On Oct. 24, 1941, an Austrian architect named Walter Dejaco sat at a drafting table in the German concentration camp at Auschwitz and sketched a preliminary design for what would soon become the camp’s main crematorium. In its clarity, precision, and carefully calculated dimensions, Dejaco’s drawing plainly reflected his professional training and experience.

It also reflected something new in the history of architecture. What Dejaco — a Nazi loyalist who had joined the SS in 1933 — drafted that day was the first rendering of a facility capable of incinerating human remains on an industrial scale. Over the next few months, his initial concept would be expanded into a crematorium with the capacity to incinerate 1,440 corpses per day. It was the first of four massive crematoria that would eventually be operating in Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people, nearly all of them Jews, would be murdered by Nazi Germany.

In the spring of 1944, my father and his family entered Auschwitz in a sealed boxcar from Hungary. Within a few hours of their arrival, my father’s parents and two youngest siblings were dead; before long, two older siblings were dead as well. The infrastructure that killed them — the gas chambers, the crematoria, the system for transporting corpses by the thousands to ovens each day so they could be turned to ash and smoke — had been designed by Dejaco and other SS architects: professionals complicit in facilitating genocide.

Earlier this month, I traveled to Los Angeles to see Dejaco’s original 1941 architectural drawing for the Auschwitz crematorium. The schematic, known as a whiteprint (a high-quality type of blueprint), was acquired in 2025 by Elliott Broidy, a businessman and philanthropist. Only two of Dejaco’s initial drawings still survive; the other, locked in a Russian military archive, is inaccessible to Western scholars.