A Franco-German team analyzed the photos – which have become iconic – of the arrival of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz in 1944. It is as much about documenting the mass murder as it is about understanding the process of constructing the album.
From 1945, major exhibitions on Nazi crimes were organized in Europe, in Paris, Berlin and London, by the Allies and representatives of the Resistance. This is what the new temporary exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin shows. These exhibitions attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors, who viewed selections of photographs of atrocities committed from 1933 onwards.
Knowledge of Nazi crimes also came through these early exhibitions of images and objects. That of Paris took place at the Grand-Palais and attracted at least 100,000 visitors. These events included the first selections of images from the camps, photographs of the Holocaust and also a “ setting in motion » of these, some of which have become iconic (often for a limited period, in fact).
Trace and decipher
With photo albums and the first documentaries, these images began to circulate, losing their identification, without reflection on how they were taken or what they actually showed. In the following decades, they were reproduced thousands of times, on book covers, in school textbooks, in television reports, in press articles. The most striking example is that of the Warsaw ghetto album, created with photographs of the liquidation of the ghetto on the orders of General SS Stroop, and which was submitted as evidence at the main Nuremberg trial.
At the beginning of XXIe century, historians undertook to revisit these photographs and to draw up both a history of their production and a genealogy of their circulation. The pioneering work was that on the photographs taken by British troops on their arrival at the Bergen Belsen camp (Lower Saxony), in a small work edited by two British historians.
It is this work of tracing origins, deciphering and elucidating that the historians Tal Bruttmann, Stefan Hördler and Christoph Kreutzmüller, a Frenchman and two Germans, have undertaken in a terrible and fascinating work. They were interested in the now famous “ Auschwitz album », found in 1980 by Serge Klarsfeld and deposited at the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem. This album was commonly described as the only visual testimony to the arrival of a convoy of Jewish deportees to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, in this case arriving from Hungary.
The album is made up of 28 perforated photo boxes, on which 197 photos have been glued on both sides. The boxes are tied with a fabric ribbon. The album measures 33 by 25 centimeters (the book reproduces it almost to scale). Only one copy of this album is known today. Lili Jacob, a deportee from this convoy, had survived the “ selection » upon her arrival and released in Dora, after her transfer between several camps. There, she had found, in the cupboard of a barracks room where people had lived SSthe famous album, in the photographs of which she recognized people from her convoy. The story itself is quite extraordinary.
In the 1950s, Lili Jacob took out some photos and gave them to survivors of the convoy. Some images from the album had therefore already circulated and had been reproduced. In the 1970s, Serge Klarsfeld noticed them and set out to find Lili Jacob and the album (to which Lili Jacob had added some photos that she owned and also some annotations in Czech). Thanks to a private detective, he met her in Miami where she lived and convinced her to give up the album.
The photos have been reproduced many times since, on the covers of books and magazines, used indiscriminately in documentary films. Some have become iconic, particularly the arrival of a convoy on the ramp to Auschwitz. They are visible online on the Yad Vashem website.
A composite album
The work by Bruttmann, Hördler and Kreutzmüller aims, for the first time, to describe the process of constructing the album. We know both SS who carried it out: two managers of the anthropometric service at Auschwitz, whose task was the photographic recording of new prisoners (those who entered the camp, and not those immediately sent to the gas chamber), but also the establishment of documentary photos for the various reports that the camp administration had to produce.
Bernhard Walter was the head of this department, which also managed the prisoner file. Ernst Hofmann was his deputy, a former schoolteacher ten years older than his boss. Neither man was a professional photographer or even had any training in photography. The three historians argue that the album was an order, at least from the camp commander Rudolf Höss, and with the agreement of his superiors, perhaps Himmler, so severe was the ban on photographing the killing process at Auschwitz and Birkenau.
If the authors do not give a clear explanation why the “ Auschwitz album » was commissioned – if not to illustrate the quality of the work carried out during the operation to assassinate the Jews of Hungary – the contributions of their work are nevertheless numerous. Firstly, the album is a carefully crafted composition. The photographs that compose it were chosen from several series, the entirety of which has been lost. Contrary to what has been too often written, the photographs do not show a single convoy, nor were they taken in a single day, but were taken over a long period, between the beginning of May and the beginning of August 1944.
The album is composite and the fact that we leaf through it has the impression of seeing photographs “ truth », taken on the spot, is more due to the mediocrity of the photographers themselves than to the absence of a desire for composition.
A historiographical feat
The work gives a luxury of detail in the analysis of the photographs, without relying on any theory of photography, but simply thanks to an in-depth reading of the images, a historical reading, and by crossing them with current knowledge on the process of selections and gassing at Birkenau in 1944. In an educational way, the paragraphs are illustrated step by step by the photographs themselves or by a detail in a cropped photograph. In the center of the book, the complete album has been reproduced.
The reader is led to look closely at each photograph in the album, instead of consulting it quickly, as evidence or even a memorial in images. These photographs remain unbearable, even if they show little violence (the authors emphasize that it is however visible in certain photos). The photos show construction work on the Auschwitz ramp (the two railway lines that enter the camp), but also trenches at other sites in Birkenau.
This analysis of the work allows the authors toAn album from Auschwitz to date certain photos, by cross-referencing them with documents (existence or not of a trench at a specific location, for example). The album documents the work carried out in Birkenau in the spring and summer of 1944, the wagons coming from different countries, the SS and their assistants on the ramp (including the two photographers, who therefore involuntarily photographed each other). But Mengele is not identifiable in any photo in Lili Jacob’s album.
The photographs of course show the “ selection » of the prisoners upon their arrival, about a third, considered able-bodied, who entered the camp to undergo forced labor and die there in the weeks that followed, and two thirds sent directly to death by gassing.
Finally, the three historians achieved the feat of identifying the “ series of photographs », that is to say the different reports produced by the two photographers, from which the images pasted in the album were extracted. According to them, there were ten, including three selections from different convoys: from Ungvar, from Beregszasz and from Tecso. There are no photographs of the killing process itself. At least in the album that has been preserved.
The photographs stop just before the Jews enter one of the bunkers where the gas chambers and crematoria are located. The title of the book by Bruttmann, Hördler and Kreutzmüller suggests that the album studied is only one among others that have existed. There is perhaps a contradiction there, their study showing precisely the exceptional character of the album, which they consider to be “ yet not just a staging “, but also “ part of the crime “.