Construction Office

Every concentration camp of the Third Reich had a construction office (Bauleitung), which was in charge of building and maintaining the camp and its facilities. During the initial setup of a camp, this office was usually called a new-construction office (Neubauleiung). Larger camps (that had subcamps with their own construction offices) had one that organized all constructions efforts in a central construction office (Zentralbautleitung).

At the Auschwitz Camp, the vast documentation of its central construction office survived the war almost completely. However, the Soviets removed the majority of that documentation, and transferred it to an archive in Moscow, where this material was kept hidden from the public until the final years of the Soviet Union. Only a fraction of the material was left in the archives of the former Auschwitz Camp, where it was meant to assist Polish investigative judge Jan Sehn to prepare the Polish show trials against Rudolf Höss and the Auschwitz camp garrison.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, this material was made publicly available for the first time. It is today stored in the Russian State War Archives (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennii Vojennii Archiv). It contains altogether some 88,200 pages of documents from the Central Construction Office.

Due to pressure from the German government, who did not want skeptical researchers using this highly informative material, access was restricted in 1998 to officially accredited researchers.

A thorough analysis of this vast material reveals all the details of how this office was organized, operated, and what its responsibilities and activities were. Since this authority was responsible for the design and construction of every single camp facility and feature, it would also have been in charge of designing, constructing and maintaining any homicidal facilities. However, these 88,200 pages of documents do not contain a single shred of evidence pointing at the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. Better still, this archival resource reveals the huge efforts made and expenses incurred to improve the camps’ hygienic, sanitary and healthcare facilities in desperate attempts to reduce inmate mortality and improve overall inmate health and fitness.

(For more details, see the Auschwitz section of the entry on healthcare; the section on Documented History of the Auschwitz Main Camp and the Birkenau Camp; see furthermore Mattogno 2015; 2019; 2023; Mattogno/Deana 2021.)