Night of the Broken Glass

Cross posted from Monkey in the Middle Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, was a pogrom in Nazi Germany on November 9–10, 1938. On a single night, 92 Jews were murdered, and 25,000–30,000 were arrested and deported to concentration camps. This was the full start of what the world has come to know as The Holocaust and the horrors that ensued. Today is the 70th Anniversary of that pogrom and maybe it is fitting that on this anniversary the following was discovered.

Plans for Auschwitz found in Berlin apartment Original plans for the construction of the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz, including a gas chamber and crematorium, have been found in a Berlin apartment, a newspaper reported Saturday. The daily Bild published copies of some of the 28 plans, which the head of Germany's federal archives, Hans-Dieter Krekamp, called "authentic proof of the systematically planned genocide of the Jews of Europe." Bild gave no indication of where, when or by whom the plans were found. It said they were dated between 1941 and 1943 and stamped, "Waffen-SS and Police Construction Directorate." Some were signed by senior SS officials and one initialed by the head of the Nazi ideological corps, Heinrich Himmler. Kreikamp told the newspaper the documents were "extraordinarily important." One plan, drawn by a detainee as early as November 1941, when experiments in eliminating prisoners were already under way, had a gas chamber clearly labeled, Bild said. Another showed a crematorium with places for ovens marked, and storage space for bodies. Full Story

With this discovery there can be no denying the fact that the Holocaust happened and that millions of innocent men, women and children were murdered at Auschwitz as many of Holocaust deniers have claimed. The historical import of this discovery is tremendous and in the future scholars will be able to compare these documents to the actual site.