On Oct. 24, 1941, an Austrian architect named Walter Dejaco sat at a drafting table in the German concentration camp at Auschwitz and sketched a preliminary design for what would soon become the camp’s main crematorium. In its clarity, precision, and carefully calculated dimensions, Dejaco’s drawing plainly reflected his professional training and experience.

It also reflected something new in the history of architecture. What Dejaco — a Nazi loyalist who had joined the SS in 1933 — drafted that day was the first rendering of a facility capable of incinerating human remains on an industrial scale. Over the next few months, his initial concept would be expanded into a crematorium with the capacity to incinerate 1,440 corpses per day. It was the first of four massive crematoria that would eventually be operating in Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people, nearly all of them Jews, would be murdered by Nazi Germany.

In the spring of 1944, my father and his family entered Auschwitz in a sealed boxcar from Hungary. Within a few hours of their arrival, my father’s parents and two youngest siblings were dead; before long, two older siblings were dead as well. The infrastructure that killed them — the gas chambers, the crematoria, the system for transporting corpses by the thousands to ovens each day so they could be turned to ash and smoke — had been designed by Dejaco and other SS architects: professionals complicit in facilitating genocide.

Earlier this month, I traveled to Los Angeles to see Dejaco’s original 1941 architectural drawing for the Auschwitz crematorium. The schematic, known as a whiteprint (a high-quality type of blueprint), was acquired in 2025 by Elliott Broidy, a businessman and philanthropist. Only two of Dejaco’s initial drawings still survive; the other, locked in a Russian military archive, is inaccessible to Western scholars.

I went to see for myself the architect’s rendering that paved the way for my family’s murder. But the whiteprint is only part of the story. What happened to the man who drew it is the rest.

After the war, Dejaco returned to Austria and resumed his architectural career in the Tyrolean town of Reutte. Among the buildings he designed was a Franciscan church rectory. In 1972, when Dejaco was finally prosecuted for his role in the Holocaust, an Austrian jury unanimously acquitted him. The architecture firm he founded in Reutte still bears his name.

And even now, more than 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the architecture profession has never established ethical guardrails to say that what Dejaco did must never happen again.

The Holocaust required the complicity of many professionals — engineers and lawyers, railway administrators and bankers, doctors and insurers, chemists and teachers. But architects occupy a unique position in this machinery of death. That is because all of us are “embodied as human beings,” Robert Jan van Pelt, a professor at Ontario’s University of Waterloo and a renowned expert on the history of Auschwitz, told me in an interview. “We need space and air before we need anything else.” For an architect to sketch gas chambers for mass murder was “such an incredible betrayal — the most basic condition of life is denied in that design.”

Dejaco was no deskbound bureaucrat far removed from the killing. He visited Chelmno, the first death camp where the Nazis used gas to murder Jews, to study its method of cremating bodies. He designed the open-air burning pits used at Auschwitz when the crematoria were overwhelmed. A witness at his trial recalled cleaning Dejaco’s boots after he returned from inspecting construction of the extermination facilities in Birkenau, the largest part of the Auschwitz complex.

When my father and his family entered Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, the gassing-and-cremation facilities designed by Walter Dejaco and other professionals were operating round the clock. On average, 6,000 Jews were being killed each day. Among them were my father's parents and four of his siblings.

Indeed, argues Michael Berenbaum, one of the foremost American scholars of the Nazi genocide, Dejaco was “more effective at killing” than the guards who operated the gas chambers. The bottleneck in the murder process wasn’t the killing itself, Berenbaum said when I met him this month; it was how to dispose of the bodies. By solving that problem through professional architectural design, Dejaco made mass murder feasible on an unprecedented scale.

In 1961, Dejaco received a prestigious papal honor, the Order of St. Gregory, for his architectural work on behalf of the church. An outraged Simon Wiesenthal — the Holocaust survivor who became a tireless Nazi hunter — prodded Austrian authorities to prosecute Dejaco for his Nazi crimes. It took another decade for the SS architect to be finally brought to trial. The indictment noted that he had “made a mockery of the most elementary principles of building technology.” At trial, the court was shown multiple blueprints of the gas chambers and the crematoria at Auschwitz, all of them bearing Dejaco’s signature.

Nevertheless, the jury unanimously acquitted him. His defense, The New York Times reported, was that he had been “acting under military orders and was ignorant of the use to which the death ovens would be put.” A jury in 1972 found this claim believable.

Van Pelt, who would later testify as an expert witness in a landmark Holocaust denial trial in Britain, believes he knows why the acquittal happened: “Nobody knew how to read blueprints.” The evidence was there, but it was in a language the jury — and even most historians — couldn’t understand. Though 300 boxes of damning architectural drawings were recovered from Auschwitz, van Pelt told me, “it remained complete terra incognita for historical research because of the inability of most people to read the evidence.”

The architecture profession itself was no help.

Forty years after the Holocaust, as a young professor at the University of Virginia, van Pelt proposed adding Auschwitz’s Crematorium 2 to the school’s canonical list of buildings that every architecture student needs to know about. History’s first industrial-scale factory for death, which had its architectural origin in Dejaco’s whiteprint of October 1941, “was an event of crucial significance in the history of architecture,” van Pelt argued. But his colleagues’ response, he later wrote, was “a stunned silence, broken by one professor’s acid observation that obviously I was not serious.” When van Pelt insisted he was, another faculty member suggested he “ought to consider an alternative career.” The message was clear: Architects had nothing to learn from the Holocaust.

Unlike the medical profession, which established the Nuremberg Code in the immediate wake of the Nazi doctors’ trials, architecture resisted establishing ethical standards for decades. Not until 2020 — nearly 80 years after Dejaco drafted the whiteprint that paved the way to the Final Solution — did the American Institute of Architects adopt new ethics rules. But those rules specifically address execution chambers and torture facilities. They say nothing — certainly nothing explicit — about designing concentration camps, deportation infrastructure, or industrial-scale crematoria like those Dejaco created.

“There is still no Hippocratic oath for architects,” van Pelt told me.

I went to Los Angeles wondering, as I so often have, how educated professionals — architects, engineers, lawyers, railway administrators — could have facilitated the Holocaust. The whiteprint doesn’t answer that question, of course. It underscores it: an artifact of how ordinary professionalism can be bent to monstrous ends.

There is no evil so monstrous that people cannot be induced to do it, or to avert their gaze while it is being done, if it serves their professional, social, or ideological interests. Dejaco’s drawing is evidence. So is everything that happened afterward.