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The Good Life of Auschwitz Guards
Last Updated: Thursday, 27 September 2007, 10:48 GMT 11:48 UK
By Laura Smith-Park
BBC News, Washington
At first glance, the photographs seem innocuous enough. Men and women in uniform lie back in deckchairs, listen to accordion music, decorate a Christmas tree.
In pictures: Auschwitz album
It seems like a carefree life - but the pictures were taken at the Auschwitz death camp at the height of the Holocaust.
The happy men and women are Nazi officials enjoying time off from the business of genocide, their images collected by Karl Hoecker, an adjutant to the camp commander.
His unique album of 116 photographs was found in Frankfurt in 1946 by a US intelligence officer, who kept it to himself for six decades before showing it to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum last year.
Museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding, who has helped to put album online, believes the very ordinariness of the scenes captured is what makes them so chilling.
"But I think it's shocking because it's a reminder that they were human beings, that they weren't red-eyed monsters, that they had pets and children and lives, and yet could do this to other people."
The find has significantly increased the number of photographs available to historians of Auschwitz-Birkenau before its liberation in January 1945.
Previously, only about 320 images were known, many of them in the so-called Auschwitz Album, which shows the arrival of Hungarian Jews at the camp in May 1944.
Hoecker's album includes the only known pictures of Dr Josef Mengele - notorious for the medical experiments he conducted on Auschwitz inmates - taken within the camp's confines.
Not a single prisoner appears in any of the images.
Gas chambers
Ms Erbelding says the album seems to have been created very much as a personal keepsake.
Karl Hoecker and SS women relax on lounge chairs in Solahuette (courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
The photographs show SS officers but no Auschwitz prisoners
Many of the pictures were taken at Solahuette, a little-known SS resort near Auschwitz where the camp's guards were periodically sent as a reward for hard work.
Hoecker himself is a regular fixture, decorating a Christmas tree in one photograph, going hunting or playing with his dog in others.
A series of images dated 22 July 1944 shows him eating blueberries with a group of female SS auxiliaries, one of whom pretends to cry as she holds her now-empty bowl upside-down.
On that same day, the museum's researchers found, 150 prisoners, Jews and non-Jews, arrived on a transport to Auschwitz. The SS selected 21 men and 12 women for work and killed the rest in the gas chambers.
Another image shows Hoecker enjoying a sing-along with senior SS officers, identified by the museum as Dr Mengele, former Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Hoess, gas chamber supervisor Otto Moll and Birkenau Kommandant Josef Kramer.
http://news.bbc.co.u...cas/7011371.stm
Last Updated: Thursday, 27 September 2007, 10:48 GMT 11:48 UK
By Laura Smith-Park
BBC News, Washington
At first glance, the photographs seem innocuous enough. Men and women in uniform lie back in deckchairs, listen to accordion music, decorate a Christmas tree.
In pictures: Auschwitz album
It seems like a carefree life - but the pictures were taken at the Auschwitz death camp at the height of the Holocaust.
The happy men and women are Nazi officials enjoying time off from the business of genocide, their images collected by Karl Hoecker, an adjutant to the camp commander.
His unique album of 116 photographs was found in Frankfurt in 1946 by a US intelligence officer, who kept it to himself for six decades before showing it to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum last year.
Museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding, who has helped to put album online, believes the very ordinariness of the scenes captured is what makes them so chilling.
"But I think it's shocking because it's a reminder that they were human beings, that they weren't red-eyed monsters, that they had pets and children and lives, and yet could do this to other people."
The find has significantly increased the number of photographs available to historians of Auschwitz-Birkenau before its liberation in January 1945.
Previously, only about 320 images were known, many of them in the so-called Auschwitz Album, which shows the arrival of Hungarian Jews at the camp in May 1944.
Hoecker's album includes the only known pictures of Dr Josef Mengele - notorious for the medical experiments he conducted on Auschwitz inmates - taken within the camp's confines.
Not a single prisoner appears in any of the images.
Gas chambers
Ms Erbelding says the album seems to have been created very much as a personal keepsake.
Karl Hoecker and SS women relax on lounge chairs in Solahuette (courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
The photographs show SS officers but no Auschwitz prisoners
Many of the pictures were taken at Solahuette, a little-known SS resort near Auschwitz where the camp's guards were periodically sent as a reward for hard work.
Hoecker himself is a regular fixture, decorating a Christmas tree in one photograph, going hunting or playing with his dog in others.
A series of images dated 22 July 1944 shows him eating blueberries with a group of female SS auxiliaries, one of whom pretends to cry as she holds her now-empty bowl upside-down.
On that same day, the museum's researchers found, 150 prisoners, Jews and non-Jews, arrived on a transport to Auschwitz. The SS selected 21 men and 12 women for work and killed the rest in the gas chambers.
Another image shows Hoecker enjoying a sing-along with senior SS officers, identified by the museum as Dr Mengele, former Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Hoess, gas chamber supervisor Otto Moll and Birkenau Kommandant Josef Kramer.
http://news.bbc.co.u...cas/7011371.stm
The complete article is twice as long and has pictures, for those of you who are interested.
But the point I'm trying to make is, being surrounded by Nazi women eating blueberries is now my new goal in life.
This post has been edited by Ninja Duck: 06 October 2007 - 01:14 PM
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