Sixty three years down the track after the Second World War, you'd think there was nothing left to discover about the horrible Holocaust. Recently, however, via the National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, a photo album has come to light that adds a chilling new chapter to what we unfortunately already know about the goings-on in places like the notorious concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. "Nazis at play" is a bit hard to get the mind around, but here's Michael Maher with just that.
REPORTER: Michael Maher
These are the men and women who ran Auschwitz - a hell on earth, the most notorious death camp the world has ever known. The photographs were taken at a nearby resort in the summer of 1944, when the slaughter was at its height. This was the summer that confirmed Auschwitz’s place in the annals of evil.
REGINA SPEIGEL, AUSCHWITZ SURVIVOR: You know, you look at these pictures, they look almost like normal people. They are...they’re devils. They are something in human flesh because how you could sit there and know what's happening to people there and enjoy.
REBECCA ERBELDING, U.S. HOLOCAUST MUSEUM ARCHIVIST: December 2006, I received a letter in the mail. This gentleman, who requested to remain anonymous, wrote to the museum and said he had World War II-era photographs in his possession that he felt we might be interested in. He believed the pictures - and he wrote in his letter - that he believed the pictures to be taken in and around Auschwitz, Poland. And I was quite doubtful of this, actually, because very few people actually have photos of Auschwitz. However I requested some more information from him. And he said, "Can I just send you the album that I have?" and I said, 'Sure,' um, so, the beginning of January 2007, an album arrived on my desk, Federal Express, and I opened it up and there was a photograph album clearly marked "Auschwitz 21 June 1944".
It was found in Germany at the end of the war by an American soldier. The album belonged to Karl Hoecker, adjutant to the commander of Auschwitz.
REBECCA ERBELDING: His job was to know everything before the commandant did and to make sure things ran smoothly for his boss. The other jobs he had was he supervised a team of women known as Helfereinnen and they were telecommunications specialists. They were in charge of all communications inside and out of the camp, so every time a transport came in - a group of Jews came in on a train - they would be in charge of saying "this many people came in", this number were selected for forced labour and this number were selected for the gas chambers", and he would sign off on that before it was telegrammed to Berlin. So he absolutely knew everything that was going on.
I think the most chilling thing is the time period that this is taken. These are not random officers who are at this resort. This is the peak. This is the A-team. This is people who were brought in specifically for the summer of 1944
JOE WHITE, HOLOCAUST HISTORIAN: By this point, at least in terms of Birkenau's killing capacity, it reached its apex. And the killing capacity was so expanded that for body disposal they were beginning to use open-pit cremation beyond the crematories.
REBECCA ERBELDING: In those photographs I recognised Dr Josef Mengele and so once we saw him then we knew the album was truly something really special because, as we knew, there weren't any - supposedly - any photographs of Mengele taken in the camp.
Mengele, known as 'the Angel of Death', conducted heinous medical experiments on women and children. In perhaps the most remarkable photograph in the album, here he stands amidst a gallery of leading Nazi killers at a singalong.
REBECCA ERBELDING: The front row of the album, to me, is the most interesting because it’s the hierarchy. But they're all in a row. They’re all lined up. They’re all smiling and laughing at this singalong at the end of one of the most horrific periods of murder in one place in human history. It’s astonishing, the photograph.
JOE WHITE: Besides Josef Mengele, whose face is quite well-known, probably the most important person that I recognized was Rudolf Hoess, who was the founder of Auschwitz as a concentration camp.
A year after first viewing them, researchers at the Holocaust Memorial Museum are still finding new clues in these rare photographs.
JOE WHITE: Look at this guy. Take the cap off.
REBECCA ERBELDING: I think you're right.
Not long after this picture was taken, Regina Spiegel, an 18-year-old Polish Jew, was deported to Auschwitz.
REGINA SPIEGEL: All these wrinkles - old age isn’t even nice to the tattoos. It looked to me like a fountain pen and they just jabbed it out, and sometimes people would ask me, "Did it hurt?" I said this was the least of our problems. We had other problems. This was the least of our problems.
There were no singalongs in Regina’s world - only a deep, dark abyss from which she thought she’d never emerge. Just how dark that abyss was can be seen in the only other Auschwitz album known to exist - the Lily Jacob album was named after the woman who discovered the photographs, including this one of her younger brothers, murdered a short time later.
REBECCA ERBELDING: It’s really impossible to look at one without really looking at the other. This is what was actually going on in Auschwitz. This is the reality of the situation, not this world of fun.
In a remarkable coincidence, the photographs in both albums were taken at the same time.
JOE WHITE: The album was created by the SS for SS purposes. It was created, presumably, to document what a selection process looked like from the beginning until just to the antechamber of the gas chambers.
Between the middle of May and the beginning of July 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz. 80% were selected for death upon arrival. These women and children, unbeknown to them, are taking their last steps towards the gas chambers.
REGINA SPIEGEL: When they told us to go into the showers, that - so help me God – I will never forget. I was the first and I pushed myself in because I figured maybe they are burning us. Might as well do it to me first, so I don’t hear anyone else scream. And, of course, I came out wet, minus my hair, and of course that’s when they put my number on. But that was Auschwitz for me.
REBECCA ERBELDING: I really think the album in the coming years will be of great interest to people who study the psychology of genocide and the psychology of perpetrators, because it's really astonishing that they can do this. The blueberry pictures, in particular - those pictures were taken on a day where transports were coming into Auschwitz, 20 miles away, and people are pretending to cry in these images, that they don’t have any more blueberries to eat. I mean, the duality of this is astonishing.
So I think the album also raises questions of bystander - you know, are these girls as guilty as the people putting the Zyklon B in the gas chamber? They're at Auschwitz, they know what's going on - where does guilt fall?
The images seared into Regina’s mind are of the family, friends and neighbours these men sent to their deaths.
REGINA SPIEGEL: I could see their haunted faces. And you know the funny thing? When they took them away, they didn’t beg them for mercy, because they knew there was no mercy. But they turned around to us when we were still standing on the side and said, "Please remember us. Remember us." Because nobody likes to go into oblivion, not to be remembered.
REBECCA ERBELDING: And that's one of the things that's really difficult about this album and raises so many questions, because they don’t look evil in this album. They look like normal people, like you and I. And how does a person get to that point where that mass killing is socially acceptable and morally acceptable to a person? It’s very difficult and I think that this album just raises that question even more than it's already been raised by the Holocaust itself.
Credits
Reporter/Camera
MICHAEL MAHER
Editor
NICK O’BRIEN
Producer
KIM CAMBERG
Original Music composed by
VICKI HANSEN
Photos courtesy of
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem