The Auschwitz Album

The Auschwitz Album is the most famous photographic document of the Holocaust. It is a collection of 193 photographs taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau in late May or early June 1944, documenting the arrival of Hungarian Jewish deportees and their selection on the ramp. The photographs were taken by SS personnel for SS purposes. The album survived the war by an extraordinary chance and is now one of the central pieces of evidence in the documentary record of the Holocaust. Most of the surviving photographs of arrivals at Auschwitz come from this single album.

Who took the photographs

The photographs were taken by SS officers Bernhard Walter and Ernst Hofmann, who ran the Auschwitz Erkennungsdienst, the camp’s identification service, which was responsible for taking mug shots of newly registered prisoners. Walter and Hofmann had been sent to the Birkenau ramp in the period of the Hungarian deportations to record the arrival operation. The intended audience for the album is unclear; some historians have suggested it was meant for Adolf Eichmann or for Heinrich Himmler personally, but no firm evidence supports either attribution.

What the photographs show

The album follows the standard arrival sequence at Birkenau. The photographs show: a Hungarian deportation train arriving at the new ramp inside the camp; the deportees disembarking; the men being separated from the women and children on the platform; the SS doctor standing at the head of the line conducting the selection; the lines of those selected for labour walking towards the disinfection blocks; the lines of those selected for the gas chambers walking towards the wood beyond Crematorium III; mothers with their children waiting in the trees in front of the crematorium for their turn at the gas chamber; the prisoners’ luggage piled on the platform after they had been removed; the warehouses full of confiscated goods.

The faces in the photographs are visible. Most of the people pictured are about to be murdered. Several of the Hungarian Jewish deportees later identified themselves and their family members in the album: the woman in the headscarf carrying a baby, walking towards the trees, who is the photographer’s sister, identified post-war by a relative. The teenage girl in the second row on the right of the women’s line, identified by her brother. The album is, in a sense the photographers cannot have intended, a roll call of the dead.

How the album survived

The album was found by Lili Jacob, a Hungarian Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, in a bedside cabinet in an SS barracks at Mittelbau-Dora, a few days after that camp’s liberation in April 1945. Jacob was 18 years old, had survived Auschwitz and the death march to Mittelbau-Dora, and was severely ill with typhus when she found the album. She opened it and recognised photographs of her family on the ramp at Birkenau. She kept the album. She survived, emigrated to the United States, and donated the album to Yad Vashem in 1980. The donation was the first time the album had been publicly available outside the small post-war Holocaust research community.

The Lili Jacob version is the only known copy. There are no other copies of the album in any archive. If Jacob had not picked the album up that day, the photographs in it would not have survived.

What the album shows about the operation

The Auschwitz Album is the most detailed photographic record of any single moment of the Holocaust. The album documents, photograph by photograph, the operational sequence at the Birkenau ramp during the height of the Hungarian deportations. It cross-references with the German railway records, with the Auschwitz arrival logs, and with the survivor testimony from the same period to produce a near-complete picture of how the camp’s killing operation worked. The album is also one of the cleanest pieces of evidence against the deniers, because it shows, in unedited photographs taken by SS personnel themselves, the arrival, selection and disposal of a deportation transport that the German records show was sent to its death.

The other surviving Auschwitz photographs

A small number of other photographs of the Auschwitz killing operation survive. The Sonderkommando photographs, four images taken clandestinely by a Greek Jewish prisoner Alberto Errera in August 1944, show bodies being burned in open pyres outside Crematorium V. The four photographs were smuggled out of the camp in a tube of toothpaste and reached the Polish underground. They are the only photographs of the killing process itself taken by anyone inside the camp. The Sonderkommando photographs and the Auschwitz Album together form the principal photographic record of the Birkenau killing operation. Beyond these two sources, almost no photographs of the actual killing process exist.

The album in modern Holocaust education

The Auschwitz Album is now reproduced in dozens of books on the Holocaust and is on permanent display at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The selected photographs from it are among the most-reproduced single images of the Holocaust. The faces in the photographs have been progressively identified by survivors and their descendants over the decades. The Yad Vashem identification project on the album is still ongoing.

See also

Sources

  • Yisrael Gutman and Bella Gutterman (eds), The Auschwitz Album: The Story of a Transport, Yad Vashem, 2002
  • Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and Yad Vashem joint catalogue
  • Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, University of Chicago Press, 2008
  • USHMM: The Auschwitz Album