Inside an SS officer’s Auschwitz photo album

In 2007, Dr. Rebecca Erbelding, archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., received a collection of old photos apparently taken in Europe in the 1940s. This is no surprise: Her role at the museum means she receives donations of wartime memorabilia—letters, diaries, keepsakes, snapshots—almost every day of the year.

In this case, however, the donor was an 87-year-old retired U.S. lieutenant colonel who claimed the photos were discovered in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt in 1946 while he was conducting official business for the U.S. government and that they were taken at Auschwitz, the largest and deadliest Nazi concentration camp.

Elberdin was skeptical. “I know there was almost no photography in the camp,” she tells me now. “We have several photos from 1944 of people having their heads shaved and waiting outside the gas chambers. There are also photos of Heinrich Himmler’s visit from 1942. But Auschwitz was in a heavily fortified area of ​​German-occupied Poland. So I knew him must Wrong. “

He is not. The 32-page photo album he owns contains a total of 116 black-and-white photos, both amateur and professional, showing Nazis in concentration camps; sometimes at work, but more often at leisure. Some of the photos are now believed to have been collected by this man (and took those he did not appear in): Karl Höcker, a former bank clerk who joined the SS and served as administrative assistant to Richard Baer, ​​the last commander of Auschwitz.

There are pictures of Nazis telling jokes, drinking, or lighting candles on Christmas trees in concentration camps. and other young female communication experts (Helfenen) Lounge on a deck chair in the sun or sit on a fence and eat blueberries with a smile. A group photo shows several members of the camp’s high command, including Josef Kramer, Rudolf Höss and Josef Menele, singing amid an accordion playing. Elberding now believes they were almost certainly wearing full Nazi uniforms and celebrating the successful completion of a plan to exterminate 350,000 Hungarian Jews.

This photo is one of several taken at Solahütte, a holiday cabin converted by the Nazis into a resting place for the concentration camp commander and his family. It is located in an idyllic location above Lake Mizbrodsky, just 20 miles from the Auschwitz gas chambers.

Strikingly, of all the photos in Hawke’s album, not a single one shows a concentration camp inmate. “They are really selfies of SS officers,” said Amanda Gronich, an American author who specializes in adapting true stories for stage and screen. “I don’t mean that in a diplomatic way. I mean [taking selfies] This is exactly what they are doing. As homely and shocking as a holiday photo can be, these images effortlessly depict the seemingly carefree life surrounding one of history’s most notorious killing machines.

The mysterious stories of these images and their discovery make up There are blueberries here – A Pulitzer-nominated play conceived and written by Gronidge with playwright Moises Kaufman, it has its UK premiere in east London this month. Combining large-scale projections with a script embroidered from real-life testimonies, it is both a provocative immersive drama and a gripping detective story.

In Hawke’s album, the photos were accompanied by only the briefest of handwritten captions (one of which stated the play’s title), so Elberding and her colleague Judy Cohen (both appeared as on-stage characters) spent months decoding the photos, painstakingly identifying as many subjects as possible and settling on 1944 as the date most of the photos were taken. “Although we believe that at least one was taken in the first week of January 1945, two weeks before the evacuation of Auschwitz,” Elbelding clarified. “The guards knew the Soviets were coming, but there was a photo of them going hunting. Instead of destroying the photos, which he was supposed to do, Hawke carefully pasted them into a photo album. This was delusional. It shows that on some level, the Nazi command did believe that the Germans would still win.”

The album debunks several widespread misconceptions about the management of Nazi death camps, particularly the assumption that staff were all male. In fact, “apple-cheeked young women” are often employed as Helfenen The play believes that in Auschwitz, they had an intimate knowledge of the horrors taking place.

“For some of these young women, serving in the Third Reich was an opportunity to leave home,” Groenich said. “It’s an adventure. They’re teenagers and they have to get away and maybe even find a husband.”

Perhaps more importantly, both the photographs and the drama unconventionally show Auschwitz as it was seen by the Nazis, rather than the victims. An early scene in the play reconstructs a conversation between Elberding and her boss about the ethics of promoting such views in the context of a Holocaust memorial museum, with the latter insisting, “We don’t want to elevate the Nazis and give them any kind of platform,” before agreeing that museum visitors should be free to draw their own conclusions.

Kaufman, whose father was a Holocaust survivor, was inspired to write the play (first staged as an unfinished work in 2018) after a New York Times article. new york times The image reproduces some images from Höcker’s album, titled “In the Shadow of Terror, SS Guardians Relax and Play.”

“The Holocaust has been written about more than any other historical event,” he told me, “and, as an artist, I have always believed that what needs to be said has been said.” Then he saw the photos and immediately had two thoughts. “First of all, how can you be so happy when you’re killing 1.1 million people outside of the frame? Secondly, these photos are [doing something] new. Humanity has a long history of trying to distance itself from Nazis, declaring them monsters. By including a photo like this in the drama, it forces the audience to put themselves in the shoes of the Nazis. “

so, There are blueberries here feels like some kind of companion area of ​​interestJonathan Glazer’s 2024 Oscar-winning film brutally juxtaposes the domestic tranquility of Auschwitz, where camp commander Rudolf Höss and his young family lived, with the industrial horror that unfolded beyond the garden walls. There are blueberries here Also included are photographs of the garden, given to Kaufman and Gronich by Hawes’ grandson after he recognized his grandfather in some of Hawke’s photographs.

Looking at these images, it’s hard not to be reminded of Hannah Arendt’s oft-quoted phrase: “the banality of evil.” Kaufmann told me that during an inspection visit to Auschwitz, he was struck by the presence of a fire-fighting water tank, which he was told had been put there at the insistence of an insurance company in the 1940s that refused to insure the camp without a fire-fighting water tank. Elberdine remembers seeing beautiful patterns on the walls of secretarial offices, presumably painted by women to “enliven” their daily surroundings.

Perhaps most importantly, the show leaves viewers with several tantalizing questions, not least why the anonymous donor kept the photos secret for so long after discovering them in Frankfurt in the 1940s, and what prompted him to eventually give them to the museum 60 years later? “This question keeps me up at night,” Kaufman said. “Because we will never know.” A few months after the lieutenant colonel donated the album, the Holocaust Memorial Museum tried to reconnect with him, but they were told he had died.

We do know what happened to Hawke, though. In 1965, he was tried at the Auschwitz concentration camp trial in Frankfurt and sentenced to seven years in prison for aiding and abetting more than 1,000 murders during his time at the camp; he continued to deny all responsibility, insisting that “I hurt no one…and no one died in Auschwitz because of me.” After his release from prison, he returned to work as chief cashier at a local bank. He died in January 2000 at the age of 88.

If the photos had been donated 10 years earlier, Gronich and Kaufman might have asked to speak to Hawke, perhaps even meet. What might they want to ask? “Tell me how you got here,” Kaufman suggested. “Tell me how you convinced yourself that this behavior was possible.”

Did he also wonder why Hawke took these photos in the first place? “Oh, I know why he took them,” he said. “He thought the empire would last 1,000 years and he wanted to document how he was helping. He was a bank teller and suddenly he was the second-in-command in a business involving 200,000 people. He couldn’t believe his luck.”

Here are the blueberries located Stratford EastLondon E15, January 31 to February 28

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