Menu
A window into horror: An original drawing of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria sold for $1.5 million

A window into horror: An original drawing of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria sold for $1.5 million

This article was originally published on MSN on December 13, 2025.

By Shadab Alam

A profoundly significant, and deeply disturbing, Holocaust artifact has resurfaced — and its new owner hopes it will serve as a bulwark against antisemitism and extremism.

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Elliott Broidy recently announced the acquisition of one of only two known surviving copies of the original whiteprint of the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The document, drawn on October 24, 1941 by SS architect Walter Dejaco, represents the earliest design concept of those crematoria, in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in 1943 and 1944.

The document has been authenticated and explicated by Auschwitz expert Robert Jan Van Pelt, who specializes in the architectural history of the camp.

According to van Pelt, the early architectural sketch “captures the moment when Auschwitz entered the technological imagination: a design that became the prototype for the most lethal killing facilities in human history.” He added that the plan “shows Auschwitz in motion — an architecture first shaped by the murder of Soviet POWs that was, through successive decisions, adapted into the machinery of destruction that resulted in the Holocaust.”

Auschwitz-Birkenau, the sprawling complex in modern-day Poland (during the war, the territory in which Auschwitz is located was annexed by Nazi Germany), was the Nazis’ most murderous death camp. More than one million people, the vast majority of whom were Jewish, were murdered there.

“This whiteprint is physical proof of humanity’s darkest capacity,” Broidy said. “To behold it is to confront the deliberate design of evil. My most sincere wish is for this whiteprint to be memorialized as part of an irrefutable body of evidence that negates Holocaust denial and helps to forever silence malevolent revisionists while also educating new generations about the lessons of the Holocaust.”

Another expert, historian Michael Berenbaum, who held prominent roles at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and was instrumental in that institution’s creation, emphasized the document’s significance: “This is one of the most important visual documents showing how the crematoria were created, and showing also the intentionality and professionalism, the intricate detail and the substance, with which the crematoria were thought through.”

Broidy purchased the document from a Beverly Hills, CA synagogue, and said that he paid $1.5 million for it — a figure matching the number of Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust — with the money earmarked for a “global early childhood curriculum promoting empathy, altruism, and anti-extremism.”

Broidy plans to exhibit the drawing at institutions dedicated to Holocaust education and combating antisemitism, before ultimately donating it to such an institution. He frames his acquisition of the document as serving the dual purpose of preserving the memory of the Holocaust and confronting today’s resurgent antisemitism and distortion of truth.