Q&A: Art Historian Paul Jaskot on the Construction of Holocaust Concentration Camps

Jaskot recently spoke at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., about his research on the planning and building activity at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Architect, Nov. 17, 2015

On Nov. 4, art historian Paul Jaskot delivered the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In “Architecture of the Holocaust,” he described the planning of the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the building activity that took place there, especially during the years of 1943 and 1944, and engaged in by thousands of women prisoners as well as men.

ARCHITECT talked with Jaskot—a professor at DePaul University who is currently the Andrew W. Mellon professor at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts—about his research, and why questions of labor and construction matter in architectural history.

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