Karl Bischoff

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SS-Sturmbannfuehrer Karl Bischoff (1897 - 1950) was a German architect & engineer. Born near Kaiserslautern, Germany. At the age of twenty he joined the German Air Force. In 1935 he obtained a job at the Luftwaffe Construction Bureau. During the early years of the Second World War he was involved in the building of airports in France. In this position he met SS-Gruppenführer Hans Kammler, who was responsible for the SS-Amt II (Building), later to become Amtsgruppe C of the WVHA. Kammler offered Bischoff a leading post at Auschwitz.

In 1941 Bischoff arrived in Auschwitz, where he became chief of the special section that had to implement the planned enlargement of the concentration camp by the creation of a POW camp, which itself later became part of the Birkenau camp. He showed his effectiveness and ambition shortly after his arrival by claiming the enormous budget of 20 million Reichsmarks. Unlike his predecessor, Bischoff was an extremely competent and dynamic bureaucrat. Despite all of the difficulties caused by the war, the building activities deemed necessary during the next years were all carried out by Bischoff and his staff of the Zentralbauleitung der Waffen-SS und Polizei Auschwitz O/S , as the department was officially named. The giant Birkenau camp, the four big crematoria, the technically complicated central sauna, the new reception building in the Stammlager and hundreds of other buildings, were planned and realized.

In 1943 the chief builder of the crematoria was able to inform his superiors in Berlin about the success of the operation: when the old crematorium in the Stammlager was included, 4,756 persons could be burned within 24 hours in five crematoria. Six months later Bischoff was honoured with the Cross for Special Contributions to Warfare, 1st class with Sword, but shortly afterwards was informed that further plans for Auschwitz had to be reduced to those which were considered absolutely necessary. The position at the front did not favour further building in the area.

In April 1944 he left Auschwitz and became chief of the building bureau of the Waffen-SS in Silesia and Bohemia. He remained there until the end of the war. Although almost all of the archives of the Auschwitz building office unknowingly fell into Soviets hands, Bischoff remained in the shadows after the war, his involvement at Auschwitz unrecognized until his death.