of testimonies in which women were involved in the construction business. And now, of course, that seems to be completely not surprising. But at the time I first looked, I couldn't point you to a single article anywhere in any language I knew that talked about women in the construction industry, not one. So that kind of revelation is what drove me in Krakow to really try to think of

the variety of different spaces, and to try to model them, use actually digital modeling to reveal a hidden side, a hidden history of these sites and to try to productively reconstruct a Jewish perspective on labor, but also on the built environment, a perspective we have lost.

Now, what that means is I'm not trying to create a kind of environment that is a gaming environment, a you are there kind of thing, but thinking about it as a constantly changing, refined environment. In fact, we're doing different versions of the same environment because, well, this is the January of 1944 version, but here's the November 1943. And actually there were some changes. And I mean, we all know that, right? Buildings change over time. But trying to get to that level,

Paul Jaskot (01:01:24.622)
And why would we do that? Well, because we have a diary in late 43. And so that is one Jewish voice that suddenly we could put in relationship to the built environment. But the built environment we have is a 45 built environment, because that's the one that most historians have been working with. And so I could use here digital reconstruction, but also other kinds of digital interventions to try to create

this intersection of perspectives, interests, and policies. And that's really what I'm trying to do is to create a kind of exploratory environment with a team, I should say, an exploratory environment that helps us to think through the real points of contact between perpetrator experience and policy and Jewish experience and agency when it was there on both sides of this equation.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:21.482)
And so how do you, how do you put these things together? How do you, how do you visualize a building project and then put, for example, the Jewish perspective into it?

Paul Jaskot (01:02:25.187)
Yeah.

Paul Jaskot (01:02:37.474)
That's a good and difficult question. And I would say we're in the middle of that right now, meaning we haven't figured out the answer. Right now, one way we're approaching that is through thinking about interoperability. That is thinking about multiple platforms at the same time.

And so even something as simple as bringing in a mapping platform, a digital mapping platform such as GIS with a 3D modeling platform such as CAD, which is an architecture software, and try to bring these two together and then connect them to.

the Showa Foundation interface, which is a different, another platform, or to think about how we might use other kinds of software to bring that in. So it's really, it's that interoperable piece. It's above my pay grade, as we say. So that's where I'm really working collaboratively. But I think that what we wanna do is we wanna bring these platforms together, but also make sure the seams are visible.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:15.016)
Right.

Paul Jaskot (01:03:41.526)
so that you really realize that you're connecting disparate approaches, different data sets, disparate perspectives. And we think that by bringing in those together and keeping the seams visible, that we can then also keep the seams in the historical evidence visible as well. Because after all, the evidence of a testimony is radically different than the evidence of an SS memo.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:01.033)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:06.986)
Yeah, I mean, I'm obviously asking is partially selfishly because I'm dealing with the same, the same questions in our project. I think one of the things that the digital modeling offers, because the question is often asked, what's the point? why are you really doing this? Isn't this just sort of like playing around?

But I think there is value in, for example, watching a show of foundation testimony about entering the camp while looking at a digital reconstruction of entering the camp. You know, I mean, like that in the way that it would be awesome to have like an augmented reality experience of visiting Auschwitz where you could like, you know, you could be on the ground walking to Auschwitz, but then you could.

listen to a testimony at a specific spot, know, kind of way they've done in the analog form with the, with the photographs, like this then and now, you know, I think that that's, that's one of the questions. One of the answers to the question of why digital, you know, why part of it is in your case and in mine. And I think, you know, lot of the stuff doesn't exist anymore or might never have existed because it might be a plan, but it tells us something.

Paul Jaskot (01:05:18.786)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:24.926)
But there's something about in situ, right? That makes others historical sources resonate in a different way.

Paul Jaskot (01:05:33.454)
I think that also has two sides, and I know you're going to agree with me on this. On the one hand, the side you're describing seems to be more of the kind of pedagogic results oriented side. But as we both experienced, there's also that other really rich side that once you start reconstructing, suddenly you know those buildings. That is, you know your analog evidence so much better.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:58.984)
Yes.

Paul Jaskot (01:06:00.182)
I've never looked more closely at photographs than when I had to model a photograph. And I've never saw, I've never seen the mistakes I made in thinking about a built environment more than when I saw the process of reconstructing that built environment.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:15.976)
Yeah, I mean, like I literally just had this today or this week because there's one of those poor ath drawings that Paul is familiar with, an architect at Yiannowska. And it was of these sort of outbuilding-y things. And I had just glanced at them because they weren't, they aren't clearly of a specific, you know, sort of A-level building. They're just kind of a drawing. And I had just assumed I knew exactly where they were located in the camp.

And then we started building them and the architect started building them. And we noticed that like the scales didn't quite match up of like how big the buildings were versus a person entering the door. So is this like a chicken coop with a four foot door or is there something weird going on with the scale? And then I realized with the context clues, I don't think I know exactly where that is anymore. I thought I knew where it was.

But now I'm not sure that I do. It's a journey of discovery. And I was telling somebody, and I'm sure Paul, you've experienced this too, where the process of modeling something is actually a process of concretization. Because you can't leave a value empty. When you build the building, the person who's modeling it says, what's it made out of?

Cause I have to model that. have to choose. have to choose. Is it going to be concrete? Is it going to be wood? It can't just be nothing. I mean, I guess it could be nothing, but you have to ask those questions about, whereas when you're writing about it, you know, you're, you're like, well, the person went into the, went into the headquarters building and that the importance is that the person went to the headquarters building, whatever happened to them in headquarters, but you haven't thought about the building in detail. Um, yeah.

Paul Jaskot (01:08:05.742)
you're saying is also one colleague I work with is Cosimo Montaglioni at the University of Padua and he calls that guided modeling and what you're describing so we modeled Plaszow, the camp south of Krakow and when we were doing that I we were taking it from photographs because it's it's all been destroyed.

and I was sending him the photographs and we had determined where things were. The thing that you said happened happened, which is he said, that's impossible, they can't possibly be there. So he sent back his version, but then he put some wallpaper on it as we call it. So he put a substance on it. And I was like, that's totally wrong. So it's that dialogic that just makes you so much more attuned.

But it also, it does leave you with those holes that you were just describing. mean, they're parts of that camp we can't model and we just have to, we have to leave them blank and marked as blank in the model. That's what we got, so.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:01.918)
Yeah, I mean, and that's another question for another time, this idea of visualizing ambiguity. So basically what we've decided, think tentatively in the Innofska project is that we're gonna have the ability to, you can toggle on and off levels of certainty. And it's gonna change the colors of the buildings, basically like filter them in a different color.

And so, so we can, it's a way of showing that, like I have of this building, have three architectural drawings and a photograph of this building. I have a footprint from a map and that's it. but I mean, even, even the colors, even the colors, with the exception of literally so far, there's been, sorry, I didn't mean to like talk about, you know, Oscar, but there's one building that I know the color of because the survivor says that the guard shack.

Paul Jaskot (01:09:40.748)
And I think it's exciting that...

Waitman Beorn (01:09:55.816)
at the inner gate was a yellow building. I don't know the colors of any of the building. the model, which is in color because there are trees and everything else, all the colors are going to be a best guess. And like a conservative best guess. So like basically white because, but they could have been pink or, you know, like they could have been all kinds of different colors.

but there's just literally no way of knowing. And I think that's, in some ways that's terrifying because you're, at some level I'm having to design the camp myself and say like, this is what this is gonna be.

Paul Jaskot (01:10:43.416)
My takeaway there is I think that there are enough of us working in the kind of digital humanities and the Holocaust space now that that ambiguity is not taken for granted, but taken as a central component of what we do so that people know that you're dealing with ambiguity. And ironically, it also points to where our careers started in which.

we didn't really address ambiguity in our dissertations, or if we did, it was in a footnote. was marginalized or it was carefully packaged in a way that this in some sense makes us, that's right, we're more honest as historians in some weird way because we do this speculative environment.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:08.276)
Yep.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:14.932)
or like worked around.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:24.66)
I think that's a really great point. That's a great point to close on actually. Before we do though, I always ask everybody to recommend sort of one book that's been particularly influential in the Holocaust. Again, this is like your favorite band. It could change tomorrow. But for right now, at this particular moment in time, what's one book that you'd recommend for our readers?

Paul Jaskot (01:11:46.872)
Well, I'm gonna have to go with two, I'm afraid. Well, one is a catalog. One is a museum catalog that's quite recent from last summer. And it is in German, so my apologies, but it's the Bauhaus and National Socialism. So Bauhaus International Socialismus. And it's by Anka Blum, Elizabeth Otto, and Pat Rosla. And it's really, it's just a great resource.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:49.424)
Okay, it's fine. I've let other people get away with two, so.

Paul Jaskot (01:12:13.684)
for making that idea that the Bauhaus and Nazi Germany are two separate categories, it really fundamentally, finally complicate that picture. So I think that would be very interesting for people, even if just looking at the pictures might be interesting. But the book that I really would want to pitch is a book that I think changed my life, one of those books, Georges Didi-Huberman's Images in Spite of All. Now,

This came out in the early early 2000s and George D. Huberman is an art historian. So and I was asked to review it and George D. Huberman was not a Holocaust specialist and this was a time when I was really grumpy about the fact that our history was avoiding really dealing with the Holocaust other than memorialization, which of course it was quite strong in and so I saw this book and I looked at I made the look to bibliography and I'm like, oh the bibliography is not updated. I'm I was gonna tear this book

I was looking forward to it. And then I read it. And this is one of the most profound, brilliant analyses I've ever read, because what he does is he takes the four surviving photographs taken by Jewish Jews in Auschwitz, so not German photographs, but Jewish photographs, four surviving photographs, and he reads them so closely, and he reads them as evidence of space and place. And...

If you want a model about how to deal with photographs, how to think about space and atrocity, I think this is a wonderful book.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:52.53)
Awesome, well I will add that onto our reading list. Again, for everyone else, thank you so much for listening. As always, please give us a like, subscribe, leave a comment. I've heard some good rumblings out there that there are lots of graduate students in this area that are listening to it, so thank you so much. Feel free to give us a comment, let us know how we're doing. Once again, Paul, my good friend, thanks so much for coming on.

Paul Jaskot (01:14:18.702)
Thank you, Whiteman.