The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has released an album of photographs of an SS recreation center near Auschwitz taken by the adjutant to the commander of the Auschwitz extermination camp in 1944. They are nothing short of shocking. These photos show SS officers and female auxiliaries laughing and playing while, twenty miles away, hundreds of thousands of Jews were being murdered.
http://www.ushmm.org/...
In the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, just a few miles away from the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the SS operated a retreat for SS officers and men at Solahutte. SS female auxiliaries entertained the men – no doubt to cheer them up from their wartime worries.
There are very few verifiable photographs of Auschwitz since the Nazis had determined that the extermination of European Jews would be a secret operation at the Wannsee Conference. The only other significant collection, The Auschwitz Album in the Yad Vashem museum in Israel, documents the arrival, selection, and the ramp walk of a transport from Hungary in May 1944 – the same time that Karl Hoecker began his album.
http://www1.yadvashem.org/...
The juxtaposition of the two albums is a devastating blow to any sense of morality. The most disturbing realization that comes from viewing this new album is that people can murder hundreds of people every day with no more concern than typing memos. Daniel Goldhagen has argued this point convincingly in Hitler’s Willing Executioners. These photos only confirm his thesis.
While the SS picnic party ran to get out of the rain, Jews on the ramp ran to escape the whips of the SS. While the SS female auxiliaries ate bowls of blueberries, those few Jews who survived selection received one rancid slice of sawdust bread on good days. While Hoecker was lighting the candles on the Yule tree in late 1944, other SS troops were dynamiting the crematoria in which a million people were reduced to ashes.
I urge you to look at these photos, but to do so in context.
http://www.ushmm.org/...
http://www1.yadvashem.org/...
- Karl Hoecker escaped capture after World War II. He worked in a bank until captured in the early 1960s. In the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials in 1963, Hoecker was convicted of aiding in the murders of over 1000 people and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment of which he served five. He was released in 1970 and died in 2000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
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