World War II is a defining war for understanding modern history not only
because of its place in 20th-century geopolitics but particularly
because of the scale of warfare and new level of brutality. As is well
known, central to the Nazi military campaign in the East were the
ideological goals of state leaders to expand the land available for
'German' settlement and, concomitantly, to rid that land of those
designated undesirable, above all the European Jews. The architectural
remnants of the SS concentration camps have become emblematic for the
experience of victims in this campaign as well as the extremes of Nazi
policy. And yet in spite of their status as some of the most infamous
construction in the modern period, relatively few architectural
historians take up the concentration camps in their analysis of German
architecture. Further, the minority of architectural historians who have
analyzed the camps tend to focus on one site rather than the system as a
whole and naturally concern themselves with the experience of the
victims rather than the perpetrator's interests and view of
architecture. Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt's important work on
Auschwitz is an exception to many of these trends. Still, in terms of
the military campaigns going on in the East, even they tend to see
Auschwitz as an ideological site that developed over time parallel to
the military campaigns rather than as integral to them. In this account,
the concentration camps and the waging of war produce simultaneous if
related goals. This paper argues against the isolation of the
concentration camps from the war by taking a broader view of the
construction of SS concentration camps, analyzing their typological
development and use of specific architectural and spatial traditions. In
particular, it argues that the imperial goals of the war as emphasized
in the political economic goals of the state are integral for helping to
explain the scale and architectural choices made at Auschwitz and other
concentration camps in the SS universe. In so doing, I look not only at
the important parts of the camps that were sites of massive oppression
but also at those sites built for the SS themselves, analyzing
administrative and visual evidence concerning their own goals and their
own construction. With this focus, the intersection of racist
ideological goals and the military political economy of empire are
manifest. Refocusing on the architecture of the concentration camps
helps us to explain the implementation of warfare, its radicalization
and its role in an imperial drive of unifying diverse ideological and
political agendas.Conference co-organized by the Institute of Fine Arts; Canadian Centre
for Architecture, Montreal; and Princeton University's School of Architecture