https://jeffjacoby.com/31233/the-drawing-that-killed-my-father-family
The drawing that killed my father’s family
by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
January 25, 2026
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Unlike the medical profession, which established the Nuremberg Code in the immediate wake of the Nazi doctors’ trials, architecture resisted establishing ethical standards for decades. Not until 2020 — nearly 80 years after Dejaco drafted the whiteprint that paved the way to the Final Solution — did the American Institute of Architects adopt new ethics rules. But those rules specifically address execution chambers and torture facilities. They say nothing — certainly nothing explicit — about designing concentration camps, deportation infrastructure, or industrial-scale crematoria like those Dejaco created.
“There is still no Hippocratic oath for architects,” van Pelt told me.
I went to Los Angeles wondering, as I so often have, how educated professionals — architects, engineers, lawyers, railway administrators — could have facilitated the Holocaust. The whiteprint doesn’t answer that question, of course. It underscores it: an artifact of how ordinary professionalism can be bent to monstrous ends.
There is no evil so monstrous that people cannot be induced to do it, or to avert their gaze while it is being done, if it serves their professional, social, or ideological interests. Dejaco’s drawing is evidence. So is everything that happened afterward.
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“There is no evil so monstrous that people cannot be induced to do it”?
Yet, usually on Facebook, I read stories where ordinary people took great person risk to save people they didn’t even know.
The Greek Island where the Bishop and the Mayor gave the Nazis the demanded “list of all the Jews” with only their two names on it.
Or the woman who smuggled Jewish babies out of the ghetto.
Or the fellow who pretended to be a Spanish consul to write out passes.
Or the Japanese guy who wrote passes in direct disobedience to his superiors.
Or the priest who turned a seminary dorm into a hide out.
Maybe there are a few good souls that can be counted on?
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