The Höcker Album (or Hoecker Album) is a collection of photographs believed to have been collected by
Karl-Friedrich Höcker
Karl-Friedrich Höcker (11 December 1911 – 30 January 2000) was a Nazi war criminal, German commander in the SS and the adjutant to Richard Baer, who was a commandant of Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to December 1944. In 2006 ...
, an officer in the
SS during the
Nazi regime in
Germany. It contains over one hundred images of the lives and living conditions of the officers and administrators who ran the
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
concentration camp complex. The album is unique and an indispensable document of
the Holocaust; it is now in the archives of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in
Washington, D.C.
Discovery
According to the museum, the photograph album was found by an unnamed
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
counterintelligence officer who was
billeted in
Frankfurt after Germany's surrender in 1945. This officer discovered the photo album in an apartment there, and when he returned to the United States, he took the album with him.
In January 2007, the American officer donated the album to the
USHMM, with the request that his identity not be disclosed. The captions of the photographs, and the people featured in the images, quickly confirmed that it depicts life in and around the Auschwitz camps. The very first photograph is a double portrait of
Richard Baer
Richard Baer (9 September 1911 – 17 June 1963) was a German SS officer who, among other assignments, was the commandant of Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to January 1945, and right after, from February to April 1945, commanda ...
,
Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
camp commandant between 1944 and 1945, and Baer's adjutant,
Karl Höcker.
Contents
The album contains 116 photographs, all in
black and white
Black-and-white (B&W or B/W) images combine black and white in a continuous spectrum, producing a range of shades of grey.
Media
The history of various visual media began with black and white, and as technology improved, altered to color. ...
, almost all of them featuring German officers. It is believed to have been the property of Höcker because he appears in far more of the images than any other individual. On the title page underneath a picture of Höcker and Baer it is written "With the Commandant SS Stubaf. Baer, Auschwitz 21.6.44", identifying Höcker as the owner of the album. He is also the only person in the album to appear alone in any of the images.
[Wilkinson, page 51]
Some of the images depict formal events, like military funerals and the dedication of a new hospital. They also include images of the camp officers relaxing at a staff retreat known as the ''
Solahütte,'' a rustic lodge only around 20 miles away from the camp complex. These images are regarded as the most striking, because they show cheerful staff officers singing, drinking and eating while, in the camp itself, tremendous suffering is taking place.
A number of the photographs show officers relaxing in the company of young women—stenographers and typists, trained at the SS school in
Obernai, who were known generally as ''
SS Helferinnen'', the German word for (female) "helpers".
Mengele photographs
Both of the camp's most well-known commanders,
Richard Baer
Richard Baer (9 September 1911 – 17 June 1963) was a German SS officer who, among other assignments, was the commandant of Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to January 1945, and right after, from February to April 1945, commanda ...
and
Rudolf Höss, are visible in the photographs.
Josef Mengele, known to camp prisoners as the "Angel of Death", was a trained physician, who directed medical experiments on twin children in the camp. He regularly took part in the "selection" on the train arrival platform, judging which prisoners would be immediately executed and which would be permitted to live and perform slave labor.
In all, the album contains eight photographs in which Mengele appears. Before the donation of the album to the museum, no images were known to exist showing him within the camp grounds.
The photographs of Mengele were all taken at the SS resort close to Auschwitz called the
Solahütte. These photographs appear to have been taken on July 29th 1944 to honour the end of
Rudolf Höss's tenure as garrison senior. Other officers depicted at these celebrations alongside Mengele and Höss include
Josef Kramer,
Franz Hoessler Franz may refer to:
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* Franz (given name)
* Franz (surname)
Places
* Franz (crater), a lunar crater
* Franz, Ontario, a railway junction and unorganized town in Canada
* Franz Lake, in the state of Washington, United States – see Fran ...
,
Walter Schmidetzki
Walter may refer to:
People
* Walter (name), both a surname and a given name
* Little Walter, American blues harmonica player Marion Walter Jacobs (1930–1968)
* Gunther (wrestler), Austrian professional wrestler and trainer Walter Hahn (born 1 ...
,
Anton Thumann,
Otto Moll and
Max Sell.
Timing of photographs
The photographs in the Höcker Album are viewed as especially chilling because of the time during which they were made, between June and December 1944.
It has been noted by archivists and historians that this period overlaps with the mass extermination of hundreds of thousands of
Hungarian Jews in the spring and summer of 1944—an event known as "the
Hungarian Transport". These Jews were gathered and shipped to Auschwitz after the March 1944 invasion of Hungary by the Nazis. So many Hungarian Jews were killed in the Auschwitz camps during that period that the crematoria were incapable of consuming all the bodies, so open pits were dug for that purpose.
According to Rebecca Erbelding, the museum archivist who received the album from its donor and first recognized its significance, "the album reminds us that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were human beings, men and women with families, children and pets, who celebrated holidays and took vacations... These people were human beings... and these photographs remind us what human beings are capable of when they succumb to anti-Semitism, racism and hatred."
[
]
Höcker's case
Höcker married before the war and had a son and daughter during the war, with whom he was reunited after his release from 18 months in a British POW camp in 1946. Early in the 1960s he was apprehended by West German authorities in his hometown, where he was a bank official. It is not known why the bank rehired and promoted him after a long absence during which he had nothing to do with banking.
At his trial in Frankfurt, part of the noted Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, Höcker denied having participated in the selection of victims at Birkenau
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
or having ever personally executed a prisoner. He further denied any knowledge of the fate of the approximately 400,000 Hungarian Jews
The history of the Jews in Hungary dates back to at least the Kingdom of Hungary, with some records even predating the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin in 895 CE by over 600 years. Written sources prove that Jewish communities lived i ...
who were murdered at Auschwitz during his term of service at the camp. Höcker was shown to have knowledge of the genocidal activities at the camp, but could not be proved to have played a direct part in them. In postwar trials, Höcker denied his involvement in the selection process. While accounts from survivors and other SS officers all but placed him there, prosecutors could locate no conclusive evidence to prove the claim.
In August 1965 Höcker was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for aiding and abetting in over 1,000 murders at Auschwitz. He was released in 1970 and was able to return to his bank post as a chief cashier, where he worked until his retirement.
On 3 May 1989 a district court in the German city of Bielefeld sentenced Höcker to four years' imprisonment for his involvement in gassing to death prisoners, primarily Polish Jews, in the Majdanek concentration camp
Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, a ...
in Poland. Camp records showed that between May 1943 and May 1944 Höcker had acquired at least of Zyklon B poisonous gas for use in Majdanek from the Hamburg firm of Tesch & Stabenow.Justiz und NS-Verbrechen
See also
*
Auschwitz Album
The Auschwitz Album is a photographic record of the Holocaust during the Second World War. It and the ''Sonderkommando'' photographs are the only known pictorial evidence of the extermination process inside Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the German ext ...
*
Sonderkommando photographs
The ''Sonderkommando'' photographs are four blurred photographs taken secretly in August 1944 inside the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. Along with a few photographs in the Auschwitz Album, they are the only ones known ...
*
Solahütte
*
Wilhelm Brasse
Wilhelm Brasse (3 December 1917 – 23 October 2012) was a Polish professional photographer and a prisoner in Auschwitz during World War II. He became known as the "famous photographer of Auschwitz concentration camp." His life and work we ...
References
External links
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum online gallery of Höcker Album photosfrom Holocaust Survivors and Remembrance Project: "Forget You Not"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hocker Album
Auschwitz concentration camp
Photographic collections and books
Holocaust historical documents
Holocaust photographs
1944 photographs
de:Auschwitz-Album#Auschwitz-Album_des_United_States_Holocaust_Memorial_Museum