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1) In June of 1945, after the war with Germany had ended, an American Army officer in Frankfurt moved into an abandoned apartment and did what he could to make it livable. Opening a closet door, he discovered an album of photographs. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/collections-highlight-auschwitz-through-the-lens-of-the-ss?series=18613 …pic.twitter.com/NVM1aGtzHD
2) It had thirty-one pages, and 116 black-and-white images, the bulk of them a little smaller than a playing card, nearly all of them portraying German officers—at a picnic, at shooting practice, at a resort among fir trees and hills...pic.twitter.com/WdwrWPiQ4G
3) ... at the dedication of a hospital, dressed as miners and visiting a coal mine, at a dinner at a long table with a white tablecloth and wine bottles and waiters, lighting candles on a Christmas tree, at a funeral in the snow where the coffins are draped with Nazi flags.pic.twitter.com/jytKyoy4yz
4) Eventually, the American officer returned to the United States. He took a job with the government, in Washington, D.C., and he and his wife lived in Virginia. They had no children, and she passed away.pic.twitter.com/3FJotv5fCV
5) In December of 2006, the officer, wrote a letter with the help of a friend from his church, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, DC. He offered the museum an opportunity to look at the album.pic.twitter.com/ENHogggaqL
6) According to what he could read of the captions and see of the photos, he wrote, the images appeared to depict “activities in and around Auschwitz, Poland.”pic.twitter.com/n5PY14ekrx
7) The album had no cover. The leaves, held together by three brass split pins, had been speckled and spotted by water and bugs. A few of the images had stains on them, too—the officer had kept the album in his basement.pic.twitter.com/jQgjLhsuot
8) After sixty years, the photographs remained fixed to the page so effectively that it wasn’t possible to remove them.pic.twitter.com/W05XTlvUgx
9) Pasted to the first page is a studio portrait of two officers. The caption reads, in translation, “With the Commandant S.S. Stubaf. Baer, Auschwitz 21.6.1944.” Stubaf. stands for Sturmbannführer, a rank equivalent to major. The second man was not identified.pic.twitter.com/dCeethXOrI
10) Baer’s first name was Richard. He was thirty-two in the photograph, and he was the commandant of Auschwitz from May, 1944, to January, 1945.pic.twitter.com/kab8YWRu6E
11) The photographs are so small that it is difficult to make out the faces in them, especially those of people who are not in the foreground.pic.twitter.com/VyNg1MsJeA
12) Amid the group stood Josef Mengele, the doctor who had conducted experiments on prisoners, often on children, and particularly on twins.pic.twitter.com/6vqtJ1XHTc
13) Mengele was never caught; after the war, with the connivance of family and friends, he had lived mostly in South America, for a time rather cynically as José Mengele, and in 1978, while swimming in the ocean, he drowned.pic.twitter.com/aSEpD2biKy
14) At Auschwitz, he was often among the doctors on the ramp, the place where the trains stopped and the passengers were selected for death or for work, depending on the doctors’ impression of them.pic.twitter.com/StqR5SKxYd
15) Prisoners sometimes called Mengele the Angel of Death, because being selected for his experiments meant at least not dying immediately.pic.twitter.com/Lt1oB4oQkB
16) Upon closer inspection, Mengele was pictured 8 times in the album. Those 8 photographs are the only existing images the world has of Mengele at the Auschwitz complex.pic.twitter.com/bZ6vaXpwR2
17) Another figure that was identified was Rudolf Hoess, who had supervised the building of Auschwitz and had been its commandant from May, 1940, to December, 1943.pic.twitter.com/9YO0X6J1Rb
18) In 1947, Hoess was sentenced to death at the first Auschwitz trials, which were held in Poland, and was hanged at the camp, the last person to be killed there.pic.twitter.com/c4ozywhZJv
19) No photographs had ever shown Nazis at leisure at Auschwitz, but in the album Hoess appears with Mengele at a retreat in the hills called Solahütte (or Solahuette).pic.twitter.com/bapMJaPZEc
20) Solahütte lay just beyond the camp’s border. It was a long, lodgelike building above the Sola River, which flowed past Auschwitz I; it is now a tavern.pic.twitter.com/2Lm16KBqVq
21) The photographs at Solahütte are the most transparently provocative, partly because they are so strange and partly because of the notoriety of the figures they contain.pic.twitter.com/iuabaYtMry
22) There are twenty-nine images, divided between two occasions, one involving officers...pic.twitter.com/rSqLeWTx3R
23) ...and the other involving officers and young women. These weren’t guards, but rather typists, telegraph clerks, and secretaries - called Helferinnen, which means “helpers.” Their racial purity had been established—should a Nazi officer be looking for a girlfriend or wife.pic.twitter.com/asFXSc8Vc2
24) In some pictures, the women recline on canvas deck chairs with officers. In a series of photographs, the women and three officers run toward the camera, grinning wildly, apparently because it has suddenly begun to rain; the caption says, “Rain coming from a bright sky.”pic.twitter.com/xB7mSVLWdw
25) Another series shows 12 Helferinnen in wool skirts & cotton blouses sitting on a terrace railing. One officer is playing the accordion. Another walks down the row of young women with a tray, serving them bowls of blueberries. (The caption says, “Here there are blueberries.”)pic.twitter.com/Wi8xpvNX88
26) The most surreal of the Solahütte photographs shows nearly a hundred officers arrayed like a glee club up the side of a hill. The accordion player stands across from them.pic.twitter.com/UA1LLNK2ZW
27) All the men are singing except those in the very front, who perhaps feel too important for it.pic.twitter.com/6gjP04RGbW
28) Over the Auschwitz album, like a gloss, clings a sense of a prideful observance of manners and customs, a tranquil and purified world, a shared purpose, a satisfaction in uniforms, boots, and accordions.pic.twitter.com/O1Weueqnpc
29) Lives so exalted required trips to the hills, shotguns and game hunting, companionable dogs, wine, and the presence of young women.pic.twitter.com/yLr5HBKgm9
30) The album’s effect is discordant. The people it depicts are engaged in the greatest mass murder ever committed, yet its principal impression is of pleasure.pic.twitter.com/sJlrsM8zA0
31) What they have done is not written on their faces, but, even so, their faces are assuredly not sympathetic.pic.twitter.com/3Be5ZLnBYz
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