20 September 2007
A photo album containing 116 photographs of senior SS officers and Nazi officials at the Auschwitz death camp has gone on display at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. The photos were taken between May and December 1944 and show the camp guards and officials relaxing at events including a Christmas gathering. Many photos were taken whilst the gas chambers and crematories were operating. "There are no photos of anything horrible. Not even a prisoner lurking in the background," Judith Cohen, the director of the museum's photographic reference collection, was quoted as saying by the AP news agency. She added: "And that's precisely what makes them so horrible."
The images were in an album that had been maintained by Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant. Höcker's personal photo album depicts a sing-a-long with an accordion player and about 70 SS men, including Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for his cruel medical experiments with camp inmates. Mengele was joined by other infamous camp leaders, including Josef Kramer and Rudolf Höß, the camp’s commander. The pictures of Mengele are the first authenticated pictures of him at Auschwitz, officials from the Holocaust Museum said. Cohen said scholars at the museum were intrigued because photos of Mengele are extremely rare.