What do you see in this Picture? Few men and women having fun and enjoying their lives, right?
But you will be stunned to know that these are the men and women who ran Auschwitz, A hell on earth, the most horrific death camp the world has ever known. Auschwitz was responsible for killing 10000 people EVERYDAY in its peak, yeah those are real numbers, and in case you are wondering this camp executed 1.1 million people in its operational period from 1940 to 1945.
The photographs were taken at a nearby resort in the summer of 1944 when the slaughter was at its height.
Solahütte, resort in Poland for the Nazi German guards
these pictures were found in the Höcker Album dated 1944.
You can clearly see it is marked Auschwitz 21st of June 1944.
Here are some more pictures from that album-
It began to rain suddenly so they all started to run inside
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The SS female auxiliaries (Helferinnen) show with mock sadness that they have finished eating their blueberries, July 22, 1944.
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Resting at the Solahütte retreat center.
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SS women arriving at an SS holiday camp in the town of Porąbka in what was then German occupied Poland
The album belong to Karl Höcker, Adjutant to the commander of Auschwitz
SS officers Richard Baer and Karl Höcker.
His job was to make sure everything run smoothly for his siniors at Auschwitz. He was also the superviser of a team of women known as “Helferinnen”, these womens were incharge of all the communication inside and outside of the camp.
So when every time a group of Jews came on the holocaust train they had to count how many people came, how many were selected for forced labor, and how many were selected for gas chambers.
In case you don’t know gas chambers were a place where a large number of people were fitted in a comparatively small room by telling them that they were going get a bath by showers but in reality, those showers were gas sprinklers. Once the chambers were filled with people and doors were closed they would sprinkle deathly gases through those sprinklers and all the people would die in a matter of hour… Yes, that was the level of cruelty at these camps and trust me this is not even the 1% of the devious acts going on there.
A gas chamber in the Auschwitz main camp
Most of the women and children were directly sent into the gas chambers. Stronger men were selected for forced labor while the weaker or unwell males had to die in the gas chambers.
So these groups had the responsibility to finalize the list of people for gas chambers and forced labor and SS commander Karl Höcker would sign it before sending it to Berlin, So yeah he absolutely knew what was happening there.
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SS officers enjoying the dinner in Auschwitz when the execution was at its peak
The most chilling part is the time period in which these photographs were taken, this was the peak of slaughter and these are the people who were specifically brought for the summer of 1944 to fast-pace the process.
By this point, the killing capacity was so expanded that for body disposal they were beginning to use open pit cremation beyond the crematories.
Now let’s dive deeper into this album…
SS officers with Dr. Josef Mengele in the middle
This is another photograph from that album but this makes the album truly special. The man in the middle is Dr. Josef Mengele and before this album, we have no photographs of him taken in the Auschwitz camp. He is known as the angel of death and he conducted many heinous medical experiments on women and children.
Children, victims of Dr Josef Mengele's experiments. Picture taken in camp photo studio.
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Josef Mengele's twins experiments
Mengele has an obsession with doing experiments on children, especially twins. Whenever a new group of Jews arrives at Auschwitz, He starts finding twins for his experiments. Auschwitz was like a heaven for Mengele as there he had an unlimited supply of twins to study, and he wouldn't get in trouble if they died.
According to Prof Paul Weindling of Oxford Brookes University, author of Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments, hundreds of children were used in Mengele's experiments.
Between the middle of May and the beginning of July 1944, 437 thousand hungarian jews were sent to Auschwitz, and 80% were selected to die upon arrival.
These women and children unbeknown to them are taking their last steps towards the gas chambers.
Before sending them to the gas chambers they changes their clothes and shaves their hairs including females. I would like to remind you that these people in photographes are still unaware that it’s their last walk to the gas chambers. They were told to go into the showers. Some of them also get’s the negative feelings that there is something wrong but unfortunately now there is no going back.
After prisoners were murdered in gas chambers, Nazis cut their hair to send to factories to produce carpets, ropes, and more…
This is the hair of hundreds of thousands of women murdered during the Holocaust, Auschwitz.
One of the warehouses filled with victims' shoes up to the ceiling, Auschwitz.
Now think all of this happening and they knew it but still somehow their albums are filled with smiles and giggles with zero guilt on there face. How can someone enjoy blueberris and vacations while knowing that they just came back killing thousands of innocent humans? The answer is very simple, The same way we can look relaxed and have fun minutes after walking past a homeless with frozen fingers. By not thinking about it.
“They almost look like normal people.” They WERE normal people, and that’s perhaps the most important and hardest lesson to learn from these pictures. They could have been us. We could be them.
This album raises questions even more than it’s already been raised by the Holocaust itself.
When I was in my std 10th there was a chapter "From the Diary of Anne Frank" in English literature, at that time I was in a hurry to complete the syllabus as the exams were near and I had literally studied nothing. That chapter was indeed saddening for me but I didn’t think much about those events at that time. But now when I finished reading her entire story, I was completely traumatized by what she has gone through. I think everyone should read her story to get a glimpse of how dangerous a human can become.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."
~Anne Frank, From the Diary of Anne Frank
Some more pictures from the Holocaust (disturbing warning!)-
An emaciated 18-year-old Russian girl looks into the camera lens during the liberation of Dachau, 1945.
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Starved prisoners, nearly dead from hunger, pose in concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria
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This photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier shooting a Ukrainian Jew during a mass execution in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, sometime between 1941 and 1943.
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A German in a military uniform shoots at a Jewish woman after a mass execution in Mizocz, Ukraine. In October of 1942
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The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in 1939 to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, in May of 1944
A victim of Nazi medical experimentation. A victim's arm shows a deep burn from phosphorus at Ravensbrueck, Germany, in November of 1943
Bodies lie piled against the walls of a crematory room in a German concentration camp in Dachau, Germany. The bodies were found by U.S. Seventh Army troops who took the camp on May 14, 1945.
Three U.S. soldiers look at bodies stuffed into an oven in a crematorium in April of 1945. Photo taken in an unidentified concentration camp in Germany, at time of liberation by U.S. Army
This heap of ashes and bones is the debris from one day's killing of German prisoners by 88 troopers in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar in Germany, shown on April 25, 1945
American soldiers walk by row after row of corpses lying on the ground beside barracks at the Nazi concentration camp at Nordhausen, Germany, on April 17, 1945
“It doesnt take much to be a monster. You just need to be convinced that the person you're harming isn't like you”
~Unknown
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EDIT- Some people are in shock with those 10k and 1.1 million number, So I am adding sources to justify those numbers-
1) approx 10,000 people were killed at Auscwitz at it’s peak-Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State . About . Transcripts
2) approx 1.1 million was the total death toal for Auschwitz-Horrors of Auschwitz: The Numbers Behind WWII's Deadliest Concentration Camp | HISTORY