The Long Lost Photography Album of WW2 | The Höcker Album

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0:00 The Höcker Album

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The content of this video covers events, people or concepts via a lecture-style presentation that is educational and historical in nature. Every video is original content by House of History. The events relating to conflict in this video are portrayed in their historical context without either value judgment or an ideological message attached to it. There is no intent to shock, upset or disgust. The goal of my channel is to make interesting lecture-style videos, no more, no less.

The Hoecker Album consists of 116 photographs taken during the last several months Auschwitz was still operating. It literally shows Auschwitz through the lens of a Nazi. The photographs were taken between June 1944 and January 1945, during the most deadly phase of the concentration camp when the Nazis knew the war was lost and all there was left between them and a trial for war crimes was time. During this time over 400.000 Hungarian Jews were murdered, Jews that were previously protected by the government but due to a coup by the Arrow Cross Nazis in Hungary were now sent off to concentration camps if the Arrow Cross party themselves didn’t kill them. But the Hoecker Album doesn’t show these war crimes or the grim situation of the camp during the last months of the war. The album was compiled by Karl Hoecker, a pre-war bank teller but now the adjutant to Richard Baer, the last commandant of Auschwitz. The photographs are a candid portrayal of daily life in the camp for the SS officer guards and official visitors.

On the 22nd of July 1944, the day for the Auschwitz officers is one like any other. Actually, it’s a bit more quiet than usual, only 180 new arrivals are registered of whom ⅔ are gassed immediately. Because it is a calm day, Karl Hoecker is able to accompany several young German girl volunteers to the small resort of Solahütte, around 30 kilometres to the south of Auschwitz. Höcker took his personal camera, the one he would carry throughout his entire term as adjutant to Baer. He takes many photographs, probably to serve as souvenirs for after the war. The pictures show how the girls and Hoecke enjoy the weather, accordion-music, the landscape near Solahütte and the freshly picked blueberries. 30 kilometres to the north one of the worst crimes in the history of humankind takes place and continues to take place, but the photographs only reveal a happy bunch of officers with girls.

The Hoecker Album consists of 116 photographs from hell on earth. The photographs are stuck on 16 double-sided cardboard. Following the war, nobody knew of the existence of the album, however, and it didn’t surface until 2007. It turned out that after the second world war and the liberation of Auschwitz, a US counterintelligence officer discovered the album in an apartment in Frankfurt. He took the album with him to the United States but waited until January 2007 to donate it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was well over 90 at that point and passed away that same summer. I can’t overstate the historical value and uniqueness of the photographs because up until then there had barely been any photographic material of daily life of the SS mass murderers, especially of the largest concentration camp of the Nazi regime. Between 1941 and 1945 approximately 1 million people were gassed in Auschwitz.

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Sources:

Photos, paintings and imagery: Public Domain, Wikicommons

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