REBECCA ERBELDING: In December of ’06 I received a letter.
I opened it up and the first sentence said “I would like to offer the Holocaust Museum
a chance to review some World War II era photographs in my possession.” In beginning- or mid-
January a bubble-wrapped package arrives on my desk. I open it up and the first page says
“21 June, Auschwitz,” and so that was the point when we knew we might have something
here.
Many people think that they have photographs of Auschwitz, and very few people actually
do.
Because of the overwhelming evidence of what we know was going on in Auschwitz, it kind
of makes it even more chilling that they were having so much fun doing it.
JUDY COHEN: It would be nice to figure out at some point
who these women are, if these are wives...
ERBELDING: Can we look at this page here?
COHEN: There’s relatively little material that
was taken in Auschwitz, other than mug shots. The most famous are the large collection of
photographs documenting the deportation of Hungarian Jews in May 1944.
ERBELDING: And these are specifically the officers who
are in charge of that deportation, who are in charge of the arrival of 437,000 Hungarian
Jews in a span of 55 days. The vast majority of them did not survive. These are the men
who did it.
PETER BLACK: The importance of finding out who the original
owner was, was vital to authenticate the artifact itself, and also to locate it in time and
place.
ERBELDING: In the album, only 3 people are actually identified
by name in the captions. Mengele I knew on sight, but for others we needed to look at
lapels, we needed to look at where they were standing, what their uniforms looked like,
what event this might possibly be, to determine who they were.
COHEN: We noticed that it’s the same person who
appears over and over on almost every single photograph. And he often will caption photos
as “Me with” so-and-so, but he never identified himself by name.
BLACK: He was seen frequently in the presence of
someone of higher rank, and we also knew from the photograph album that both men were promoted,
to different ranks, on June 21, 1944.
Here’s the listing of Karl Höcker’s name, and you can see by the notation of his rank
and the date of promotion, June 21, 1944, as indicated in the photo album.
COHEN: One of the two was Karl Höcker, who was the
adjutant to the commandant. And then the light bulbs went off and we said, “Oh, it would
make sense that he would be always standing next to the commandant,” and we noticed
that in a number of pictures he has an adjutant cord, which is a cord that you wear over your
shoulder, which really clinched the identification.
ERBELDING: Karl Höcker was an Obersturmführer. He was
a career concentration camp officer. He went to Auschwitz in 1944. It was a fairly big
deal to establish that it was Karl Höcker’s album because his proximity to power was extreme.
JOSEPH WHITE: Auschwitz wasn’t just a series of concentration
camps, it was also a German community. And the fact that you have this resort...
COHEN: Solahütte was the SS retreat, and was within
the grounds of Auschwitz. That people go on vacation is not a surprise. That they felt
a need to go to a retreat where SS personnel can frolic at the same time that they were
murdering the Jews of Europe, and to build it as part of the same complex, is an amazing
thing.
ERBELDING: There’s one photograph, it’s a sing-along
picture. And along the bottom are 7 of the highest-ranking officers in Auschwitz. Just
leaning back smiling, while the men behind them sing. Höcker is there; Otto Moll, the
supervisor of the gas chambers; and [Rudolf] Höss and [Richard] Baer and [Josef] Kramer;
and Franz Hössler, who was the head of the women’s camp at Birkenau; and [Josef] Mengele.
To have them all together is such a rare photograph. And then to have them enjoying themselves
all together, it’s really frightening.
WHITE: Here we have a case where people we investigate
and research all of a sudden, we’re seeing them, in some cases for the first time.
COHEN: There are the
photographs of the Helferinnen, of the female auxiliaries that came...
ERBELDING: And they were female auxiliary officers who
worked the telecommunications between Auschwitz and Berlin and Auschwitz and the other camps.
COHEN: They’re young and they’re out for a good
time.
ERBELDING: And there’s a series of 6 photographs where
Höcker is handing out blueberries, bowls of blueberries, at Solahütte.
COHEN: And one young girl is pretending to cry. No
more blueberries, and she’s making mock tears.
WHITE: This is at a time when Elie Wiesel and Primo
Levi and so many other Holocaust surviving victims were in a part of the Auschwitz complex.
COHEN: The last series of photographs that are in
the album are ones of a funeral of, it’s called a “terror attack.”
WHITE: “Terrorangriff” -- “terror attack,”
underneath, that was the Nazi code language for bombing.
ERBELDING: There’s a color guard. There’s a parade
for these men. There are women and children there mourning them with flag-draped coffins.
This was three weeks before the end. It tells us they still hadn’t come to grips with
the fact that it was over.
COHEN: We all know that monsters do monstrous things.
But when you see people who look like they’re nice guys, in a fairly benign setting, and
we know for a fact that they were doing monstrous things, then it raises all sorts of questions
about what’s man’s capacity for evil. In a different setting would they still be
monsters?
WHITE: They were all too frighteningly human.
ERBELDING: It makes you think about how people could
come to this. That they don’t look like monsters. They look like me. They look like
my next door neighbor. Is he capable of that? Am I?