Blueprints of the concentration camp at Auschwitz, found recently in a rubbish skip, have been put on display in a Berlin shopping centre as a public challenge to Holocaust deniers.

The plans, which show gas chambers, huge storage halls for corpses, and a crematorium, have been put up in a busy foyer between sandwich shops and a sushi bar.

“It’s shocking, deeply shocking,” said Tobias Prennzler, 27, a design student, as he leant forward to decipher the signature of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi security machine. “This was 1941 and they were already drawing up plans for some kind of a death factory. And it looks like they wanted to make it permanent.”

The display comes as Germans, once fiercely proud of the Bavarian-born Pope Benedict XVI, are registering dismay that the Vatican should have accepted a Holocaust sceptic back into the fold. Bishop Richard Williamson, who is being expelled from Argentina by the Government, once told Swedish television: “I believe there were no gas chambers.”

The core of Auschwitz was built for migrant farm workers in 1916 when southern Poland was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the First World War ended it was taken over by the Polish horse artillery. After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, it was turned into a jail for Polish officers and intellectuals.

But Himmler had ambitious plans for the camp: he wanted it to house a pool of slave labour for an IG Farben factory making synthetic rubber and petrol. He ruled that it should be expanded to accommodate 30,000 prisoners; that an adjacent camp be built for 100,000 in Auschwitz-Birkenau; and that 10,000 inmates be assigned to building factory halls for IG Farben.

The plans were found last autumn when an old apartment in Berlin was being gutted. They correspond to other plans in the possession of the Auschwitz museum and the Russian Central Archives in Moscow, taken by Soviet forces after they liberated the camp in January 1945. This is the first time that Germans have been able to see the sketches. They are a chilling study. “The terrible thing about these drawings is their cool perfectionism, their professionalism,” Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a former Polish Foreign Minister and Auschwitz inmate, said after touring the display in Berlin. “They are the building plans for a real, rather than mythical, Hell on Earth.”

The sketches, made by a Polish technical draughtsman who was also an Auschwitz prisoner, were prepared in November 1941, after the first prisoners has been gassed using Zyklon B, and before the Wannsee conference in January 1942, when Nazi officials discussed the logistics of the Holocaust. By February 1942 the first Jews were being gassed in the camp.

Holocaust deniers question the capacity or even the existence of the gas chambers. Bishop Williamson, who has been told by the Vatican that he has to distance himself from his expressed views on the Holocaust, is on record as saying that no more than 300,000 Jews perished in all the Nazi concentration camps.

The exhibition’s organiser, the Axel Springer publishing group, makes clear on the display boards that between 800,000 and 1,050,000 Jews were killed in Auschwitz, as well as 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 25,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and 15,000 other inmates.

One extraordinary aspect of the plans is that the Nazis plainly intended to create a model town around the death camp, complete with flowerbedded courtyards and lawns. Few of these beautification plans were ever realised. Instead, Auschwitz retained to the end an ugly, factory-like atmosphere; a factory that produced nothing but corpses and broken lives.

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