There is a connection between the architecture and function of German concentration camps at Auschwitz, according to Robert Jan van Pelt, a full-time professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Working with Carroll William Westfall, chair of Notre Dame's School of Architecture, van Pelt, who has studied the relationship for more than a decade and a half verified the normative nature of classical Athenian design.

"If something is normative," van Pelt argued in a lecture at Notre Dame Monday, "it deserves to be repeated."

Van Pelt's next task was to determine what society, if any, had attempted to re-create the structure of ancient Greece. All signs pointed to Nazi Germany.

After pouring over examples of German households, funerary architecture, monuments, and governmental buildings constructed during the Third Reich, van Pelt noticed striking similarities between the architecture of such structures and the architecture of their ancient Athenian counterparts.

Van Pelt's study of Nazi-era structures inevitably led him to the concentration camps. According to van Pelt, they became the "garbage bins for the contradictions" of a society that believed that the "German glory" of the Austro-Hungarian Empire could be re-created by a pure Aryan race.

The apex of this German plan centered around plans for an eastern Utopia, in the small, unassuming Polish town of Oswiecim, better known to western audiences as Auschwitz.

Through his research of the concentration camp's architectural structure and its dedication to efficiency and competence in the extermination of the Jewish in Europe, van Pelt stumbled upon a map containing plans for revamping the town of Auschwitz.

The strategies for urban revitalization were ironic and out of place in a location built specifically to carry out the destruction of an entire people. The professor discovered from this document that Auschwitz was slated to play a prominent role in the larger scheme for German domination of eastern Europe.

Van Pelt was soon to unearth an agreement between industrial giant I.G. Farbenindustrie and Nazi leaders to build a synthetic gas and rubber plant in the town, far removed from the threat of British bombers. A deal had been struck between the two entities that, should the company build the factory, the Nazi regime would provide both the workers and German-designed housing for plant administrators.

The plans that van Pelt found were designs for the re-creation of medieval Auschwitz, a town which Hitler had claimed to have a German culture as a result of its location along the border of Austria-Hungary and Russia earlier in German history.

With building plans already in place, Heinrich Himmler, officer in charge of the small concentration camp that had been established outside of Auschwitz, was charged with the task of providing enough workers to build it. As a result of the military conflict that Germany was simultaneously engaged in, Himmler turned to Slovakia.

As van Pelt put it, "Himmler got control of the `Jewish problem.' He needed Jewish labor and control over Jewish labor," so he engineered a deal with the Slovakian government in which its leaders paid for the relocation of Jews from Slovakia to Auschwitz, where those who were physically able would work for the Germans, and those who were not would be killed.

"Suddenly the history of the camp became a part of the larger picture involving the immigration of Germans" to staff the factory at Auschwitz, ethnic cleansing, and the re-introduction of "German glory," according to van Pelt.

After studying original concentration camp blueprints at the site, van Pelt was appalled at the seeming efficiency and premeditation behind the functionality of Auschwitz's design. Van Pelt learned that the gas chambers and ovens built under the structures were only as good as the number of corpses they could incinerate in a day.

Van Pelt also noted with horror the meticulous design of the entrance, "The Gate of Death," which was drawn and re-drawn to better accommodate the trains that transported prisoners to their deaths and the large transformers used to electrify the barbed wire surrounding the camp.

"Here we see a war crime in progress, done by an architect," said van Pelt.

The issue of ethics and morals in architecture became another point to van Pelt's lecture, in his emphasis on the exactness with which each space of Auschwitz was intended, from the melting room for extracted gold teeth to the treasury to the pre-heating mechanisms found in gas chambers to better circulate the poison.

"These architectural plans show everything … you have these in your hand and you feel like you're close to the crime," he said.

As such, Auschwitz has now become not only a stark symbol of the capabilities for human intolerance, but has also inadvertently placed itself at the center of the "Holocaust denial" debate.

Van Pelt, armed with architectural records to add to the mountains of other evidence, has made it his duty to refute such theories that the Holocaust never happened.

"The Holocaust was not an accident of history … it was not a collateral of war," said van Pelt.

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