There is hardly any place that is so widely associated with the genocide of
the European Jewry as Auschwitz and especially the Birkenau camp.  Yet it
seems that some basic dates of the history of Birkenau are still worth some
research.  Most scholars assert that Himmler himself ordered the
construction of what later became Birkenau on his visit to Auschwitz on
March 1, 1941.  In general, this assumption is based on the testimony of
the first Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Hoess which Hoess gave during his
trial at Krakow, Poland, in 1946.
During a recent visit to Polish archives including the Auschwitz archive, I
have found strong and quite conclusive evidence that Himmler did not order
the construction of Birkenau before the end of September, 1941.  It also
seems that Hoess got the order to enlarge the Birkenau camp for as many as
125.000 Soviet prisoners of war only several weeks later, on October 21,
1941.  This is an obvious but quite noteworthy disagreement with nearly all
of the scholarly Holocaust literature (Danuta Czech, Kalendarium, German
edition p. 79; Raul Hilberg, Auschwitz and the Final Solution, in: Yisrael
Gutmann / Michael Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp,
Indiana University Press 1994, p. 82; Deborah Dwork / Robert Jan van Pelt,
Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present, New York 1996, p. 254).
I would like to find out if anybody has any knowledge of documentary
evidence confirming the March 1, 1941 date which is not based on the
information Hoess gave.
Rainer Froebe, University of Hannover

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