National Geographic is presenting a no miss documentary this weekend that reveals a rare photo album discovered, the personal property of Nazi SS officer Karl Höcker. The photos are an innocuous flip side to Karl's days work spent selecting, culling and killing European Jews at Auschwitz.
A nazi flag EPA/LISE AASERUD
“It shows the killers as humans…this scrapbook forces us to look at the killers in a way that I think pushes our comfort level where we don’t want it to go.” says Sara J. Bloomfield, Director, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on camera.
"Nazi Scrapbooks from Hell" Premieres on Sunday, April 27, 2008 at 9 p.m. ET/PT
The death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and especially the year of 1944 is considered the epicenter for the mass killings during the Holocaust, a single camp of several where the Nazis and their collaborators murdered more than one million people.
Six such death camps existed: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Large-scale murder was conducted by poisonous gas and then body disposal through cremation was conducted systematically by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler's SS men.
Victims were deported to these centers from Western Europe and from the ghettos in Eastern Europe which the Nazis had established.
Millions died in the ghettos and concentration camps as a result of forced labor, starvation, exposure, brutality, disease, and execution.
The new documentary also reveals authenticated rare photos of Dr. Josef Mengele, The Angel Of Death, who possessed both a PhD and an MD. Mengele is photographed smiling at Auschwitz where he put his education to use by torturing men, women and children in medical experiments of unspeakable horror during the Holocaust.
It is historical fact that Mengele had put his victims into pressure chambers, administered various drugs, castrated them or froze his test subjects to death. Children were exposed to experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia.
This new documentary shows what life was like after the day's work was over, a calm and happy world revealed in one-of-a-kind photos from a newly discovered album.
Karl Höcker
Blueberry picking and sing alongs, cocktail parties and dinners with wine and beer. This album is nothing short of a scrapbook from hell.
Woven together with harrowing testimonials from survivors and scholars, archival audio, video footage and haunting trial statements by an SS officer, the special brings to life these fascinating and disturbing photographs of Auschwitz and challenges viewers to contemplate the individual’s capacity for evil.
This album was presented to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in January 2007 by an anonymous donor, the album was originally compiled by Karl Höcker, an SS officer who served as the assistant to the commandant of the Auschwitz complex during some of the most murderous months of the camp's existence.
He took photos of the most senior SS officers laughing, frolicking, drinking and engaging in recreational activities – as if Auschwitz were an enjoyable place to live.
Höcker also appears in many photos in the album, but is rarely referenced in historical records, as he was acquitted of involvement in genocide – a controversy that may now be given new perspective.
Michael Berenbaum, director of Ziering Holocaust Institute in Bel Air, California, describes the ironic nature of the album: “Here what you see is, you see the faces of killers who were trying to unwind. ‘Boy we had a tough day at the office. It was hard out there.’ And these were men who…took a professional pride in what they were doing.
That doesn’t make it right. It was awful. It was evil. It was horrendous. It was terrible. But it was significant.”
The Nazi scrapbook is shown alongside the “Auschwitz Album,” found after liberation by Holocaust survivor Lilly Jacob, that provides the only known surviving visual evidence of the selection process at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Both albums were compiled and photographed at virtually the same period in time; two vastly different perspectives of the human tragedy.
Karl Höcker arrived at the camp only one day before Lilly Jacob and may appear in one of the photos selecting prisoners for the gas chamber. The contemporaneous albums sharply juxtapose the horrific fate awaiting those innocent prisoners with that of the privileged life led by those overseeing genocide.
In postwar trials, Höcker denied his involvement in the selection process. While accounts from survivors and other SS officers all but placed him there, no conclusive evidence could be located proving the claim, thus sparing him from a likely death sentence.
Using images of Höcker from the newly discovered album, the special follows forensic experts applying state-of-the-art photo analysis as they attempt to verify Höcker’s identity in the images from the “Auschwitz Album.”
This album reveals a world where mass murder is reduced to the mundane. The archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum are now home to the 116 photographs of the Höcker album.
To view the album online, visit here .
mikeApr 28th, 2008 - 22:35:10
It was a very moving documentary, very well researched. However there was a very large lapse in reviewing some very obvious evidence in the comparison of the photo suspected to be Hoecker on the ramp.
Why was no mentioned made that the soldier on the ramp with his back to the camera is clearly wearing the collar tress and shoulder insignis of a SS NCO? a much lower rank and one Hoecker never held.
It seeems thay would have refered such photos to true experts on the subject.
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