(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)March 30, 2012

Dr. Paul Jaskot

(MAHWAH, NJ) -On March 30, 2012, under the auspices of the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and History Club, Dr. Paul Jaskot, Professor of the History of Art and Architectural History at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, discussed “The Architecture of Auschwitz.” He showed how the very architecture of Auschwitz underscored its simultaneous and interlocking roles as concentration camp (Auschwitz I), killing center (Auschwitz II-Birkenau), and a site for industrial production based on slave/forced labor (essentially located Auschwitz III-Buna/Monowitz, but also in sections of Auschwitz I and II).

As Jaskot pointed out, it was additionally the home for all the personnel who operated the site’s facilities. Included were not only the SS personnel in charge of the killing at Birkenau, exploiting, tormenting and guarding prisoners, but also their families and a bevy of civilian employees.

Auschwitz thus assumed the character of an ever-expanding and changing city that required its own architectural office that included, in addition to SS and civilian architects and other personnel, prisoners put to work as draftsmen. Through the failure of the SS to destroy the papers of the office ahead of the Red Army advance, scholars have been able to draw a detailed picture of the installation’s design and operation as a concentration camp, killing center, industrial complex and municipality.

Working with a team of experts from various disciplines has allowed Jaskot to construct an analytical framework that brings into sharper focus how Auschwitz embodied and intertwined Nazi Germany’s goals and priorities in pursuing racial genocide and imperial expansion with cultural policy and total war. In revealing that the site included landscaped everyday buildings such as a sauna and an SS family apartment complex, Jaskot and his colleagues have made it abundantly clear that the perpetrators at Auschwitz, while carrying out genocide and implementing slave labor, experienced a world that was radically different from their defenseless victims.

As a scholar, Paul B. Jaskot has focused on art and politics in the Nazi period as well as the postwar cultural impact of the Nazi past. He is the author of The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy” (Taylor and Francis, 2000) and The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (forthcoming 2012) as well as the co-editor (with Gavriel Rosenfeld) of Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (University of Michigan Press, 2008).

Jaskot has published and spoken widely on these and related topics. In March 2011 he was the Miller Visiting Distinguished Professorship in Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont, Burlington and in fall 2011 he was a Visiting Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition to his scholarly work, Jaskot is also the Director of the Holocaust Education Foundation Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization. From 2008-2010, he was President of the College Art Association, the nation’s largest professional group for artists and art historians.

Professor Paul Jaskot holds a doctorate and a Masters of Art in Art History from Northwestern University, and a Bachelor of Arts in history and English from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

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