Alberto Errera (officer)

Alberto Errera

Alberto Errera (born January 15, 1913 in the Larisa regional district , Greece ; died August / September 1944 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp ) was a Greek naval officer of the Jewish faith .

He is considered to be the one who secretly took the photos of the Sonderkommando - the only authentic photo documentation of the Holocaust in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp .

Life

After the occupation of Greece, Alberto Errera took the Christian name Alex (Alekos) Michaelides as a camouflage . He was captured by Germans in Larisa together with 225 Greek Jews in March 1944 and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp , where he arrived on April 11, 1944. There he was forced to work in the prisoner special detachment at the crematoria . He is said to have been involved in the preparation of a prisoner uprising. He is the authorship of the four secret photographs taken from the yard of Crematorium V ( English detail photographs . See "images in spite of everything" ) attributed that were smuggled out of the camp. Its author had remained unknown for a long time and was relatively indefinitely assigned to a Greek named Alex.

Errera allegedly died trying to escape after attempting to swim across the Soła and bleeding to death from a gunshot wound.

literature

Georges Didi-Huberman : Pictures in spite of everything. Translated from the French by Peter Geimer. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-7705-4020-4 .
Stefan Hördler, Christoph Kreutzmüller, Tal Bruttmann: Auschwitz in pictures. For a critical analysis of the Auschwitz albums. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft , 63 (2015), Issue 7/8, pp. 609–632.

Web links

Commons : Alberto Errera (officer) - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Andreas Kilian: Representations of the Auschwitz refugee Alberto Errera: On the mythologization of a Greek hero of the resistance .

Individual evidence

↑ According to information from Filip Müller , Leon Cohen, Hermann Langbein. Zalmen Gradowski: Au cœur de l'enfer. Tallandier, Paris 2009.
^ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. Lexicon of persons. Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 , p. 110.

personal data
SURNAME	Errera, Alberto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Greek naval officer of the Jewish faith
DATE OF BIRTH	January 15, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH	Larissa Regional Unit , Greece
DATE OF DEATH	August 1944
Place of death	Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

[1] According to information from Filip Müller , Leon Cohen, Hermann Langbein. Zalmen Gradowski: Au cœur de l'enfer. Tallandier, Paris 2009.

[2] Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. Lexicon of persons. Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 , p. 110.