The Auschwitz Album, Nazi Photographic Record, Summer 1944

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(10 mins). The Auschwitz Album is a unique photographic record of the Holocaust during the Second World War. Along with the Sonderkommando photographs, it is the only known surviving pictorial evidence of the extermination process inside Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the German extermination camp in occupied Poland.

The identity of the photographer has never been determined. They may have been taken by either Ernst Hoffmann or Bernhard Walter, two SS men responsible for fingerprinting and taking photo IDs of those prisoners who were not selected for extermination. The album has 56 pages and 193 photographs. Originally, it had more photos, but before being donated to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel, some of them were given to survivors who recognized relatives and friends.

The images follow the processing of newly arrived Hungarian Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia in the early summer of 1944. They document the disembarkation of the Jewish prisoners from the train boxcars, followed by the selection process, performed by doctors of the SS and wardens of the camp, which 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, where they were made to wait before being killed. The photographer also documented the workings of an area called Canada, where the looted belongings of the prisoners were sorted before transport to Germany.

The album's survival is remarkable, given the strenuous efforts made by the Nazis to keep the "Final Solution" a secret. Also remarkable is the story of its discovery. 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. The album's contents were first published that year in the book The Auschwitz Album, edited by Klarsfeld. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_Album

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1. Commandant of Auschwitz Rudolph Hoss, Trial & Execution 1947

Rudolph Hoess, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_H%C3%B6ss

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2. MORE: The Hoecker Album, Auschwitz through the Lens of the SS:

(8 mins). In December 2006, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and former member of the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) wrote to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives. As one of its many tasks as a military intelligence agency, the CIC conducted investigations of Nazi perpetrators for U.S. prosecutors in the Judge Advocate General's Office after World War II.
> While stationed in Germany in 1946, this officer found a photograph album in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt and took it home with him. In 2007, he donated the album to the Museum, but wanted his donation to remain anonymous.
The album contained 116 pictures taken between May and December 1944 chronicling the life of SS officers and other officials at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The rare images capture SS guards and Nazi officials relaxing and enjoying time off—hunting, singing, trimming Christmas trees, and more—all while Jews were being murdered at rates as fast as anytime during the Holocaust.

> The album was created and owned by Karl Hoecker, an adjunct to camp Kommandant Richard Baer.
*Karl-Friedrich Hoecker, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Friedrich_H%C3%B6cker

The album complements the only other known collection of photographs taken at Auschwitz, published as the "Auschwitz Album" in 1980. Those images specifically depict the arrival of Hungarian Jews at the camp in late May 1944, and the selection process that the SS imposed on them. Some of the images contained in the new album were taken just days later. In contrast to documenting mass murder, they focus on the daily lives and recreational pursuits of Nazi officials, and no prisoner appears in any of the images.
Remarkably, many of the album's pictures were taken when the camp's gas chambers and crematoria were operating at and above capacity as Hungarian Jews were arriving and being murdered.



Karl Hoecker, Right.

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3. Empty Zyklon B Canisters Found By The Allies At Auschwitz-Birkenau 1945 (2)

Wiki. Zyklon B was the trade name of a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the early 1920s. It consisted of hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid), as well as a cautionary eye irritant and one of several adsorbents such as diatomaceous earth. The product is infamous for its use by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust to murder approximately one million people in gas chambers installed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and other extermination camps.

Hydrogen cyanide, a poisonous gas that interferes with cellular respiration, was first used as a pesticide in California in the 1880s. Research at Degesch of Germany led to the development of Zyklon (later known as Zyklon A), a pesticide which released hydrogen cyanide upon exposure to water and heat. It was banned after a similar product was used by Germany as a chemical weapon in World War I..The new product was also named Zyklon, but it became known as Zyklon B to distinguish it from the earlier version. Uses included delousing clothing and fumigating ships, warehouses, and trains.

>In early 1942, Zyklon B emerged as the preferred killing tool of Nazi Germany for use in extermination camps during the Holocaust. Around a million people were killed using this method, mostly at Auschwitz. Tesch was executed in 1946 for knowingly selling the product to the SS for use on humans. Hydrogen cyanide is now rarely used as a pesticide, but still has industrial applications. Firms in several countries continue to produce Zyklon B under alternative brand names, including Detia-Degesch, the successor to Degesch, who renamed the product Cyanosil in 1974. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyklon_B