The Holocaust is documented by one of the most extensive records of any atrocity in history. The documentation comes from multiple independent sources: Nazi perpetrators who photographed and recorded their own activities with bureaucratic thoroughness, Allied military forces who documented what they found on liberation, and a smaller number of images and testimonies created clandestinely by victims. The convergence of these sources from completely different vantage points is part of what makes the historical record so robust.
The perpetrators’ own records
The Nazi regime was a bureaucratic state that generated paperwork. The Einsatzgruppen submitted regular operational reports to Berlin detailing the numbers killed in each shooting action. The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 was recorded in formal minutes, signed by the participants, that survived the war in a single copy discovered by Allied investigators in 1947. The construction documents for the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau survive in the Auschwitz Building Office files, now held at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, and include references to gas-tight doors and Zyklon B introduction apertures in language that is unambiguous. Transport records, deportation lists, railway billing documents, and camp registration records survive in archives across Europe.
Photography was used extensively. SS units photographed mass shooting operations; some of these photographs were found in the personal effects of captured soldiers. The Auschwitz Album, 193 photographs taken by SS Hauptscharführer Bernhard Walter and his assistant Ernst Hofmann at Auschwitz-Birkenau in late May 1944, documents the arrival, selection, and processing for murder of a transport of Hungarian Jews. The album was discovered in 1945 by Lilly Jacob, a survivor, in an abandoned SS barracks at Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp. It is now held at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and constitutes the most significant single photographic record of the killing process at Auschwitz.
Clandestine documentation
A small number of images were created by prisoners at extreme personal risk. Four photographs taken by members of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944 show bodies being burned in open pits and women being driven toward the gas chambers. They were smuggled out of the camp concealed in a tube of toothpaste and reached the Polish underground. These photographs, taken from inside the killing process itself, are among the most historically significant images of the Holocaust.
Emmanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes archive, buried in the Warsaw Ghetto and partially recovered after the war, contains diaries, testimonies, statistical studies, and correspondence that document ghetto life from inside. The archive was packed in metal containers and milk cans and buried at three locations in the ghetto; two of the three caches were recovered, in 1946 and 1950. The third has not been found.
Liberation documentation
When Allied forces entered the concentration camps in April and May 1945 they found conditions of extreme horror. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, visited Ohrdruf concentration camp on 12 April 1945 and immediately summoned journalists, photographers, and members of the United States Congress to come and witness what he had seen, stating explicitly that he wanted to create a documentary record because he anticipated that future generations would deny what had happened. The British liberation of Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945 was filmed and photographed by British Army Film and Photographic Unit personnel; Richard Dimbleby’s BBC radio broadcast from the camp on 19 April 1945 was the first eyewitness account to reach the British public. The American Signal Corps filmed the liberation of Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and other camps. This material formed a significant part of the prosecution evidence at the Nuremberg trials.
See also
- Serge and Beate Klarsfeld
- The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
- The Auschwitz Album
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
Sources
- Sybil Milton and Ira Nowinski, In Fitting Memory: The Art and Politics of Holocaust Memorials, Wayne State University Press, 1991
- Serge Klarsfeld, The Auschwitz Album, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1980
- Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, Indiana University Press, 2007
- Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, University of Chicago Press, 2008
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Liberation of Nazi Camps, encyclopedia.ushmm.org