Höcker Album

The Höcker Album (or Hoecker Album) is a collection of photographs believed to have been collected by Karl Höcker, an officer of the SS during the Nazi regime in Germany. It contains over a hundred images of the lives and living conditions of the officers and administrators who ran the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex. These photographs are among the only examples of their kind, and the album is considered to be an indispensable document of the Holocaust. The album is in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C.

Discovery

According to the museum, the photograph album was found by an unidentified American counter-intelligence officer who was billeted in Vrankfurt after Germany's surrender in 1945. This officer discovered the photo album ina drawer in the apartment where he stayed, 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, with the request that his identity not be disclosed. The album was quickly confirmed as including images of Auschwitz because of handwritten inscriptions and the first photograph, which feature a portrait of Richard Baer, Auschwitz camp commandant between 1944 and 1945, and a second man who was later identified as Baer's adjutant, Karl Höcker.

Contents

The album contains 116 photographs, all in black-and-white, 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. 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 opening of a local hospital. They also include images of the camp officers relaxing at a staff retreat known as the Solahutte, a rustic lodge only a few miles away from the camp complex. These images are regarded as the most striking, because they show cheerful staff members singing, frolicking and eating blueberries 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 from the staff who were known generally as Helferinnen, the German word for "helpers."

Mengele photographs

Both of the camp's most well-known commanders, Richard Baer and Rudolf Höss, are visible in the photographs. But possibly the most notorious Auschwitz figure who features in the album is Dr. Josef Mengele, known to camp prisoners as the "Angel of Death." Mengele, a trained physician, directed the 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 murdered 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 1944 and January 1945. It has been noted by archivists and historians that this period overlaps with the mass extermination of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews 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."

Hoecker'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. He was found guilty of aiding and abetting the deaths of a thousand people four separate times, but it was never fully proven that he himself took part in the "selections."

Höcker served five years of a seven-year sentence. He died in 2000 at the age of 89.

Footnotes

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External Links

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum pages displaying these photographs at http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/ssalbum/