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The Fund to End Antisemitism Extremism and Hate

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Why I acquired the whiteprint of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria

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Preservation isn’t enough; this document must be seen, studied and understood.

Elliott Broidy
This piece was originally published on JNS on February 18, 2026.

When I first saw the faded whiteprint, an architectural drawing of the earliest design concept for what became Crematoria II and III at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I felt the crushing weight of evil. This piece of paper with its neat geometric lines—so professional, so precise—was proof of the intent to incinerate the corpses of hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women and children who would be murdered on an industrial scale.

I have dedicated much of my philanthropic work to support Jewish organizations and to combat antisemitism. I knew immediately that this artifact had to be brought to light, especially in our era of surging Holocaust denial and resurgent antisemitism.

That’s why I acquired the whiteprint for $1.5 million, a sum chosen to honor the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The document, drawn by SS architect Walter Dejaco in October 1941, has been authenticated by Robert Jan van Pelt, one of the world’s leading experts on Auschwitz. Van Pelt has called it “quite literally irreplaceable.”

The whiteprint represents crucial architectural evidence of Nazi extermination infrastructure. It is a tangible link to the systematic planning behind the Holocaust and an irrefutable record of genocidal intent. Physical artifacts such as this provide enduring evidence of the Nazi pursuit of the “Final Solution.”

Yet preservation by itself isn’t enough. The whiteprint must be seen, studied and understood.

For that reason, I intend to exhibit it at various Holocaust museums and institutions dedicated to fighting antisemitism before permanently donating it to one such institution. Each viewing will be an opportunity to educate, to remember and to inoculate future generations against denial and distortion.

The proceeds from the acquisition will support an early-childhood curriculum designed to combat extremism and hate before they take root. By emphasizing altruism and empathy in young children, we can build immunity against the dehumanization that makes hatred and ultimately violence possible.

‘A particular responsibility’

The whiteprint acquisition is part of a broader commitment.

Working with the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, I helped fund the purchase of the former home of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. At 88 Legionów Street in Oświęcim, Poland, the house sits directly adjacent to the camp where he oversaw mass murder on a scale that will forever be incomprehensible.

CEP has transformed the house into the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization (ARCHER) at House 88, which uses the very latest technology to disrupt the shadowy financial networks that extremists use to foment antisemitism, extremism and terrorism. What was once the home of a principal architect of genocide now houses scholars, researchers and activists working to fight against the mainstreaming of the evil Höss embodied. I serve as co-chair of the Fund to End Antisemitism, Extremism and Hate, which helps enable ARCHER’s vital work.

We are living in a time of acute danger. Antisemitic incidents have reached levels not seen in generations. Holocaust denial proliferates online, often cloaked in the dishonest guise of “just asking questions,” as it edges ever closer to the mainstream—a harrowing development. The survivors who bore witness to history’s greatest crime will not be alive much longer. And when they are gone, artifacts like the whiteprint, Holocaust museums and organizations like ARCHER will become our primary vehicles for transmitting memory and combating lies.

The Jewish philanthropic community carries a particular responsibility. We cannot shirk it. We must support education that cultivates moral responsibility and seriousness; fund research that exposes and disrupts contemporary forms of antisemitism; preserve and display evidence of the Holocaust (in addition to the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the most devastating massacre since the Holocaust); and build communal institutions that will outlast our lifetimes.

We must confront the most dangerous form of contemporary antisemitism: the systematic delegitimization of the State of Israel.

We must push back against those who accuse Israel of committing genocide, a modern-day blood libel that was once confined to the fringes of radical academia, but has escaped containment into the broader discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

We must proudly support Israel and champion a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. We can differ in our views of particular Israeli policies, but we must never lose sight of what is at stake: the survival and security of the world’s only Jewish state, home to nearly half the Jews on the planet.

For a small people—there are only about 16 million Jews in the world today, fewer than on the eve of World War II—this work is not optional.

Elie Wiesel moved beyond vowing “Never Again” in his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, insisting instead: “Sometimes, we must interfere.”

Fighting antisemitism must be a sustained commitment expressed through action, scholarship and memory.

Elliott Broidy is an entrepreneur who has used his extensive experience and talent to found, invest in, and in some cases, manage as CEO, more than 160 companies over his four-decade career. He has given extensively to support the Jewish community and other causes during his career. He currently is the Co-Chair of the Fund to End Antisemitism, Extremism and Hate which supports the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization (ARCHER) at House 88, an initiative of The Counter Extremism Project.

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A message to the world on Holocaust Remembrance Day

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On this date, Jan. 27, in 1945, the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by U.S.-allied Soviet troops.

Like many Jews, I prefer not to call it a “concentration camp,” for that is what the German Nazis called the hellish places where they confined the people they sought to exterminate — 1.1 million in all in Auschwitz-Birkenau alone. Of those killed at Auschwitz, a million were Jews. Numbers matter and should be stated aloud.

Think of it this way: At Auschwitz-Birkenau, in a space of just under 500 acres, in less than 18 months, Jews numbering more than the entire population of San Francisco were gassed, shot, beaten, bludgeoned, starved, dehydrated, tortured, sickened or frozen to death. In all, the Nazis murdered 6,000,000 Jews: two-thirds of all the Jews in Europe, one-third of the entire Jewish population in the world.

It’s no wonder that the day of the camp’s liberation is now called Holocaust Remembrance Day, so declared by the United Nations (so rarely today a friend of the Jewish people) in a 2005 resolution. In the words of Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, “for the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”

As I sat down in my study in Florida to compose this piece, I read breaking news from New York — the city with the most Jews in the world outside Israel, a city so synonymous with American Jewishness that it came as a severe shock to Jews around the world when its voters recently elected as mayor a man who believes we should “Globalize the intifada.”

In the context of the enormities of Auschwitz, the day’s news from New York might seem small fare. A playground in Borough Park, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn — therefore, of course, a playground used largely by little Jewish boys and girls — had been vandalized by two teenagers. Playground equipment and a handball court were covered in more than 50 swastikas. The walls of the handball court had the words “Adolf Hitler” daubed on them. No one was killed, unlike the attacks last month at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, but that is not the point. In a public place in Jewish Brooklyn, symbols and words of hate were meant to evoke and sneer at the killing of Jews.

As Piotr Cywinski, the sage Polish historian who is the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, wrote in his book “Auschwitz: A Monograph on the Human” (2023), the camps were a place of “programmatic dehumanization.” Gazing at pictures of a vandalized playground in Brooklyn, I can’t help feeling that the project to dehumanize Jews lives on, ineradicable, in spite of all our efforts to teach people right from wrong, good from evil. Knowledge of the Holocaust — taught to generations of Americans at schools across this country and elsewhere — no longer seems to ensure that antisemitism is anathema in our society.

We can be forgiven for despairing, especially when antisemitic outrages (let us not call them “incidents”) occur almost every day in various parts of the United States and the Western Judeo-Christian world. Heartbreaking, for all of us, was the fire that tore through Beth Israel, the oldest and largest synagogue in the state of Mississippi — and the only synagogue in the city of Jackson — the evil work of a 19-year-old arsonist with a hatred for Jews. (And once again, a teenager.)

What should we do to fight antisemitism to extinction? It would be so easy to give in to despair and to adopt, instead, a defensive crouch. But we will not do that. Adamantly not. Never Again. America is home to the Jews. We thrive here and play our indispensable part in ensuring that America thrives.

Didn’t George Washington say this, in a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Savannah, Georgia, on June 14, 1790? “May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land — whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation — still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven.”

As an American Jew with zero-tolerance for antisemitism, I have made it my mission to fight back against antisemitism by helping to strengthen the hand of those who expose Jew-hatred in our midst and act to curtail it. To this end, I have helped a nonprofit that has been fighting extremism since 2014, the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), pay for the purchase of the house at Auschwitz that was once occupied by Rudolf Hoss, the camp’s murderous commandant. This was the house featured, in fact, in “The Zone of Interest,” a film about the seemingly idyllic life Hoss led with his family in the shadow of a death camp.

The project has turned that tainted place of horror into its newest initiative, the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization (ARCHER). They call it ARCHER at House 88, that being the street number of the address. Mark Wallace, a former U.S. diplomat who heads the project, oversees a dedicated team of researchers who have set up a global database of “extremist content, groups, actors and incidents,” powered by the very latest technology. This database and numerous other government advisory groups that CEP/ARCHER is associated with all work to diminish the power of those who wish to spread antisemitism to our young people.

These efforts enable CEP/ARCHER to persuade Western lawmakers to crack down on antisemitic and terrorist support networks, extinguish online propaganda, recruitment, incitement and disrupt their financial networks. The goal of CEP/ARCHER is to investigate, expose and act to stop evil.

I first visited the house on Jan. 27, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. On that occasion, I heard an Italian music historian play the piano in what used to be Hoss’s living room. He played a lullaby that had been composed by one of the prisoners at Auschwitz, and as I heard the music I was filled with powerful hope. If we can reclaim the house in which a planner of the extermination of Jews once lived and turn it into a center that works to fight against everything he stood for, we have to believe that we can combat antisemitism in the world at large.

Our greatest enemy used to be complacency. It is now despair. We cannot allow ourselves to succumb to either. We owe that to the men, women and children who perished at Auschwitz. And we owe it to the men, women and children of today who need to live without fear of hatred, dehumanization, destruction of their property and, worse, violence and death.

About the author

Elliott Broidy is chairman and CEO of Broidy Capital Holdings and a co-chairman of the Fund to End Antisemitism, Extremism and Hate.

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Elliott Broidy: An original Auschwitz plan, a warning for our time

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I have acquired an original architectural drawing – a “whiteprint” – of the very first design of the crematoria built in Birkenau as an expansion of Auschwitz by Austrian architect Walter Dejaco.

This piece was originally published in The Jerusalem Post on January 14, 2026.
By Elliott Broidy
The massacre on Bondi Beach brought home to every Jew, everywhere, that no Jew is safe, anywhere.

As an American Jew, I watched the images of the antisemitic attack in Australia with horror – images that, like those of October 7 in Israel, brought back into our present-day lives the antisemitic violence of the past. Alongside this horror was a determination to fight back, using every means at our disposal to ensure that history is not forgotten.

As part of that fight, I have acquired an original architectural drawing – a “whiteprint” – of the very first design of the crematoria built in Birkenau as an expansion of Auschwitz.

Auschwitz concentration camp, operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during the Holocaust.
Auschwitz concentration camp, operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. (credit: WALLPAPER FLARE)

The term ‘genocide’

The term “genocide” was first used in a legal context at the Nuremberg Trials, which began on November 20, 1945, almost exactly 80 years ago. It was intended to describe Nazi Germany’s systematic project to annihilate, with intent, an ethnic, racial, or religious group: the Jewss.Today, however, the concept of genocide has become debased and misused, most flagrantly in accusations leveled against Israel that it has committed genocide in Gaza. Holocaust deniers, of whom there are still too many for comfort, have been joined by a large and vocal crowd – including the United Nations and governments in Europe – who abuse the term genocide by applying it to Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Prior to acquiring the whiteprint, in 2024, I helped the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit organization, purchase a house next door to Auschwitz. Commandant Rudolf Hoss lived there from May 1940 to December 1943, and again in early 1944, with his wife and five children. His chillingly dispassionate approach to the horror he oversaw at Auschwitz was portrayed in the Academy Award-winning film The Zone of Interest.

I obtained the whiteprint from a rabbi in the Los Angeles area, who had been given the document a decade earlier by a collector of Nazi memorabilia known to one of his congregants. The donor had come across it at an auction in Germany without knowing its true historical value.

Whiteprint ‘literally irreplaceable’

In exchange for the whiteprint, I committed to fund $1.5 million for an educational project that the rabbi is currently developing. It is an early-education curriculum on altruistic behavior – a “catch them while they are young” approach to safeguarding children from extremism. The sum is intended to honor the memory of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust.

The whiteprint is of immense historical significance. A member of my research team consulted Robert Jan van Pelt, a professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo in Canada and a leading authority on Nazi concentration camp architecture. He authenticated the whiteprint, describing it as “quite literally irreplaceable.”

Van Pelt explained that Dejaco created the design while visiting Auschwitz, where he would have been a guest of Hoss. The crematorium was initially planned to be located next to the Hoss family home, where he lived with his wife and young children. In 1942, the Nazis instead chose to build four crematoria in the nearby camp of Birkenau. These were later blown up by the Nazis as the Soviet Army advanced.

The four crematoria had an incineration capacity of nearly 4,400 corpses per day. Given their central role in the genocide of the Jews, van Pelt noted that Hoss “would have followed this project very intensely. It was a major capital outlay at a time of general rationing of resources like building materials and steel.”

Gassing and burning, starvation and disease

Although historians now estimate that approximately 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, roughly one million of them Jews, Hoss testified at Nuremberg that he believed the number was far higher. He stated that “at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated [at Auschwitz] by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000 dead.” This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners.”

Today, the two largest crematoria exist only in ruins.

Given the extraordinary rise in antisemitism across the globe and the threat it poses not only to Jews, but to Western civilization itself, we must make it impossible for anyone to deny that the Holocaust occurred. The whiteprint, in effect, makes denial untenable even for the most committed revisionists.

Elliott Broidy is a philanthropist and chairman and CEO of Broidy Capital Holdings, LLC. He is co-chair of the Fund to End Antisemitism, Hate, and Extremism.
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Elliott Broidy: Schematic for the Holocaust

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I acquired one of only two surviving copies of the original drawings of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria – a truly evil document. I hope to exhibit it at institutions dedicated to fighting antisemitism and ultimately to donate it to one of them. At a time of surging antisemitism and Holocaust denial, this irrefutable proof of Nazi genocidal intent is more

I wrote about my acquisition for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page:

I am a patriotic American and a proud Jew. I consider it my civic duty to fight antisemitism and help preserve the memory of the Holocaust. That’s why I acquired one of only two surviving architectural drawings of the first design of the crematoria at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

This original drawing—or whiteprint—was made by Austrian architect Walter Dejaco. The only other known copy of this genocidal schematic is in Moscow’s State Military Archive, which is inaccessible to Westerners.

In 2024 I helped the nonprofit Counter Extremism Project buy the house next door to Auschwitz, where camp commandant Rudolf Höss lived with his family. The house has been turned into a research center to combat antisemitism and other forms of extremism.

I acquired the whiteprint earlier this year from the Temple of the Arts Synagogue in Beverly Hills, into whose possession it had come by way of a friend of a congregant. The latter had bought it at a Nazi memorabilia auction in Germany, with both buyer and seller unaware of its historical significance. Rabbi David Baron of Temple of the Arts wishes to create a global curriculum on “altruistic behavior”—his way of inoculating the young against extremism—in honor of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. The sum I paid for the whiteprint is the same number in dollars as the number of children killed. The money will be used for the curriculum project.

Read the rest in The Wall Street Journal.