BERLIN — Sketched on yellowing parchment, the 29 blueprints presented to Israel's prime minister Thursday lay out the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in chilling detail, with gas chambers, crematoria, delousing facilities and watchtowers drawn to scale.
"There are those who deny that the Holocaust happened," Benjamin Netanyahu said as he accepted the documents as a gift to Israel's Holocaust memorial, where they will go on display next year.
"Let them come to Jerusalem and look at these plans, these plans for the factory of death."
Netanyahu lingered over the large sheets spread on a table. Stamped with the Nazi abbreviation for concentration camp "K.L. Auschwitz," one of the largest featured multicolored sketches, with barracks and even latrines drawn in detail. Other smaller sheets showed architectural designs of individual buildings, drawn from various angles.
The Israeli leader was accompanied by his wife, Sara, whose father was the only member of his family to survive the Nazi genocide that killed 6 million Jews during World War II. She watched somberly as the documents, which date from 1941 to 1943, were unfolded.
Also present was Yossi Peled, an Israeli Cabinet minister and former general whose father was killed by the Nazis and whose mother survived Auschwitz in one of the barracks detailed in the blueprints. Peled himself was hidden until age 7 by a family in Belgium who raised him as a Christian. He discovered his Jewish roots in 1948 and was taken to Israel two years later.
In Germany for a visit that combined talks on the Mideast conflict with acknowledgments of the painful past that binds the two countries, Netanyahu drew a clear parallel between the events of the Nazi era and the present day. The world did not do enough to stop the murder of Europe's Jews, he said, and must be careful now to take rapid action against "armed barbarism."
"We cannot allow those who wish to perpetrate mass death, those who call for the destruction of the Jewish people or the Jewish state to go unchallenged," Netanyahu said.
Though he did not explicitly mention Iran, his comments were a clear reference to the Tehran regime and its nuclear program, which Israel sees as a grave threat and wants blocked by stronger international sanctions. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Israel should be "wiped off the map."