Sensational, Previously Unknown Photographs of Mengele, Hoess, and Other Auschwitz Murderers
30-09-2007
The Holocaust Museum in Washington has given Auschwitz Museum historians access to the 115 photographs in an album belonging to Auschwitz SS man Karl Hoecker. Adjutant to the third Auschwitz commandant, Richard Baer, Hoecker took the pictures in the second half of 1944. An anonymous benefactor recently donated the photographs to the American museum.
The majority of the unique images originated in the summer of 1944 in Międzybrodzie, Poland, near Oświęcim. A rest-and-recreation center for the Auschwitz garrison existed there, on the slopes of Kotelnica mountain in the Beskid chain, during the war. A second group of photographs comes mostly from the SS infirmary, which was located directly adjacent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration Camp.
The photographs from Międzybrodzie present relaxed SS men and smiling girls from the SS auxiliary service. The Germans are portrayed resting on lounge chairs, singing to the accompaniment of an accordion, and eating blueberries. Their faces bear no signs of the emotions connected with the everyday, criminal operation of the camp. The newly opened SS infirmary, visits by high-ranking officials, and practice at the nearby firing range feature in the photographs taken in Auschwitz.
Cooperation between American and Polish historians has made it possible to identify more than ten of the perpetrators, including Josef Mengele, known primarily for his experiments on children; Rudolf Hoess, who founded the camp and was its commandant; as well as the owner of the album, Karl Hoecker.
Guests invited to the camp, including civilians, also appear in the photographs. One picture shows Otto Ambros, a manager of the German IG Farben chemical firm, which exploited Auschwitz prisoners as slave laborers.
Museum Deputy Director Teresa Świebocka announced that, under an agreement reached with the Washington museum, these unique photographs will be used in the new main exhibition at the Auschwitz Museum, and in Museum publication.
About the Owner of the Album
Karl Hoecker was born in Engershausen, Germany, in December 1911. He was the youngest of six children. His father, a construction worker, was killed in World War I, and his mother struggled to support the family. Höcker, who worked as a bank teller in Lubbecke, joined the SS in 1933 and the Nazi party in 1937. He married that same year. His daughter was born two years later, and his son in 1944.
When the war broke out, Hoecker was assigned to the Neuengamme concentration camp garrison. In 1943, he became adjutant to the commandant of the Majdanek camp in Lublin and was there during Operation Reinhard, the mass deportation and extermination campaign. When Sturmbahnführer Richard Baer was named commandant of Auschwitz in May 1944, Hoecker was transferred there as his adjutant.
Baer, previously deputy to WVHA (SS Main Economic-Administrative Office) chief Oswald Pohl in Berlin, had never worked in a camp previously. Hoecker remained in Auschwitz until evacuation, when he was transferred to the Dora-Mittelbau camp along with Baer. The two men administered the camp until the Allies arrived. Hoecker fled the camp just before liberation. The British arrested him near Hamburg, but he passed himself off as a soldier from a regular unit.
Since the Allies had no precise description of him, Hoecker served only a year and a half in a British POW camp before being released at the end of 1946. He returned to family life in Engershausen with his wife and two children. After vountarily submitting to de-nazification proceedings in 1952, he was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment for membership in a criminal organization, the SS. Because of a 1954 amnesty, he did not serve time. No one took any further interest in him until the 1960s, when the public prosecutor began searching for him in the aftermath of the Eichmann trial.
He took up gardening in his spare time. He held the position of head teller at the regional bank in Lübbecke with a break from 1963 to 1965, when he was under investigation in connection with the Frankfurt Trial, where he was indicted. The court found Hoecker guilty of involvement in the murder of 1,000 people in four separate incidents. The facts that he had been a model citizen after the war, had voluntarily submitted to de-nazification in 1952, and had been shown to be merely a bureaucrat who worked at a desk, were all taken into account as mitigating circ*mstances.
The court ruled that there was no proof that Hoecker had been present on the ramp or unloading platform where the Nazis carried out the selection of new arrivals. It sentenced him to only seven years, and counted his previous time in prison against the sentence. Paroled in 1970, Hoecker went back to his job as head teller at the bank in Lübbecke.
Karl Hoecker died in 2000 at the age of 89.
(source: USHMM, Washington)
Some remarks on the album
Who took pictures in Auschwitz?
It is generally known that the upper SS leadership attempted to maintain the secrecy of the crimes committed in the concentration camps; the oldest extant orders from commandant Rudolf Hoess include a blanket prohibition, frequently reiterated later, on all forms of photography on the grounds of Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
Later years, however, saw a number of exceptions to the ban. At least two extensive collections of photographs have survived: some 200 pictures taken by SS-Hauptscharführer Bernhard Walter and SS-Unterscharführer Ernst Hofmann, depicting selection on the railroad platform in Birkenau, and over 500 photographs taken for the most part by SS-Unterscharführer Dietrich Kamann, presenting the progress of construction projects in various parts of the camp.
The Museum Archives also hold almost 40,000 photographs taken when prisoners were registered, a range of images made by the SS and by Germans and Poles living in Oświęcim, aerial reconnaissance photographs from late 1944 and early 1945, and pictures taken by Russians and Poles after liberation.
An absolutely unique class of photographs was taken by members of the Sonderkommando near Crematorium V in Birkenau in the summer of 1944.
What can be seen in the official photographs from the camp?
In almost all these photographs, with the exception of those taken on the ramp in Birkenau, prisoners appear in the background, performing their assigned tasks: digging drainage ditches, laying bricks, carrying wooden beams, etc. Generally, they strike the beholder as healthy and relatively well dressed. These pictures contain no scenes of SS men beating or tormenting prisoners, let alone, obviously, killing or executing them. The camp commandant issued a strict prohibition against photographing such events, and this ban would seem to have been observed scrupulously.
The uniqueness of the Hoecker album
For many years following the end of the war, the Nazi perpetrators were viewed as people with exclusively sad*stic character traits, unalloyed with any humane attributes or feelings. A turning point came only with the publication of Daniel J. Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners and the subsequent, tempestuous media polemics during which an alternative image was presented to the public, of “ordinary people”—fathers of families, sometimes well educated, who nevertheless helped carry out the most enormous crime in human history.
Previously, the Museum collections contained no images that could contribute to a fuller illustration of the way that the SS men assigned to Auschwitz behaved. Specialists in the history of the camp had at their disposal only pictures of the SS “on duty” at the Birkenau ramp, or while guarding or escorting prisoners. Otherwise, there were only the numerous studio portraits, and photographs from the postwar trials.
The photos in the Hoecker album, on the other hand, depict SS men from the Auschwitz gallery in their private lives. We see them smiling and, frequently, looking downright joyful. Their faces betray no hint of the emotions connected with the “duties” they performed in the camp.
Scenes from everyday life
In several of the photographs, SS physicians pose in the course of kameradeschaft (team-building) meetings at the rest-and-recreation center in Międzybrodzie. These occurred during breaks between the regular series of selection procedures during which these same men personally sent Jews directly from the unloading platform to the gas chambers.
The notorious Josef Mengele is seen in animated conversation with camp commandant Richard Baer and Auschwitz SS garrison commander Rudolf Hoess; all three men are clearly in a buoyant mood. Further along, girls from the SS auxiliary service gorge themselves on blueberries picked in the forest. Nearby stands an SS man playing the accordion.
Finally come the group photographs. In the front row stand the commandants of the various camps making up the Auschwitz complex. Among them is Otto Moll. Although he holds the rank of a mere SS-Hauptscharführer (sergeant), the officers obviously treat him as their equal, apparently as a result of his position as boss of the crematoria.
Another series of pictures was taken during a party at the Auschwitz officers’ mess, with guests from the Wehrmacht and civilians sitting at the tables alongside the SS men. One of the civilians is Otto Ambros, a manager and board member with IG Farben.
The album also shows target practice at an SS firing range, probably the one in the village of Rajsko, outside Oświęcim. Lying on specially constructed wooden platforms, the SS men take aim.
Many photographs were taken during official ceremonies at the camp, such as the opening of the newly constructed SS hospital complex in Birkenau. Visiting dignitaries are identifiable, along with commandants Hoess and Baer, SS physician Eduard Wirths from the camp health service, and another civilian, Professor Carl Clauberg, who carried out criminal sterilization experiments in Auschwitz. In the background is a group of German Red Cross nurses, including Maria Stromberger—one of the few who showed sympathy for the prisoners and cooperated with the camp resistance movement.
When were the pictures taken?
Almost all the photographs in the album were taken between Karl Hoecker’s arrival in Auschwitz in late May 1944 and the end of that year. Several photographs depict the funeral of the SS men killed during American air raids on December 18 and 26. Some of the series of pictures are dated, while others, unfortunately, are not. Documentary evidence makes it possible, however, to determine that the visit of the air force general Erich Quade took place on May 31 (it included a lecture on Die deutsche Luftkriegsführung—the German air campaign), while the SS infirmary was opened on September 1.
The importance of the photographs
All these pictures possess indisputably great historical value. They enable us to reconstruct many details of the furnishing of camp buildings, to determine the participants in important events, and, perhaps most of all, to make several observations of a general nature. There seems to be not a hint that dealing with the psychological burdens connected with their everyday “duty” constituted a problem for these SS men. In fact, their time in Auschwitz may have struck them as idyllic. After all, they slept in clean barracks, dined in well-stocked mess halls, went hunting, and took part in cultural and recreational events.
Here, perhaps, lies the answer to the conundrum of why the Auschwitz SS records contain no information on transfer requests. Perhaps the only puzzling thing is the alcohol that was ubiquitous at the “team-building” meetings—was it intended to soothe the nerves of the SS men?
Piotr Setkiewicz, head of the archives at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
The owner of the...
Ceremonial opening...
Foreground, from...
