The Auschwitz Album

gr82bart · Apr 17, 2016

No idea where to post this, so I'm posting here. Mods feel free to move somewhere else more appropriate.

Strong, very peaceful images, in a way, juxtaposing the fear and evil.

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/index.asp

Regards, Art

Ian Leake · Apr 17, 2016

I visited Dachau in my early twenties, and will never forget the numbing feeling of horror when I learned about the things people are able to do to others. Those who committed these vile crimes are mostly dead, but the evil they represented is timeless and still with us today. These photos should be mandatory viewing.

CropDusterMan · Apr 17, 2016

Thanks for posting this gr82brt.
I agree with Ian on the mandatory viewing comment. People need to know about this period in history...I am amazed at
how little kids are taught in school about it (at least here in America)...I had to teach my own son.

The father and mother of a good friend in New York are survivors of Auschwitz. When his dad arrived there on the train
with his mother, baby sister and younger brother, the mother and baby were immediately sent to the line where there
would be no return. My friends dad saw his mother struggling with the baby and their things and he was trying to figure
where they had to go and what was going on, and without knowing the situation, he told his younger brother "to go and
help your mom", not knowing he would never see any of them again...that thought tortured him throughout his life.

Photographer Mark Seliger did a good book a few years back called "When they Came to Take my Father"
which was photographs and stories by Holocaust Survivors...it had quite an impact on me when I saw it.

HiHoSilver · Apr 17, 2016

I'm guessing this has made the rounds.
Dead Link Removed

The evil that happened in Germany was mirrored elsewhere at the same time. It happened in other places, other centuries with different sales pitches. The error is to point elsewhere, thinking it couldn't happen here - or to me. Add power and opportunity to appetite and its a strong corrective to thinking progress is invincible. Its a movie we've seen a number of times.

Richard S. (rich815) · Apr 17, 2016

I grew up Jewish, attending Hebrew and Sunday school 2-3 times a week. This album is quite tame and frankly quite monotonous, uninteresting and tedious compared to much of what I've seen and been shown in photos and films. Repetitive groups of people standing around with repetitive and often identical captions, and while I've no doubt in the authenticity of the descriptions of what's going on and the context of it all, I really don't see what impact this is supposed to have to educate, illuminate or show what really happened in these camps. Or are there links within I missed? Sorry, perhaps a "don't go there" subject in terms of critique but I'm just sharing, as a raised Jew of German, and eastern Europen ancestry, with relatives who perished in the camps, how it lacks impact or definitive purpose in my opinion.

HiHoSilver · Apr 17, 2016

'Preciate your weighing in, Richard. Similar horror has been meeted out to others. I have no trouble at all acknowledging these shot are tame. 'Seen the ones of trinketry made from human body parts. This was also done in the US with the native americans. Its no fun to look at/acknowledge the potential for horror, but I don't think any group is any different. We're a frail specie. As Tennyson said of nature - we're red in tooth and claw.

Sirius Glass · Apr 17, 2016

Ian Leake said:
I visited Dachau in my early twenties, and will never forget the numbing feeling of horror when I learned about the things people are able to do to others. Those who committed these vile crimes are mostly dead, but the evil they represented is timeless and still with us today. These photos should be mandatory viewing.

General Eisenhower, later US President, made the local people walk through the death camps so that they could not deny their existence and their complicity.

JimCee · Apr 17, 2016

Another chilling example of the Nazi killing machine at Auschwitz Birkenau was the personal photo album of Karl Hoecker, adjutant to the final camp commander. This photo album shows the Nazi officers and other personnel at their leisure. Laughing, enjoying their rest time, completely oblivious to the gross crimes against humanity they were committing.. http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/lau...iaries-poses-resort-auschwitz-personnel-1942/

HiHoSilver · Apr 17, 2016

Sirius Glass said:
General Eisenhower, later US President, made the local people walk through the death camps so that they could not deny their existence and their complicity.

The ones I saw of this had people cringing, vomiting & convulsing to look away.

ozphoto · Apr 17, 2016

I visited several camps back in '98, and shot a huge series sole in B&W. Was an extremely sobering experience indeed. On my visit to Dachau, I noticed a group of German high-school children undertaking a lesson, with printouts and lecturers taking them around.

It was good to see that the atrocities are still being taught to the generations that followed, I can't imagine what was going through their minds as they explored the camp.

Guess having the "real horrors" on show for all to view today, is not "politically correct" and may offend the sensibilities of the minority. Seems that's the way of today - keep it all sanitised for fear of offending anyone. Whereas, in the years that others have described above, you saw it all for what it was - no holding back.

My father distinctly remembers seeing images of lampshades made from tattooed skin when he was in high school - and the woman who was imprisoned for these (I think) was still remembered in '98 by (older) Germans in the area; I spoke with some of them at the time I visited, and a couple mentioned the prison she was in.

Richard S. (rich815) said:
I really don't see what impact this is supposed to have to educate, illuminate or show what really happened in these camps.

Agree 100% Richard - to truly understand the horrors endured and atrocities committed, it needs to be shown in all its vileness; no holding back, no shying away from the truth, no trying to keep the squeamish/minority/politically correct etc happy. Hopefully in the near future, media outlets in all forms, will throw the objections (and lobbying that will naturally follow) out the window and present the Holocaust in full.

Diapositivo · Apr 18, 2016

The pictures are very interesting as they show that people deported at Auschwitz by and large had no idea what would happen to many of them. The picture with the group of people all holding their bundle on their back shows how they actually thought they had been transferred to a labour camp, or to another labour camp. The soldiers who made the selection were careful in not letting know the "meaning" of the two groups. People who had been separated from their relatives hoped to see them again one day.
The persons with the inmate dress transmit a sense of "normality" that, to people arriving, must not have looked very different from a POW detection camp or from a different concentration camp whence they were transferred.
Typhus fever being an enormous problem in all concentration camps, even the crematories did not raise the suspect, in most inmates, that a mass massacre was actually happening.
What I find interesting, even if it gives me a shiver, in the pictures is this sense of "normality" - in the context of a concentration camp - that most people probably had when they arrived at the Auschwitz train station. I think they were mostly unsuspecting and this is what many of them have told later.

It should be said that, for what I know, Auschwitz-Birkenau was the only "second-generation"* camp where the deliberate extermination took place. In the other camps in activity at the time of the Liberation, such as Dachau, there was no deliberate extermination although there was a huge number of deaths due to typhus fever. People coming, let's say, from Dachau to Auschwitz would not suspect anything worse. Not that anything worse was to be suspected, given the already extremely inhuman treatment they were subjected to.

* There had been a first-generation camp of which the most famous is Treblinka. People were transferred to the camp and immediately killed. After an armed revolt at Treblinka (the orchestra stole some weapons to some German soldiers and made a small massacre of them) the entire extermination camp policy was revised. The prisoners would now all be enslaved and used for work. Those who would be killed as unfit for work were all to be killed, as far as I know, at Birkenau. All first-generation extermination camps were closed.

Diapositivo · Apr 18, 2016

JimCee said:
Another chilling example of the Nazi killing machine at Auschwitz Birkenau was the personal photo album of Karl Hoecker, adjutant to the final camp commander. This photo album shows the Nazi officers and other personnel at their leisure. Laughing, enjoying their rest time, completely oblivious to the gross crimes against humanity they were committing.. http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/lau...iaries-poses-resort-auschwitz-personnel-1942/

I don't subscribe to this rethoric. I'm sure you can find plenty of pictures of RAF bomber pilots singing and dancing just after having mass-murdered tenths of thousand of German civilians. In a war you are a cog of a greater mechanism and yet you never stop being a person. The more stressing your life, the more you need to have some respite from the horror you are confronted with.
Even in a WWI trench you could find people singing and dancing an laughing. People are "multi-dimensional" they don't behave like fiction movie theatre or cartoon characters.

HiHoSilver · Apr 18, 2016

Diapositivo your points are good ones. The people who know what they were doing had to perform mental escape from the horror - retreating to other topics, usually involving humor to relieve themselves of the burden - like police having to deal with highway carnage sounding calloused. 'Just what it takes to do the awful.

On the other side, your point about the naivete & normalcy. Naivete because surely it can't get worse than a forced labor camp - or so they thought. Normalcy - alot of people hid from the truth. One French movie with original footage was the train stations where one part of the train unloaded starved, partially clothed (if at all) prisoners while the local population boarded the train for another trip to work - like its just another normal day.

goamules · May 11, 2016

Exterminating an entire race, along with any political competitors like Priests, along with any handicapped children, so that you could take over the lands, homes, art, and gold of the former, and have a Germany for 1,000 years, is a lot different than bomber pilots that were trying to bomb cites to force their government to stop the war. Think about it, the smiling camp guards were purposely exterminating huge populations to steal their countries. Bomber pilots were trying to save them, and Europe. BIG difference.

Dali · May 11, 2016

goamules said:
Exterminating an entire race, along with any political competitors like Priests, along with any handicapped children, so that you could take over the lands, homes, art, and gold of the former, and have a Germany for 1,000 years, is a lot different than bomber pilots that were trying to bomb cites to force their government to stop the war. Think about it, the smiling camp guards were purposely exterminating huge populations to steal their countries. Bomber pilots were trying to save them, and Europe. BIG difference.

Yes, random killing is way better.

Hatchetman · May 11, 2016

He we go into absurdity.

removed account4 · May 11, 2016

with all the great things humans have done
it never ceases to amaze me what great evil they can do too.

Dali · May 11, 2016

Hatchetman said:
He we go into absurdity.

Yes, killing civilians is an absurdity except when you are the winner.

eddie · May 11, 2016

Dali said:
Yes, killing civilians is an absurdity except when you are the winner.

Are you really trying to equate the attempt to liberate people with the act of exterminating them?

Diapositivo · May 12, 2016

goamules said:
Exterminating an entire race, along with any political competitors like Priests, along with any handicapped children, so that you could take over the lands, homes, art, and gold of the former, and have a Germany for 1,000 years, is a lot different than bomber pilots that were trying to bomb cites to force their government to stop the war. Think about it, the smiling camp guards were purposely exterminating huge populations to steal their countries. Bomber pilots were trying to save them, and Europe. BIG difference.

Both are obeying orders and would rather like not be there. My comment originated from the comments that were astonished at seeing people "having fun". Bombers know they are mass-exterminating innocent people who have no decision power. Those employees were not necessarily knowing about the intentional mass extermination. There were a large number of deaths for typhoid fever in those concentration camps. German soldiers - believe it or not - also died for the same cause (certainly they were not cremated in the same ovens). Life was hard for everybody, though much harder for the prisoners!
Taken at a personal level, I don't see the difference. People want to escape, people laugh, people need distractions, people want to live a normal life as much as they can.

Taken at the historical level, things are a bit more complicated but yes, certainly the German government wanted to make an "empire" in Ukraine and Belarus just like the one the British did in India or Africa. They certainly did not aim at exterminating the Slave people. Just at enslaving them or, if you prefer, colonize them, and create a two-layer society, with the Untermenschen in a subordinated position.

(If this reminds you of the US of the same time, that's because it is exactly that. A racist country which fights another racist country in the name of freedom!).

If you subscribe to the British Imperial doctrine that the British were on a mission to civilize Barbaric India and Africa (which, to be true though politically incorrect, is not entirely unfounded) you can claim that Slave peoples were as much civilized than the Germans so there is no ideological basis for the creation of an Empire in Eastern Europe.

Yet, I don't subscribe to the rethoric (that's OT) about WWII. The fairy tale that the Allied were on a mission for Good against Evil. France and Britain declared war on Germany because they wanted to contain German might. Not because they wanted to defend the freedom of Poland. The Soviet Union invaded Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland two weeks after Germany invaded Poland, and there was no battlecry for freedom of those countries. The problem was Germany, not Freedom.
The final outcome was that East Germany, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Checoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria ended up under the Sovietic Empire, in the hands of foreign-directed dictators. Europe overall was less free after the war than before. Not entirely the fault of Britain and France and the US of course! But it was not a war for "the freedom of Europe" for sure (or if it was, the outcome was certainly a failure).

jeffreyg · May 12, 2016

My wife and I visited Dachau a number of years ago and there was a display of rather large explicit prints depicting the horrors of what occurred there. Once you see them, the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach you wonder how these events can happen yet they still do in one form or another ... look at what is going on in the Middle East and elsewhere. There was a sculptural metal sign at Dachau "NEVER AGAIN". Obviously, it hasn't been read by too many.

http://www.jeffreyglasser.com/

Dali · May 12, 2016

eddie said:
Are you really trying to equate the attempt to liberate people with the act of exterminating them?

I equate nothing. I just to point out the fact that killing an unarmed population is a murder whatever is the reason and as a winner, every act, even the most absurd or disgusting bear its own justification.

FujiLove · May 12, 2016

Sirius Glass said:
General Eisenhower, later US President, made the local people walk through the death camps so that they could not deny their existence and their complicity.

Thanks for posting this album. It may not be anything new, or the most impactful holocaust photography, but I think it's important that people are frequently reminded of what happened.

Regarding the actions of Eisenhower, it's interesting to note that the idea of eugenics was advocated by many prominent scientists, politicians and social commentators around the world in the early 1900's. The US and many other countries ran programs where those deemed 'undesirable' were sterilised or put to death. Theodore Roosevelt himself was a strong supporter, and the US government and it's academic institutions funded lots of the pseudo-scientific research around the world, including in Germany...right up until 1939.

Ghostman · May 12, 2016

Richard S. (rich815) said:
I grew up Jewish, attending Hebrew and Sunday school 2-3 times a week. This album is quite tame and frankly quite monotonous, uninteresting and tedious compared to much of what I've seen and been shown in photos and films. Repetitive groups of people standing around with repetitive and often identical captions, and while I've no doubt in the authenticity of the descriptions of what's going on and the context of it all, I really don't see what impact this is supposed to have to educate, illuminate or show what really happened in these camps. Or are there links within I missed? Sorry, perhaps a "don't go there" subject in terms of critique but I'm just sharing, as a raised Jew of German, and eastern Europen ancestry, with relatives who perished in the camps, how it lacks impact or definitive purpose in my opinion.

I have been to Auschwitz and Birkenau and nothing can prepare you for what you'll feel. The horrors were such that no matter how dull or repetitive pictures may seem they are all worth showing, lest we forget.

One look into the eyes of a child in one of those pictures, smiling and unaware of imminent death is enough to bring home the magnitude of horror and suffering. I don't mind how many seemingly repetitive some holocaust images may be, if one little aspect gets through to one person and can make an impression then it's all worth it.

Julie McLeod · May 12, 2016

Ghostman said:
I have been to Auschwitz and Birkenau and nothing can prepare you for what you'll feel. The horrors were such that no matter how dull or repetitive pictures may seem they are all worth showing, lest we forget.

One look into the eyes of a child in one of those pictures, smiling and unaware of imminent death is enough to bring home the magnitude of horror and suffering. I don't mind how many seemingly repetitive some holocaust images may be, if one little aspect gets through to one person and can make an impression then it's all worth it.

I agree with your comment about the power of these photos, no matter how repetitive, to inform and educate. And the importance of educating was never more clear to me than during our recent federal election when the press uncovered a highly insensitive remark a candidate had made on social media a number of years before. The candidate (who holds a master's degree and is a school board trustee) claimed she hadn't known what the holocaust was until she was called out. Whether she actually was woefully ignorant or just insensitive, I don't know for sure, but she no doubt understands more fully now after having visited Auschwitz at the invitation of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies.

The Auschwitz Album

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