MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Archivist Becky Erbelding speaks with Jerry Fowler about an important addition to the Holocaust Museum’s collection--a personal photo album with pictures chronicling the lives of SS officers and other Nazis at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The rare images capture Nazi officials relaxing and enjoying time off while Jews were being murdered at rates as fast as anytime during the Holocaust.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is Becky Erbelding. She’s a colleague who is an archivist here at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The museum just made public a new addition to its collection, a personal photo album containing 116 pictures taken between May and December 1944 that chronicle the life of SS officers and other officials at the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The album provides an important perspective on the psychology of people perpetrating genocide. Becky, welcome to the program.
BECKY ERBELDING: Thank you for having me.
JERRY FOWLER: Well as I said this is a personal photo album, and just with the basics, do we know whose album it was?
BECKY ERBELDING: We actually do. It took us a while to figure that out because he’s never named in the album, but through archival research and looking at his rank insignia and who he’s with we’ve determined that his name was Karl Hoecker. He was an obersturmfuehrer, which is the equivalent of a first-lieutenant. He was 32 at the time of the camp and he was the adjutant to the commandant of the camp complex, whose name was Richard Baer.
JERRY FOWLER: And when you say adjutant, how high up is that in the food chain, so to speak?
BECKY ERBELDING: It’s fairly high up. And if you- if you didn’t think so just by the title or by his rank, he’s pictured in the album with commandants, with obergruppenfuehrers, who are the equivalent of four-star generals. He, in terms of power, he wielded a lot of power within the camp. He was basically a chief-of-staff.
JERRY FOWLER: And one thing that struck me about the album is the fact that this Hoecker, whose album we now think it was, is in most of the pictures. And I don’t know about you, but my photo albums maybe have a few pictures that I’m in because I’ve given the camera to someone, but it’s usually pictures of other people. How do you think this came about, that this album was put together?
BECKY ERBELDING: My theory, and it- it is just a theory, is that a lot of- well a lot of the pictures are professionally taken. Some are taken from above, some have additional lighting. I think he befriended one of the professional photographers, and there were two professional photographers at the camp. And I think that he kind of collected these pictures. At the same time, though, there are some of Hoecker while on vacation at the SS retreat facility with women, with colleagues. There are a lot of pictures of this retreat facility and those wouldn’t have been necessarily done by a professional or be part of their daily job. So I think he may have befriended somebody or just had a friend who was an extraordinarily good photographer.
JERRY FOWLER: And the pictures were taken between May and December 1944. I guess one little question is, was that easy . . . was that pretty evident? Or did it take some work to place them in time?
BECKY ERBELDING: It was actually pretty evident, because Hoecker arrived at the camp on May 25th, 1944, and the final photographs are taken of a – the final chronological photographs – are taken of a burial of . . . the actual caption on the photograph is “The Burial of our SS Comrades after a Terror Attack.” And this was the accidental American bombing of the camp in December of, late December of 1944. So those photographs could only have been taken in the final days of December and the early days of January since the camp was evacuated January 18th.
JERRY FOWLER: And so that anticipates my next question. Before we get into some of what these pictures actually show, what was happening in Auschwitz itself and in the war in general in that time period, May to December 1944?
BECKY ERBELDING: Well it’s very interesting. There are two photographs that are dated, within the album. The first is on the first page, which was the date that Hoecker was promoted to his rank of obersturmfuehrer. That is dated as June 21st, 1944. That was actually one of the facts that we used in establishing that it was Hoecker’s album, was that he was promoted on that day. And we know that in the Spring of 1944, coinciding with the photographs in this album, was the deportation and arrival of the Hungarian Jews in the camp. Between mid-April and the end of July of 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to the camp. The vast majority of them were killed upon arrival. And so, the thing that makes this album especially interesting is that you can literally see these are the people perpetrating that crime. These are the people at the camp at that time overseeing the Hungarian arrivals. Rudolf Hoess is the album and he had been the former commandant of the camp. He was brought back specifically to oversee the Hungarians. That is the entire reason that he’s there, in those pictures, at that time, was because there were so many people coming in that they needed someone who was really good at, well, killing a lot of people really fast.
JERRY FOWLER: And another person who is in many of the photographs is the notorious Josef Mengele.
BECKY ERBELDING: Yes.
JERRY FOWLER: So that brings me to what I think is probably to me the most intriguing aspect of the whole thing is that, at the time these pictures are taken, the killing machine is working literally overtime, I imagine. And all of these pictures are of people relaxing, of people eating blueberries or going on a hunting trip. If you didn’t know the context, you would not even know a war was on, much less a genocide.
BECKY ERBELDING: Exactly. And that was one of the reasons – the album came to us in January -- and that was one of the reasons that we haven’t made it public before now is we wanted to really do our research in making sure that we knew exactly where these photographs were taken, exactly when they were taken, as best we could, who was in them and what they were doing, because context is everything with this album. You could look at it and use it as a way of saying, well it couldn’t have been that bad if they’re having the time to enjoy themselves. But because we know what we know about why these people are here, what they’re doing, who they are, we can establish that it’s actually even more frightening that they’re taking the time to relax when all of this is going on, that they have created this world for themselves where this is their job and they can leave their job, actually mentally leave their jobs to go play with their dogs.
JERRY FOWLER: And what does that say to you about the nature of the people who were committing this mass murder?
BECKY ERBELDING: To me it reminds us, and I think we need the reminder, that Nazis weren’t red-eyed, pointy toothed, evil monsters, that they were people like you and I and that their society had gotten to a point where this was morally acceptable behavior. And that’s a very scary concept. It’s so easy and tempting to just say black/white, evil and good, Nazis were evil entirely, and not think about what that means, think about how they got there, the fact that they had dogs and children and pets and took vacations. It makes them human and I think that raises very important questions about humanity.
JERRY FOWLER: And the capacity of humanity to perpetrate these crimes on a huge scale.
BECKY ERBELDING: Right. And the fear that, the realization that it really could happen again.
JERRY FOWLER: A number of the pictures show Hoecker and other officers interacting with female SS personnel, called Helferinnen. Were these females brought in for recreation or were they part of the camp staff?
BECKY ERBELDING: They’re actually part of the camp staff. Most of them were in their late teens and early twenties. They had been fully indoctrinated with Nazi ideology. Many of them had been raised in Nazi school systems and they applied to come to the camp to be part of the telecommunications staff. They worked the telephones and the telegraphs between Auschwitz and other camps and Auschwitz and Berlin.
JERRY FOWLER: And a striking thing to me was that there’s a retreat house that some of the pictures are taken at, and this was also where they’re eating blueberries and everything. Where was this in relationship to Auschwitz? Had they traveled far away to get there?
BECKY ERBELDING: It was only about 30 kilometers south of the camp, in the mountains. It was actually considered part of the Auschwitz complex. So when you see them they’re actually on Auschwitz territory.
JERRY FOWLER: And the complex was quite huge, as I understand it.
BECKY ERBELDING: Yes. It didn’t extend that far so it was considered a sub-camp, specifically designed for SS relaxation and retreat. There’s documentary evidence that SS officers or military men who did their duty very well – there’s one case where two officers stopped an escape by shooting the prisoner; they were rewarded with eight days at the SS recreation facility at Solahutte for performing their duties exceptionally well.
JERRY FOWLER: And what would people do there, besides eat blueberries, which is in some of the photographs?
BECKY ERBELDING: There’s tanning or there’re beds where you can sit on the deck and relax; there were little vacation things. In some of the pictures, children were there, so obviously their families could join them. It was in the mountains. Many of the officers liked to hunt. There are a number of hunting pictures in the album, so I imagine that they would go hunting.
JERRY FOWLER: One thing that you mentioned earlier is that there were a couple of professional photographers at Auschwitz, but my understanding was that there actually aren’t very many pictures of Auschwitz.
BECKY ERBELDING: No, before this album we knew of about 320 photographs of wartime Auschwitz. This is not including all of the prisoner photographs, the prisoner identification photographs, which these two photographers would have been responsible for.
JERRY FOWLER: So their job was, when people came in . . .
BECKY ERBELDING: Photograph them front and then side profiles.
JERRY FOWLER: And we should clarify, Auschwitz had a killing center where many people were selected right off the train and gassed. But then it also had a labor camp where people were sent to labor, often, and killed through labor. But those would be the people who were photographed.
BECKY ERBELDING: There are actually three main Auschwitz complexes. There’s Auschwitz One, which was forced labor, a large number of barracks for forced labor; Auschwitz Two is Birkenau, which is where the gas chambers and the crematoriums were located; and Auschwitz Three were factories who were owned by companies that used the forced labor. But it was all one big complex and then a number of sub-camps, including Solahuette, frankly, and including a coal mine and a number of other places. But these photographers operated photographing the people who were selected to work. But they’re are also, we think, responsible for the largest other set of photographs, which is called the Auschwitz Album, and these are photographs taken in late May of 1944 of one specific transport of Hungarian Jews. They photographed the entire process of the arrival at the camp, getting off the train, being selected, going into either forced labor or going to the gas chambers. There’s about 190 pictures of those. So that’s included in the 320 known photographs. So now we have what? 430, 440 photographs of wartime Auschwitz-- still not many but this new album adds 116 new ones that we didn’t know about.
JERRY FOWLER: And the Auschwitz Album that you were talking about of the Hungarian prisoners arriving and then going to the gas chambers-- so you said that it’s believed that those photographs were also taken by these professional photographers.
BECKY ERBELDING: Right. And we think that they were taken by professionals for the same reason that we think Hoecker’s album, many of those photographs were taken by professionals. They’re exceptionally clear. Some of the photographs are taken from the tops of the trains. So it was clear that this was not clandestine photography. This was open photography. Many of the victims are looking at the camera. Guards are looking at the camera, they know that this is being filmed and they’re accepting of this.
JERRY FOWLER: And how did those earlier photographs come to light, or the earlier discovered photographs?
BECKY ERBELDING: It’s actually a pretty amazing story. That album was found immediately after the war in the Dora-Mittelbau Concentration Camp by a survivor of the same transport. She was recovering from – I’m not sure which disease, I think typhus. She was recovering from typhus after being liberated and she was looking for a blanket, and she opened a dresser drawer and there was this photograph album. She immediately recognized her rabbi and her two brothers. She is also photographed in the album. And so she was able to identify the vast majority of people who were in the album. But it was quite a coincidence that she was the one who found it, about 500 miles away.
JERRY FOWLER: And similar to this Hoecker album, it had been organized, someone had taken the trouble to sort through pictures and to . . .
BECKY ERBELDING: . . . paste them in the album.
JERRY FOWLER: Paste in the paper.
BECKY ERBELDING: Write captions. It was a very organized effort.
JERRY FOWLER: So as big as Auschwitz was, as many people were involved, do you think that it’s possible that there are other albums that are out there that were put together for similar reasons as these two?
BECKY ERBELDING: I hope so. There’s still a lot that we don’t know, and I hope that other photograph albums or other documentary evidence will come to light that will explain some of the mysteries that we have about how Auschwitz functioned. Likewise I hope collections of other camps will come to light. There are many things that we still don’t know and we’re still learning. This album reminds us of that as well, that there’s still a lot out there, even 60 years after the war. There’s a lot to learn, there’s a lot to collect and I hope that people will think about what they may have in their attic that may be useful for a museum.
JERRY FOWLER: I guess that raises the question, how did this album come into the museum’s possession?
BECKY ERBELDING: I actually got a letter in December of 2006. It floated around the museum a bit because it wasn’t addressed to anyone specifically and landed on my desk. And it said, “I have World War II-era photographs of wartime Auschwitz.” And I was – I’ll be honest – I was pretty skeptical because we have a lot of people who see a concentration camp photograph and believe it to be Auschwitz, because that’s the name that they associate with any sort of concentration camp. So I was kind of skeptical when he said that, but I asked for more information. And in January he sent me the photograph album itself in bubble wrap. And I remember opening it and seeing, on the first page, Auschwitz, 21 June 1944. And I thought, “okay, he’s right.” And then I think the third time flipping through the album, we were able to identify Josef Mengele. Then we knew we really had something; because I had done some undergraduate work on Josef Mengele and I knew that there no photographs of him in the camp. And so since Solahuette is . . .
JERRY FOWLER: Before this there were no photographs of Mengele?
BECKY ERBELDING: Before this there were no photographs of Mengele . . .
JERRY FOWLER: In Auschwitz?
BECKY ERBELDING: . . . in Auschwitz. There’re photographs before and after and photographs taken while on leave. These are the only photographs that we know of where he is on camp property. Not only is he on camp property, he’s in uniform, you can see his medical insignia, and he’s standing next to – in one picture he’s standing with Baer on one side, the current commandant, and with Hoess, the former commandant, on the other. Very clear photographs; it’s unmistakably him.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me ask you this, Becky. As an archivist you deal with these historical materials, and as an archivist at the Holocaust Museum you’re dealing with artifacts and photographs that deal with this horrible crime. How difficult is that, day in and day out, to – or is it difficult?
BECKY ERBELDING: It can be very difficult. There are certainly things that still affect me. At the same time, though, I find that it’s given me a really great perspective on my own life. It’s hard to be upset or angry about anything that happens to me because my family is healthy, I know where they are, I have contact with them. There are people who love me and – and I’m safe. So it makes my problems seem much easier, and it’s an honor and a privilege to meet the people that I get to meet and tell the stories that I get to tell. And I love my job, I have a great job.
JERRY FOWLER: What happened to Hoecker?
BECKY ERBELDING: This is the part of the story that nobody’s going to like. Hoecker, after the evacuation of Auschwitz, Hoecker actually went to Dora-Mittelbau, the same place where the other Auschwitz album was later found. He and Baer . . .
JERRY FOWLER: Do you think it could have been his album?
BECKY ERBELDING: It think it – it would be hard for it to be his album. There are theories that it could’ve been Richard Baer’s album. He had also just arrived at the camp and so it’s conceivable that this album was created as a way of showing him how the selection process works and how everything works. This is mere speculation and it’s entirely speculation based on the fact of what we know about Baer and Hoecker and what happened to them after the war. In any case, it could have been. I don’t know that we’ll ever know. Hoecker and Baer went to Dora-Mittelbau. When that camp was about to be liberated, Hoecker escaped east and was captured by the British near Hamburg, as part of a military unit. He was put in a POW camp. The Allies knew to look for a man named Karl Hoecker but for some reason they never found him. I don’t know if he was using a false name or they just were looking for bigger people than Karl Hoecker. But he was released at the end of 1946, and he went back to his hometown of Engershausen, took up his job, his pre-war job as a bank official, and worked there until the 1960s. In the wake of the Eichmann trial, Germany decided to go back and think about war criminals that may have slipped through their fingers and they had the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which tried a lot of the Auschwitz personnel who had not previously been tried, including Karl Hoecker.
JERRY FOWLER: This was in 1963.
BECKY ERBELDING: ’63, right. The trial lasted for two years and Hoecker was given seven years, because they could never prove that he had been on the ramp. There were – countless people testified that he must have been, he had to have been, but no one had actually seen him on the ramp participating in a selection. So he only got seven years; it was one of the lightest sentences of the trial. He was released in 1970 and he went back to being a bank official. He died just in 2000, he was 88.
JERRY FOWLER: You said that it couldn’t be proved that he was on the ramp. But what does that mean? He was the number two person or he was the Chief-of-Staff for the camp, and it must’ve been known and he must have been able to be culpable for what was going on. There were a million people gassed here or more.
BECKY ERBELDING: Right. He argued throughout his trial that he had been a pencil pusher, just a desktop functionary, spent all of his time in Auschwitz One, which was the forced labor camp. He said that he had never been to Birkenau – which we have photographs of him now in Birkenau. So we know that he was lying. He really argued that he knew nothing. He actually said in his trial that before Auschwitz he didn’t know about the gas chambers, which had to have been patently false because before his time in Auschwitz he had been the adjutant to the commandant of Majdanek, which was another killing center. Some, during the trial, speculated that he was brought to Auschwitz because Richard Baer had never worked in a concentration camp before, and they felt as though Karl Hoecker maybe was the expert and was brought to kind of show the commandant how these things are run, how a death camp should be operating.
JERRY FOWLER: Do you think that if these pictures had been available in 1963, it might have changed the outcome of the trial?
BECKY ERBELDING: Well, there still aren’t photographs of him on the ramp. At the same time, there are photographs with him with Mengele, with Josef Kramer, who was the commandant of Birkenau at the time, with Rudolf Hoess, with Richard Baer. I mean, it would’ve been harder for him to argue that he knew nothing, I think, if these photographs had surfaced.
JERRY FOWLER: Becky Erbelding is an archivist at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Becky, thanks for being with us.
BECKY ERBELDING: Thank you.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
