Wilhelm Brasse

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Wilhelm Brasse (born December 3, 1917 in Saybusch (Żywiec), Austria-Hungary ; † October 23, 2012 there ) was a Polish photographer and survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp (part of the Auschwitz I camp, the main camp) . As a prisoner, he was forced by the SS to work as a camp photographer for four years. At the end of his detention he managed to save most of the negatives he had made from the intended destruction. They document many victims of the persecution of the Jews (Shoah) . In the last years of his life he acted as a contemporary witness of the Nazi crimes .

Life

Brasse was born in 1917 as the son of an Austrian and a Polish woman in Saybusch (today Żywiec), Galicia . After the First World War , his hometown became part of the now again independent Poland. As a teenager he began an apprenticeship as a photographer in Katowice . At the time of the German invasion of Poland in 1939 , he was a Polish soldier. In 1940, while trying to make his way across the border to Hungary - in his own words as a contemporary witness - he was initially captured by Hungarian border guards, passed on to alleged Ukrainian police officers and imprisoned by Germans for several weeks. These gave him the choice of either joining the armed forces or going into captivity. Brasse opted for the latter and was taken to Auschwitz on August 31, 1940, which at that time was still a camp for Polish prisoners, and was given camp number 3,444.

One of the surviving photos by Wilhelm Brasse; it shows 14-year-old Czesława Kwoka , who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943

After two weeks of quarantine and months of forced labor, he was employed by the Gestapo as a photographer for the identification service due to his photographic skills and his knowledge of German . His main task there was to take pictures of the arriving prisoners for the camp index. In total, he photographed 40,000 to 50,000 people. In 1942 the first Jewish prisoners arrived in Auschwitz, and doctors like Josef Mengele began their inhuman experiments; he also had to photograph their victims. In July 1943, were fingerprinting and photographs of the prisoners on the orders of the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin in the camp largely stopped; The reason was the lack of photo material. Until January 1945 only German prisoners were photographed.

Although Brasse and the other members of the identification service were closely monitored, they managed to forge documents that helped other prisoners escape and smuggled information into the Polish underground in Krakow . Shortly before the liberation in January 1945, Brasse received an order from the head of the identification service, Bernhard Walter , to destroy all photographs in order to remove the evidence of the mass murder. As ordered, he lit the prints and negatives, which were difficult to burn, and extinguished them as soon as his superior had left the room. The negatives of 38,969 prisoner portraits remained in a cupboard in Auschwitz and thus survived the war. For this reason, most of the evidence of some of the crimes in Auschwitz has been preserved.

Brasse was deported from the concentration camp on January 21, 1945 with the last transport of prisoners. In the icy cold, the prisoners were driven in open coal wagons for four days to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Upper Austria , and later to the Melk subcamp . There, Brasse was liberated by US troops on May 6th.

After the war, Brasse initially wanted to work as a photographer again, but his time in Auschwitz had traumatized him so much that he was unable to look through a camera viewfinder again. He married and had two daughters. Until his death he lived in Żywiec, about 50 kilometers from Oświęcim .

It was only for the documentary The Portraitist by Ireneusz Dobrowolski that Brasse released his story for a television film in 2005; afterwards he worked as a witness until his death . By Erich Hackl of bream under assessment, first published in 2007 and 2014, re-released text is the photographer of Auschwitz.

literature

  • Luca Crippa, Maurizio Onnis: Wilhelm Brasse. The photographer from Auschwitz. Translated from the Italian by Bruno Genzler. Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-89667-531-6 . (With a picture of him before his capture)
  • Janina Struk: Photographing the Holocaust - Interpretations of the Evidence. Tauris Publisher, London 2004, ISBN 1-86064-546-1 .
  • Reiner Engelmann: The photographer from Auschwitz. The life of Wilhelm Brasse. cbj, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-570-15919-4 .

Movie

  • Portrecista. Ireneusz Dobrowolski (screenplay and direction). Documentation about Brasse and his recordings in the concentration camp up to 1945. 2005, DVD film, length 52 minutes. English title The Portraitist . Produced by Anna Dobrowolska for a Polish TV station. Awarded at various international festivals. As DVD, Polish, with subtitles in EN, DE, NLD, FR, HEBR, HU, IT, KOR, ESP.

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm Brasse  - Photographs by Wilhelm Brasse

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dennis Hevesi: Wilhelm Brasse Dies at 94; Documented Nazis' Victims. In: The New York Times . October 24, 2012, accessed November 1, 2012 .
  2. ^ Magdeburg Open Canal: Sponsorship of contemporary witnesses | Wilhelm Brasse. YouTube . May 11, 2015, accessed December 23, 2017.
  3. ↑ Marian Kummerow: I never took a picture again. In: New Germany . January 27, 2009.
  4. ↑ Returning to Auschwitz: Photographs from Hell. Mail Online , April 7, 2007, accessed December 29, 2014.
  5. ^ Stefanie Maeck: Holocaust. The photographer from Auschwitz. In: the mirror
  6. ↑ Kamilla Pfeffer: Photographer in Auschwitz - quarter of a second, aperture 16. On: Süddeutsche.de. May 17, 2010, accessed December 29, 2014.
  7. ↑ Ekkehard Geiger: The profession of witness. Letter to the editor. In: Badische Zeitung . 20th December 2014.
  8. ↑ In: Die Presse / Spectrum. Vienna, January 5, 2007.
  9. ↑ Erich Hackl: Three tearless stories. Diogenes, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-257-06884-9 , pp. 78–99.
  10. ^ Johanna Reinicke: Documents of Destruction. In: Badische Zeitung . December 10, 2014.
  11. ↑ At IMDB
personal data
SURNAME Brasse, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish concentration camp survivor, camp photographer from Auschwitz
DATE OF BIRTH December 3, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Saybusch
DATE OF DEATH October 23, 2012
Place of death Żywiec