Francisco Boix Campo was an Spanish republican

Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...

 exiled in France in 1939. He was recruited by the French Foreign Legion

French Foreign Legion

The French Foreign Legion is a unique military service wing of the French Army established in 1831. The foreign legion was exclusively created for foreign nationals willing to serve in the French Armed Forces...

 and French Army

French Army

The French Army, officially the Armée de Terre , is the land-based and largest component of the French Armed Forces.As of 2010, the army employs 123,100 regulars, 18,350 part-time reservists and 7,700 Legionnaires. All soldiers are professionals, following the suspension of conscription, voted in...

 and captured in 1940 by the Germans. Boix, like over 7000 Spaniards, was an inmate in the Mauthausen concentration camp between January 1941 and May 1945, who became known for having testified as a witness in two trials against Nazi war criminals.

In the Nuremberg trial (International Military Tribunal), Boix was called by the French prosecution to show photographs taken by the SS in Mauthausen. Those photos depicted the conditions in which the prisoners lived and were murdered in that camp. They were also a proof that the camp was known and visited by high leaders of the Third Reich, like Ernst Kaltenbrunner

Ernst Kaltenbrunner

Ernst Kaltenbrunner was an Austrian-born senior official of Nazi Germany during World War II. Between January 1943 and May 1945, he held the offices of Chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt , President of Interpol and, as a Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei und Waffen-SS, he was the...

, who appeared visiting both the Mauthausen camp proper, and the Wienergraben quarry in and the camp in Mauthausen.

Boix was also a witness in the military American trial which took place in Dachau

Dachau

Dachau is a town in Upper Bavaria, in the southern part of Germany. It is a major district town—a Große Kreisstadt—of the administrative region of Upper Bavaria, about 20 km north-west of Munich. It is now a popular residential area for people working in Munich with roughly 40,000 inhabitants...

against 61 criminals from the Nazi camp Mauthausen.

Boix had hidden these photographs (around 2.000) in the time he was in Mauthausen and worked as a prisoner in the SS photographic service.

Between 1945 and 1951 Boix worked as a photo reporter in the French press.

Books

• Benito Bermejo, Francisco Boix, el fotógrafo de Mauthausen. Fotografías de Francisco Boix y de los archivos capturados a los SS de Mauthausen, Barcelona, RBA Libros, 2002, ISBN 978-84-7901-847-4 (Biography in Spanish)

Films

• Francisco Boix, un fotógrafo en el infierno (Francisco Boix, a photographer in hell), a documentary directed by Llorenç Soler, Spain, 2000