*Originally published in 2022. Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or make a donation, to support our work.

A video of holocaust exterminators and their victims was posted on YouTube in 2008 as “The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Nazi”. The original film clip had been entitled “Happy Nazis”. This gruesome documentary disclosure portrayed off-duty Nazis while train arrivals at Auschwitz were selected to be gassed. Few subjects in dark heritage have now been as comprehensively researched as the identity of perpetrators of the holocaust. In holocaust studies, identification constitutes a systemic discipline, with its own epistemology and phenomenology converging in a whispering of sacred investigative protocol. This sets heinous holocaust actions and their actors apart from the generic field of mass violence or genocide research. Indeed thanks to Simon Wiesenthal, an industry of institutes and museums emerged to hunt Nazis. However, and despite these efforts, due to the strictness of Nazi security, images of concentration camps, and especially of the off-duty activities of camp staff, are rare.

This article will look at two fully authenticated collections, the so-called Auschwitz Album which details the reception of Hungarian Jews, and what is usually referred to as Karl Höcker's photograph album (Lustig, 2016) which pictures SS staff at leisure- like a kind of bizarre holiday album. The latter’s images were described upon discovery as “shockingly gleeful”. Indeed newspapers upon discovery quickly dubbed the video-clip, "Happy Nazis (2008.) It was clear that the secret photographs reveal how Nazi exterminators spent their free time without any sense of conscience. This latter document covers official visits and ceremonies at Auschwitz and personal photographs of Auschwitz camp staff parties.  There is now, we are assured, no danger of a “Hitler’s War Diaries” fiasco as forensic photographers have completed their verification. The Auschwitz Album is the only surviving visual evidence of the process leading to the mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Taken with Höcker's photos we have a unique convergence of mass murder and Nazi off-duty celebration. We have the mass gassing, and then the SS party-time in two albums.

The Auschwitz Album is indeed a rare photographic record of the Holocaust. The Sonderkommando photographs are the only discovered pictorial evidence of extermination at Auschwitz II-Birkenau in Poland.  Taken by photographers from the camp's Erkennungsdienst ("identification service") their identity is not verified but believed to be Bernhard Walter or Ernst Hoffmann, respectively SS director and deputy director of the Erkennungsdienst. This unit fingerprinted and photo ID’s viable” surviving prisoners (those who had not been selected for extermination). Those who were destined for the gas chambers were largely undocumented and rounded up unceremoniously like cattle.

The album possesses a total of 56 pages and  some 193 photographs (Hellman, 1981.) Originally, the collection was perhaps 25% larger, but prior to depositing at Yad Vashem, some pictures were donated to identifiable families. Not all of those have been returned to Yad Vashem.  The pictures document the processing of Hungarian Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia in the summer of 1944 from their train boxcars to the selection process under SS medical supervision. This separated those who were considered fit for work from those who were to be sent to the gas chambers. The photographer followed groups of those selected for work, and those selected for death to a birch grove just outside the crematoria. The photographer also documented the workings of the Kanada storage facilities, where the looted belongings of the prisoners were sorted before transport to Germany. These images graphically visualize a factory production line. Indeed, processed animals at a slaughter-house might be treated with greater dignity

The Auschwitz album's survival is remarkable, given the efforts made by the Nazis to keep the "Final Solution" a secret. Equally noteworthy is the story of its discovery. Lili Jacob (later Lili Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier) was selected for work at Auschwitz-Birkenau, while the other members of her family were sent to the gas chambers. The Auschwitz camp was evacuated by the Nazis as the Soviet army approached. Jacob passed through various camps before Dora concentration camp, where she was eventually liberated. Recovering from illness in a vacated barracks of the SS, Jacob found the album. Inside, astonishingly, she found pictures of herself, her relatives, and others from her community. The coincidence was astounding, as Nordhausen-Dora camp was 400 miles away, and that over 1,100,000 people were killed at Auschwitz. The album's existence had been known publicly since at least the 1960s, when it was used as evidence at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials. Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld visited Lili in 1980 and convinced her to donate the album to Yad Vashem, and agreed an edited collection. This was re-published by Peter Hellman (Gilbert, 1981.)

As for the Höcker Album featuring ceremonies at Auschwitz, incorporating four Sonderkommando photographs at Auschwitz (1944; probably taken by Alberto Errera) and Wilhelm Brasse, prisoner photographers at Auschwitz. The album also shows that in the final months of the war — after the Soviets liberated concentration camps in the east – SS officers at Auschwitz continued to revel in their social functions. Photographs include Karl Höcker playing with his pet German Shepherd, lighting up a Christmas tree, and joking with other Nazi officials. There are also photographs of the SS officers wining and dining nearby Auschwitz. Other photos show the Nazi officers enjoying a relaxing time sunbathing and eating blueberries at Solahütte (or Solahuette), a famous Nazi holiday camp that was located less than 20 miles from Auschwitz. These images offer an unfathomable contrast to the horrors that happened during the Holocaust and serve as a sobering reminder that “merely possessing an appetite for life and its simple pleasures is no guarantee that a person will not just as eagerly take life and forever deny those same pleasures to others”.

The Auschwitz Album provides unique visual evidence of the largest extermination centre created by the Nazis, the symbol of the Holocaust and of mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This transport of Hungarian Jews from the area of Carpathian Ruthenia arrived at the ramp of the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944. In the photos we see the men, women and children step out of the overcrowded train visibly traumatised. They have no clue that they have just been delivered to a death factory and that few of them will survive. Survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel described his delivery as a teenager at Auschwitz:

Hand in hand we followed the crowed as tannoy speakers instructed us, Men to the left, women to the........

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