Dejaco, Walter

Walter Dejaco (19 June 1909 – 9 Jan. 1978), SS Untersturmführer, was an architect employed by the Auschwitz Central Construction Office. As head of the planning department, he was deeply involved in the construction of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp, including the crematoria (see index entries in Mattogno 2023, Part 1).

On 16 September 1942, together with Camp Commandant Höss and the Head of the Concentration Camp Hössler, Dejaco visited a “experimental station for field incinerators Aktion Reinhardt” near Lodz operated by Paul Blobel, where it was decided to procure construction material for the erection of such a facility in Auschwitz (ibid., pp. 155f.). It is unknown what this incinerator was for, but since the Aktion Reinhardt included looting the property of Europe’s Jews deported by National-Socialist Germany, it is likely that these field furnaces served to burn useless or ruined Jewish property.

Mainstream historians assume that Blobel was conducting cremation experiments with victims of mass murder at the Chełmno Camp at that time, in the context of the so-called “Aktion 1005”, which in itself is highly dubious. Moreover, Chełmno was some 60 km away from Lodz, so Dejaco went to the wrong place. Furthermore, there is no documental or anecdotal evidence that a field furnace was ever built at Auschwitz. Instead, both Crematoria II and III, which became operational in early 1943, were equipped with waste incinerators that allowed for the incineration of combustible material of all kinds (Mattogno 2017, pp. 73-81). In addition, if we follow (mostly implausible) witness statements, mass cremations at Auschwitz are said to have been conducted simply in pits on piles of wood, without the use of any construction material. See the entry on open-air incinerations for more.

In 1972, Dejaco was put on trial in Vienna, together with his former colleague Fritz Ertl, for their involvement in the construction of the Birkenau crematories, which are said to have been equipped with homicidal gas chambers. The court had court-accredited architect Gerhard Dubin evaluate the blueprints for these buildings, which had been drawn by Dejaco’s department under his supervision. The result of this assessment was that the rooms in question could not have been homicidal gas chambers, and they also could not have been converted into such facilities. Not the least due to this expert report, which subsequently disappeared from the court files, the two defendants were acquitted. (Lüftl 2004; Faurisson 1991, pp. 59f.)