Jerusalem – Yad Vashem unveiled the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp blueprints last week, before the 65th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation. They are displayed for public viewing in their permanent home at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Architects hired by the SS were told to sketch a building in a pastoral setting with trees. From the outside, no one would know that the building housed the crematoria. A red cottage housed a gas chamber.

“When I saw the plans, I personally was shocked. How could one ignore humanity and participate in sketching such plans!” Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem directorate, told the media.

When seeing these plans for the first time, Shalev said that he intensified his efforts in documenting the Holocaust atrocities. “To my knowledge, not a single architect refused orders,” Shalev added.

When Germany was losing the war, the Nazis tried to hide evidence of mass murder by destroying crematoria and documents. However, they overlooked a building at Auschwitz that contained 29 architectural plans, some of which were signed by Heinrich Himmler.

After the Soviet liberation of the camp on Jan. 27, 1945, the documents were transferred to East Berlin, inaccessible to the west until the fall of the Iron Curtain. The German Bild magazine purchased the plans in a public auction last year and handed them to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visited Germany last November. Bild editor-in-chief Kai Diekmann called the purchase “an act of reconciliation between Germany and the Jewish People.”

Fran Sonshine, national chair of the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem, led a Canadian delegation to last week’s event. The Canadian society brings mostly non-Jewish Canadian educators to Israel to learn about the Holocaust, tolerance and empathy.

“They go back to become ambassadors for Israel,” Sonshine said, adding that the educators are “blown away” from touring Israel and the educational component.

Netanyahu said at the event that the survivors’ testimony alone isn’t enough to preserve historical memory. But viewing the plans, which graphically show the design and execution of mass murder, will.

“What you see in this exhibit, what you see in these testimonies is the testimony of great evil; pure unadulterated evil,” Netanyahu stated.

Despite all the evidence, there are people who still deny the Holocaust, he warned.

“There is evil in the world; if it is unstopped, it expands; it is expanding and it is threatening the same people, the Jewish people, but we know that it only starts with the Jews and then it consumes the rest of mankind,” he said.

Alluding to Iran’s nuclear threat against Israel, Netanyahu said, “There is now a test – a test for humanity. There is new Jew hatred in our midst. There are new calls for the extermination of the Jewish state.”

He added that the international community is being tested as to “whether it will stand up to the truth, to the evidence of evil, to the design of mass murder. This is a test of humanity. This is a test of mankind and we shall see in the coming weeks and months how the international community lives up to its responsibility to stop evil before it spreads further.”