Martin Filler: Modern Architecture’s Dark Side

As Cohen notes, one of the principal designers of the Auschwitz death factory, Fritz Ertl, was trained at the Bauhaus, the German design school we now associate with the most enlightened aspects of the new architecture. Ertl’s partner in crime at Auschwitz was the all-too-aptly named architect August Schlachter (slaughterer). Their thoroughly depraved SS boss, Hans Kammler, was an architect who had worked under the socially aware Berlin housing architect Paul Mebes during the Weimar period. Even though Hitler’s personal hatred for the supposedly un-Germanic International Style led his acolytes to reject its outward manifestations in favor of traditional Völkisch motifs (especially the pitched roof), they were all too willing to retain the internal functional improvements of Modernism and apply them wholeheartedly to the Nazi killing machine.

Mein Blog befasst sich in einem umfassenden Sinn mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein besonderes Augenmerk richte ich dabei auf die Aktivitäten des Medien- und Dienstleistungskonzern Bertelsmann und der Bertelsmann Stiftung.