Auschwitz – a photographic record of monsters at play

This week in the New Yorker magazine on-line section is a slide show related to an article in the magazine which is not on-line unfortunately.

This week in the magazine, Alec Wilkinson writes about a rare album of photographs from the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, in southern Poland. The album, which was delivered to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007, belonged to Karl Hoecker, adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz from May, 1944, to January, 1945. Wilkinson writes:“If the album consisted only of photographs of people who hadn’t been seen at Auschwitz, and of areas of Auschwitz that hadn’t been portrayed, or if it merely expanded the photographic record of Auschwitz, it would be valuable historically…but it has an enhanced value….In the fifty-four days between May 15 and July 8, 1944, a period partly covered in the Hoecker album, and called the Hungarian Deportation, four hundred and thirty-four thousand people were put aboard trains to Auschwitz—so many people that the crematoriums, which could dispose of a hundred and thirty-two thousand bodies a month, were overrun.”

What struck me was the fact that these people engaged in outrageous acts of barbarism, are photographed as leading a somewhat bucolic existence. It is the contrast of this with the reality of what they were doing that makes the whole thing so revealing of them and demonstrates the extent of man’s inhumanity to man.

Here is the link to the slideshow. It is worth clicking through to the Holocaust Museum site linked above, where the full album is displayed along with pictures in an album found by a camp inmate.