Originally titled "Resettlement of the Jews from Hungary" (Umsiedlung der Juden aus Ungarn), it shows a period when the Nazis accelerated their deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.[2] The images were taken by photographers from the camp's Erkennungsdienst ("identification service"). Among other things, the Erkennungsdienst was responsible for fingerprinting and taking photo IDs of prisoners who had not been selected for extermination.[3] The identity of the photographers is uncertain, but it is thought to have been Bernhard Walter or Ernst Hoffmann, two SS men who were director and deputy director of the Erkennungsdienst.[4] The camp's director, Rudolf Höss, also may have taken several of the photographs himself.[2]
The album has 56 pages and 193 photographs. Originally, it had more photographs, but before being donated to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel, some of them were given to survivors who recognized relatives and friends.
Description
The images follow the processing of newly arrived Hungarian Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia in the spring and summer of 1944.[2] They document the disembarkation of the Jewish prisoners from the train boxcars, followed by the selection process, performed by doctors of the SS and wardens of the camp, which separated those who were considered fit for work from those who were to be sent to the gas chambers. The photographers followed groups of those selected for work, and those selected for death, to a birch grove just outside the crematoria, where they were made to wait before being killed. The photographers also documented the workings of the Canada storage facilities, where the looted belongings of the prisoners were sorted before transport to Germany.[5] The photographs are unrepresentative in showing the arrival process during the daytime; the vast majority of transports were timed to arrive at the camp during the night.[2]
Purpose and intended audience
The album was likely produced to show the efficient operations of Auschwitz to an audience of high-level Nazi officials. The goal can be inferred from the album's contents, which focus on the processing of Hungarian Jews upon their arrival at the camp. The photographs were taken at a time when Eichmann accelerated the deportation of Hungarian Jews, with 650,000 people to be transported to Auschwitz in the course of three months. Rudolf Höss had been deployed to Auschwitz in May 1944 to oversee the operation, and the album highlights his management of the arrival process. The album has therefore been interpreted by scholars as an example of "internal propaganda" meant to show the orderly operation of the "Final Solution".[2]
History
The album's survival is remarkable, given the strenuous efforts made by the Nazis to keep the "Final Solution" a secret. Also remarkable is the story of its discovery.[6] Lili Jacob (later Lili Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier) was selected for work at Auschwitz-Birkenau, while the other members of her family were sent to the gas chambers. After the Auschwitz camp was evacuated by the Nazis as the Soviet army approached, Jacob passed through various camps, finally arriving at the Dora concentration camp, where she was eventually liberated. Recovering from illness in a vacated barracks of the SS, Jacob found the album in a cupboard beside her bed. Inside, she found pictures of herself, her relatives, and others from her community. The coincidence was astounding, given that the Nordhausen-Dora camp was over 640km (400mi) away, and that over 1,100,000 people were killed at Auschwitz.[7]
The album's existence had been known publicly since at least the 1960s, when it was used as evidence at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials.[3] Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld visited Lili in 1980 and convinced her to donate the album to Yad Vashem.[8] The album's contents were first published that year in the book The Auschwitz Album, edited by Klarsfeld.
See also
Höcker Album a collection of photographs with SS who ran the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp
↑ Wontor-Cichy, Teresa (2012). "Erkennungsdienst—The Identification Service at Auschwitz". Wilhelm Brasse, Number 3444: Photographer, Auschwitz, 1940-1945. Krakow and Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. p.14.
Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager) in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labour camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish question.
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps, also called death camps, or killing centers, in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million people – mostly Jews – in the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily murdered by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Extermination through labour was also used at the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps. Millions were also murdered in concentration camps, in the Aktion T4, or directly on site.
Sonderkommandos were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. The death-camp Sonderkommandos, who were always inmates, were unrelated to the SS-Sonderkommandos, which were ad hoc units formed from members of various SS offices between 1938 and 1945.
Majdanek was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, placing it among the largest of Nazi concentration camps. Although initially intended for forced labor rather than extermination, it was used to murder people on an industrial scale during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Polish Jews within their own occupied homeland. In operation from 1 October 1941 to 22 July 1944, it was captured nearly intact. The rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration prevented the SS from destroying most of its infrastructure, and Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes failed to remove the most incriminating evidence of war crimes.
The Holocaust—the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945—is the most-documented genocide in history. Although there is no single document which lists the names of all Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, there is conclusive evidence that about six million Jews were murdered. There is also conclusive evidence that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Operation Reinhard extermination camps, and in gas vans, and that there was a systematic plan by the Nazi leadership to murder them.
Roza Robota or Róża Robota in Polish, referred to in other sources as Rojza, Rózia or Rosa, was the leader of a group of four women Holocaust resistors hanged in the Auschwitz concentration camp for their role in the Sonderkommando prisoner revolt of 7 October 1944.
Franciszek Piper is a Polish scholar, historian and author. Most of his work concerns the Holocaust, especially the history of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Dr. Piper is credited as one of the historians who helped establish a more accurate number of victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps. According to his research, at least 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, of whom about 960,000 were Jewish. He is the author of several books and chair of the Historical Department at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
Czesława Kwoka was a Polish Catholic girl who was murdered at the age of 14 in Auschwitz. One of the thousands of minor child and teen victims of German World War II war crimes against ethnic Poles in German-occupied Poland, she is among those memorialized in an Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum exhibit, "Block no. 6: Exhibition: The Life of the Prisoners".
We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz, is a book by Gideon Greif. First published in Hebrew in 1999, the work was translated into English in 2005. Greif's book based on a series of interviews with surviving Sonderkommandos - Jewish prisoners who survived by working in the German death camps. The writer, Gideon Greif, is a researcher at Yad Vashem, Israel, the principal institution in the world studying the history of the Holocaust. He had also served as a visiting professor at The Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies, the University of Miami.
Holocaust trains were railway transports run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn national railway system under the control of Nazi Germany and its allies, for the purpose of forcible deportation of the Jews, as well as other victims of the Holocaust, to the Nazi concentration, forced labour, and extermination camps.
The Höcker Album is a collection of photographs believed to have been collected by Karl-Friedrich Höcker, an officer in the SS during the Nazi regime in Germany. It contains over one hundred images of the lives and living conditions of the officers and administrators who ran the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex. The album is unique and an indispensable document of the Holocaust; it is now in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C.
Franz Hößler, also Franz Hössler was a Nazi German SS-Obersturmführer and Schutzhaftlagerführer at the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dora-Mittelbau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps during World War II. Captured by the Allies at the end of the war, Hößler was charged with war crimes in the First Bergen-Belsen Trial, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He was executed by hanging at Hameln Prison in 1945.
Wilhelm Brasse was a Polish professional photographer and a prisoner in Auschwitz during World War II. He became known as the "famous photographer of Auschwitz concentration camp." His life and work were the subject of the 2005 Polish television documentary film The Portraitist (Portrecista), which first aired in the Proud to Present series on the Polish TVP1 on 1 January 2006.
The Portraitist is a 2005 Polish television documentary film about the life and work of Wilhelm Brasse, the famous "photographer of Auschwitz", made for TVP1, Poland, which first aired in its "Proud to Present" series on January 1, 2006. It also premiered at the Polish Film Festival, at the West London Synagogue, in London, on March 19, 2007.
Peter Voss, sometimes misspelled as Foss, Vost or Vast, was an SS-Oberscharführer, known for his role as a commander of the crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, buildings which were used to gas and burn some 900,000 of the 1.1 million people that were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Leib Langfus, or also Leyb Langfus, was one of the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. A rabbi and Dayan in Maków Mazowiecki he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942, where he was forced to work as a Sonderkommando. After the war, a diary he kept was unearthed in the grounds of Birkenau - that was later to be published with a number of other diaries, under the title, The scrolls of Auschwitz. The accounts written by Langfus are considered one of the most important historical documents dealing with subject of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, and the Holocaust in general.
The Sonderkommando photographs are four blurred photographs taken secretly in August 1944 inside the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. Along with a few photographs in the Auschwitz Album, they are the only ones known to exist of events around the gas chambers.
Zalman Gradowski or Chaim Zalman Gradowski originally from Suwałki, was a Polish Jewish prisoner of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust in occupied Poland. On November 2, 1942, he was deported, as were all Jews then living in Lunna, as well as neighboring towns, to the Kielbasin (Kolbasino) transit camp. On December 5, 1942, he and all his Jewish townsfolk were forcibly marched from the Kielbasin transit camp to Lososno, Poland, where they boarded a train bound for, as he later discovered, Auschwitz. The train arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau on the morning of December 8, 1942. After "selection" at Auschwitz-Birkenau, his family members as well as all women and children, and most of the men who were on the transport, were immediately sent to the gas chamber and murdered. Shortly afterward, Gradowski and several others from the transport who survived the “selection” were sent to work in crematoria as part of the Sonderkommando slave labour unit.
Photography of the Holocaust is a topic of interest to scholars of the Holocaust. Such studies are often situated in the academic fields related to visual culture and visual sociology studies. Photographs created during the Holocaust also raise questions in terms of ethics related to their creation and later reuse.
In German-occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust, the Politische Abteilung Erkennungsdienst in the Auschwitz concentration camp was a kommando of SS officers and prisoners who photographed camp events, visiting dignitaries, and building works on behalf of the camp's commandant, Rudolf Höss.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
