AP Features, September 19th, 2007
A photo album containing 116 rare photographs of senior SS officers and Nazi officials at the Auschwitz concentration camp was unveiled Wednesday by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The photos, taken between May and December 1944, show the guards and officials relaxing at events including a Christmas gathering and a sing-a-long. Many photos were taken as the gas chambers and crematories were operating at and above capacity as the Nazis frantically sought to eliminate Jews in Europe as the war neared its end. The German camp in Poland was liberated by the Soviets on Jan. 27, 1945.
"There are no photos of anything horrible. Not even a prisoner lurking in the background," said Judith Cohen, the director of the museum's photographic reference collection. "And that's precisely what makes them so horrible."
The images were in an album that had been maintained by Karl Hoecker, the adjutant to the camp commandant.
Hoecker's personal photo album depicts a sing-a-long with an accordion player and about 70 SS men, including Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for his bizarre and cruel medical experiments. Mengele was joined by other infamous camp leaders, including Josef Kramer and Rudolf Hoess.
The eight photos of Mengele are the first authenticated pictures of Mengele at Auschwitz, officials at the U.S. Holocaust Museum said. Cohen said scholars at the museum are intrigued because photos of Mengele are extremely rare.
Also among the images are SS guards and Nazi officials on numerous hunting trips, a group singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordionist, Hoecker lighting the camp's Christmas tree, and female SS auxiliaries eating blueberries and then mockingly crying and posing with empty bowls.
"It's hard to fathom the kind of people who ran these camps and one always struggles to understand who they were and how they saw themselves," museum director Sara Bloomfield said in a statement. "These unique photographs vividly illustrate the contented world they enjoyed while overseeing a world of unimaginable suffering. They offer an important perspective on the psychology of those perpetrating genocide."
The museum obtained the photos earlier this year from a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer who found the album in an apartment while stationed in Germany in 1946. The donor, who asked to remain anonymous, died this summer.
The album provides a stark contrast to the only other known collection of photographs taken at Auschwitz. The so-called Auschwitz Album is a compilation of pictures taken by SS photographers in the spring of 1944 and discovered by a survivor in another camp. Those images show the arrival of Hungarian Jews, who at the time made up the last remaining sizable Jewish community in Europe.
Curators currently do not have plans to exhibit the Hoecker album photos, but they are displayed online at the museum's Web site, http://www.ushmm.org.
