Newly Discovered Photos of S.S. Officers Donated to Holocaust Museum

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum revealed today in a press release by PRNewswire that it has added to it's collection. The item is an album of personal photos taken during the height of Nazi cruelty and torture in World War Two. The album contains 116 photos depicting the daily life and recreation of S.S. officers at the infamous Auschwitz-Birkinau concentration camp. Photos show life chronicled from May through December 1944 from the viewpoint of the men and women who simultaneously lived seemingly normal lives and murdered millions of innocent people.

Rare images capture S.S. guards and Nazi officers relaxing and enjoying time off, hunting, singing, trimming Christmas trees and more while Jews were being killed at rates faster than at any other time during the Holocaust. The album was created and owned by Karl Hocker, an adjunct to camp Kommandant Richard Baer.

Some of the photos in the collection include Dr. Josef Mengeles in uniform on the Auschwitz-Birkinau camp grounds: A sing along featuring an accordion player and including approximately 70 S.S. guards and officers including Hocker himself: Former Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Hess, who was brought back to the camp to oversee the murder of the Hungarian Jews: Photos also include Otto Moll who was the gas chamber supervisor at Auschwitz-Birkinau.

Some photos showed female S.S. officers eating blueberries and then pretending to cry with bowls turned upside down on the table after the berries were gone. There were photos of numerous hunting trips and even a few portraits of Hocker's famous hunting dog. Some photos show Hocker trimming a Christmas tree in Dec. 1944, weeks before the Russian would overrun and liberate the camp. Non of the photos show any prisoners.

Remarkably many of the photos seemed to be taken while the gas chamber and crematoria were operating at or above capacity as Hungarian Jews were processed through the camp.The album accentuates the only other known collection of photos taken at Auschwitz published as "The Auschwitz Album." The album was published in 1980 and shows the arrival of Hungarian Jews to the camp in late May of 1944. The photos depicted the selection process that the S.S. used on prisoners.

The 116 images represents a major increase in the number of pre-liberation photos of the now infamous concentration camp. Previously only about 320 images were known to exist of Auschwitz-Birkinau before it's liberation on January 27, 1945 by the Russian army. The figures do not include those photographs that were taken of prisoners as they were processed into the camp to be used for forced labor.

An on line exhibition of the newest collection can be found on the Museum's Website at www.ushmm.org

Museum Director, Sara J. Bloomfield said, "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. These unique photographs vividly illustrate the contended world that they enjoyed while overseeing a world of unimaginable suffering. They offer an important perspective on the psychology of those perpetrating genocide".

The album was donated to the Museum in 2007 by a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who also served as a member of the Counter Intelligence Corps. (C.I.C). The officer had been stationed in Germany in 1946 and found the album in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt while investigating Nazi perpetrators. The man donated the album anonymously to the Museum.

A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was created to inspire leaders and citizens to confront hatred, prevent genocide, promote human dignity and to strengthen democracy.

Sources used for this article are as follows: http://prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/09-19-2007/0004666001&EDATE=