Israeli PM to receive Auschwitz plans

25 August 2009

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/darticlen.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2009/August/middleeast_August631.xml&section=middleeast&col=

BERLIN - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be given original blueprints of Auschwitz during a visit to Berlin this week, the German publisher that will make the presentation said on Tuesday.

Netanyahu will be handed the 29 documents for the Nazi death camp at the Berlin headquarters of Axel Springer by the editor of the Bild daily, Kai Diekmann, on Thursday, the company said.

The prime minister will then present the drawings, which were found in a Berlin apartment in 2008 and then bought by Bild, to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Springer added.

Later Thursday Netanyahu was due to visit the villa on the Wannsee lake on the outskirts of Berlin where senior Nazis adopted in January 1942 the “final solution”, namely the extermination of all Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

More than a million Jews, gypsies and others deemed “subhumans” by the Nazis were killed at Auschwitz, near the Polish city of Krakow, out of a total six million slaughtered up to the fall of the regime in 1945.

“The sketches and building plans of Auschwitz are the only original documents of their kind ever to be found in Germany,” Springer said. “The federal archive, which has confirmed them as genuine, called it an important discovery.”

The blueprints, which date from 1941-2 and include plans drawn with cool technical precision of a gas chamber and a crematorium, were put on display by Springer earlier this year.

Netanyahu kicked off a European tour in London on Tuesday with talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and US President Barack Obama’s Middle East envoy George Mitchell.

On Wednesday he was due to fly to Berlin for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel the following day.