Following up on Al Martin’s contention that Karl Rove’s grandfather built concentration camps for the Nazis (which was blogged and subsequently contested here the week before last), we asked a noted holocaust scholar, Robert Jan van Pelt, Ph.D., Professor of Architetcure at the University of Waterloo, Canada, author of The Case for Auschwitz and co-author of Auschwitz with Deborah Dwork, to look into the matter for us. Here’s what we found out:

I have studied for over 14 years the history and construction of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the center of the Holocaust with more than 1 million victims, mostly Jews, but I do not remember having seen any document linking the firm Roverer Süd-Deutsche Ingenieurbüro to the construction of that camp. I could do some research into this matter—sometimes outside engineers provided the equivalent of what we would call today building code consultancy (in WW II they had to sign off that the project used building materials in accordance with the regulations concerning wartime rationing). But if the firm had been contracted to do such work, it would have been a very minor matter. What is absolutely certain is that Roverer neither designed, nor constructed Birkenau. That camp was designed by the architects of the SS Zentralbauleitung in Auschwitz, with the major responsibility going to Karl Bischoff and Fritz Ertl.

In retrospect, I guess I should’ve phrased the post, “Did Karl Rove’s grandfather build Birkenau?” Boy this foot tastes terrific.