Höcker Album
Encyclopedia
Karl-Friedrich Höcker
Karl-Friedrich Höcker was a SS-Obersturmführer and the adjutant to Richard Baer, who was a commandant of Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to February 1945...
, an officer of the SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
during the Nazi
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
regime in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. It contains over one hundred images of the lives and living conditions of the officers and administrators who ran the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
concentration camp complex. These photographs are among the only examples of their kind. The album is considered to be an indispensable document of the Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
; it is in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history...
(USHMM) in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
Discovery
According to the museum, the photograph album was found by an unidentified AmericanUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
counterintelligence officer who was billet
Billet
A billet is a term for living quarters to which a soldier is assigned to sleep. Historically, it referred to a private dwelling that was required to accept the soldier....
ed in Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
after Germany's surrender in 1945. This officer discovered the photo album in an apartment there, and when he returned to the United States, he brought the album with him.
In January 2007, the American officer donated the album to the USHMM
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history...
, with the request that his identity not be disclosed. The captions of the photographs, and the people featured in the images, quickly confirmed that it depicted life in and around the Auschwitz camps. The very first photograph is a double portrait of Richard Baer
Richard Baer
Richard Baer was a German Nazi official with the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer and commander of the Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to February 1945. He was a member of N.S.D.A.P...
, Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
camp commandant between 1944 and 1945, and Baer's adjutant, Karl Höcker.
Contents
The album contains 116 photographs, all in black-and-whiteBlack-and-white
Black-and-white, often abbreviated B/W or B&W, is a term referring to a number of monochrome forms in visual arts.Black-and-white as a description is also something of a misnomer, for in addition to black and white, most of these media included varying shades of gray...
, almost all of them featuring German officers. It is believed to have been the property of Hoecker because he appears in far more of the images than any other individual. On the title page underneath a picture of Hoecker and Baer written is "With the Commandant SS Stubaf. Baer, Auschwitz 21.6.44", identifying Hoecker as the owner of the album. He is also the only person in the album to appear alone in any of the images.
Some of the images depict formal events, like military funerals and the dedication of a new hospital. They also include images of the camp officers relaxing at a staff retreat known as the Solahütte
Solahütte
Solahütte was a little-known resort for the Nazi German guards, administrators, and auxiliary personnel of the Auschwitz/Birkenau/Buna facilities...
, a rustic lodge only around 20 miles away from the camp complex. These images are regarded as the most striking, because they show cheerful staff officers singing, drinking and eating while, in the camp itself, tremendous suffering is taking place.
A number of the photographs show officers relaxing in the company of young women—stenographers and typists who were known generally as Helferinnen, the German word for (female) "helpers."
Mengele photographs
Both of the camp's most well-known commanders, Richard BaerRichard Baer
Richard Baer was a German Nazi official with the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer and commander of the Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to February 1945. He was a member of N.S.D.A.P...
and Rudolf Höss, are visible in the photographs. But possibly the most notorious Auschwitz figure who features in the album is Dr. Josef Mengele
Josef Mengele
Josef Rudolf Mengele , also known as the Angel of Death was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He earned doctorates in anthropology from Munich University and in medicine from Frankfurt University...
, known to camp prisoners as the "Angel of Death." Mengele, a trained physician, directed the medical experiments on twin children in the camp. He regularly took part in the "selection" on the train arrival platform, judging which prisoners would be immediately executed and which would be permitted to live and perform slave labor.
In all, the album contains eight photographs in which Mengele appears. Before the donation of the album to the museum, no images were known to exist showing him within the camp grounds.
Timing of photographs
The photographs in the Höcker Album are viewed as especially chilling because of the time during which they were made, between June and December 1944. It has been noted by archivists and historians that this period overlaps with the mass extermination of hundreds of thousands of HungarianHungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
in the spring and summer of 1944—an event known as "the Hungarian Transport". These Jews were gathered and shipped to Auschwitz after the March 1944 invasion by the Nazis of Hungary. So many Hungarian Jews were killed in the Auschwitz camps during that period that the crematoria were incapable of consuming all the bodies, and open pits for the purpose were dug. The contrast of these events with the singing, flirting and blueberry-eating in the Höcker album is particularly disturbing.
According to Rebecca Erbelding, the museum archivist who received the album from its donor and first recognized its significance, "the album reminds us that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were human beings, men and women with families, children and pets, who celebrated holidays and took vacations... These people were human beings... and these photographs remind us what human beings are capable of when they succumb to anti-Semitism, racism and hatred."
Höcker's case
Karl Höcker survived the war and, after evading arrest, turned himself in to authorities in 1952 for being a member of the SS. He received a nine-month sentence but was spared from serving it. In 1963, he was again put on trial, this time for mass murders at the camps where he served. He was found guilty of aiding and abetting the deaths of a thousand people in four separate instances, but it was never fully proven that he himself took part in the "selections."Höcker served five years of a seven-year sentence, and was paroled in 1970. He died in 2000 at the age of 88.
External links
- U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum online gallery of Höcker Album photos
- In the Shadow of Horror, Auschwitz SS Guardians Frolic from Holocaust Survivors and Remembrance Project: "Forget You Not"
- NewYorker.com: Hoecker Album Slide Show (14 images)