In 1943, a Spanish photographer saved the photographs taken by the SS of Mauthausen. Beyond the daily life of the camp, the exceptional “Boix collection” documents the concentration camp conditions. It sheds light on the importance of photography for history — and vice versa.
This work is the translation of a book originally published in 2002, but republished in Spain in 2015, in a second version significantly revised and enriched with information and unpublished documents by its author, the historian Benito Bermejo. Let us note this small detail from the outset: during the Spanish reissue, The Photographer of Mauthausen has become The Horror Photographerand the anthropometric portrait of Boix in Mauthausen has given way to a blurred photograph of theAppelplatz from Mauthausen.
A young photographer
Such inflections testify to the progressive awareness, since the beginning of the 2000s, of the importance of these photographs. This exceptional “Boix collection” does not only document the ordinary life of Mauthausen, but, well beyond that, that of the concentration camp condition as a whole.
The 2015 Spanish edition had a preface by Javier Cercas, a writer well known in France, notably for his novel The imposter (Actes Sud, 2015) which caused a stir in the press and in associative circles defending the memories of the concentration camp experiences. Indeed, the impostor is none other than Enric Marco, a real-fake deportee from the Nazi camps who nevertheless managed to become president of the Amicale de Mauthausen, before being unmasked in 2005, precisely, by Benito Bermejo, a historian specializing in the history and memory of Spanish deportees in the Nazi camps during the Second World War.
With The Photographer of Mauthausenit delivers the fruit of a long and fascinating investigation that began in 1991. The historian reconstructs with great rigor the brief but dazzling career of the young Spanish photographer. He roots him in his family environment (Francisco’s father is rather anarchist in tendency) and follows him into the post-war period, in particular during his last and brief years in Paris when Boix worked as a reporter for the French communist press. These are among the two major contributions of the second version of the book.
When Francisco Boix took his first photographs, from 1936-1937, notably for the magazine Juliol published by the Unified Socialist Youth of Catalonia, an offshoot of the Spanish Communist Party, he was not yet 17 years old. In 1938-1939, Boix was on the front. Then, he crossed the French border, with half a million men, women and children to escape Franco’s victorious armies. He then stayed successively in several of these pitiful internment camps intended for ex-combatants of the Spanish Republic.
Enlisted from September 1939 in a Company of Foreign Workers assigned to Lorraine, Boix fell — like most of his fellow exiles — into the hands of the German army. Very quickly, and with the at least tacit blessing of the French authorities in Vichy and the Spanish authorities in Madrid, a special fate was reserved for those called the “Spanish Reds”. At the beginning of 1941, Boix was transferred to the Stalag from Fallingbostel (Lower Saxony), the final stage before his arrival, on January 27, 1941, at Mauthausen, from which he would not leave until more than 4 and a half years later. Among the fighters captured by the Wehrmachtonly the Spanish and the Soviets did not benefit from their status as “prisoners of war” and were transferred to a concentration camp with a particularly harsh regime. Two thirds of the Spanish prisoners died at Mauthausen.
The photo saga
As B. Bermejo indicates in his introductory remarks, this book is neither a new history of the Spanish Republicans, nor a monograph of the Mauthausen camp. It focuses precisely on Francisco Boix, who was one of the main inventors and rescuers of the collection of photographs stolen from the SS of the camp. His quality as a photographer, and luck too, allowed Boix to be assigned to the camp’s identification service. In this laboratory, which represents a relatively protected island, with other comrades, he is notably responsible for taking photographs of all arrivals at the camp in anthropometric format; but he also participates in the development and printing of the numerous photographs taken by the SS of the camp for propaganda purposes — and personal souvenirs.
However, in early 1943, the SS were ordered to destroy these photographs documenting various scenes in which they generally prided themselves—official visits by dignitaries, exhausting work by deportees, summary executions and mass crimes—but which were now likely to become so many pieces of evidence for indictment. The destruction began, but by chance, clairvoyance and a lot of nerve, Boix and a few friends, all Spanish and members of the clandestine communist organization of the camp, managed to steal and hide some of the photographs.
These were taken out of the camp and hidden in the village of Mauthausen. As the Allied troops approached, the help of an Austrian woman (Anna Pointner), who agreed to hide the negatives from February 1945 to the Liberation, was decisive. Thanks to this formidable human chain, constantly on the verge of fatal rupture, a certain number of these photos have reached us. But the story of Boix does not end there.
From the hasty departure of the SS and even before the arrival of the American troops, from May 5, 1945, he became a reporter-photographer again and captured these incredible moments when the captives doomed to death finally regained freedom and dignity. In the summer of 1945, Boix lived in Paris, where he worked for various French communist publications. But he was seriously ill and his many professional trips were frequently interspersed with stays in hospitals and various rest homes. He died in 1951, at the age of 31, without having seen his country again or his sister Núria, whom the Francoist authorities had forbidden from going to the border where Francisco waited for him, in vain.
To date, a thousand photographs are known and located. But, according to a statement by Boix himself, nearly 20,000 photographs were stolen. Where are the others?
Repairing the Boix erasure
As soon as Boix returned to Paris, some photographs taken from this documentation were published in the French communist press (This evening And Looksin June 1945). Boix’s name is never mentioned. The photographs then have the main function of arousing indignation. This outweighs the intelligence of the photographs and their irreplaceable documentary contribution; the question of their relationship to truth is not raised. The problems raised by the images, between capturing reality, distortion and manipulation, are not addressed.
Finally, the fact that, before the Liberation, these were Nazi views of martyred deportees is not questioned any more. However, these photographs have a power of revelation. By its scale and the diversity of the themes restored, such a collection reveals an essential part of the Nazi mental framework, the imagination and the representations of SS of Mauthausen and, beyond that, allows us to document, for history and for memory, the logic of the concentration camp system of the Third Reich.
A few months later, a certain number of these photographs were used as indictment evidence during the Nuremberg trials (January 28-29, 1946) and Dachau trials (April 1946). Boix was called upon to comment on the photographs extracted from the collection. SSto which had been added some photographs taken by himself at the time of the Liberation. Very opportunely, B. Bermejo reproduces these images in his book and places them alongside the testimony given by Boix at Nuremberg. B. Bermejo completes his device by adding photographs illustrating the remarks made at the time by Boix, but not presented at the trial. The image as proof.
However, despite this publicity, this inestimable testimonial heritage remained little known, outside the small circle of specialists and associations of former deportees. Twenty years after Nuremberg, in the great memorial book The Deportation published in 1967 under the aegis of the National Federation of Deported and Interned Resistance Fighters and Patriots (FNDIRP), we find a certain number of photos from the collection SS of Mauthausen; in this major work, the series concerning Mauthausen is completed by a few photographs taken by Boix himself at the Liberation. However, here again, Boix’s name is never mentioned.
This erasure is all the more disturbing because the names of other holders of the photographs are cited. For example, the caption of the photo showing the camp in the winter of 1941 states: “Photo SS loaned by Mr. Le Caer of Deauville” (p. 182). Moreover, twenty years after the Liberation, witnesses who have become historians of their own martyrdom are still keen to show images which, in their eyes, are proof of Nazi crimes. But today?
Why are the photographic identification service of this camp, why are the saved funds itself, as well as the figure of Boix, still so neglected by Mauthausen historians, even the most informed? The photographic laboratory was however, as Daniel Simon, president of the Amicale de Mauthausen, recalls, a major place for the affirmation of power SSNazi ideology and the modernity of Third Reich Germany. To what should we attribute this lasting indifference of historians?
Beyond the overwhelming feeling that they continue to cause, these photographs stolen from SS by deportees nevertheless send us a strong message. They bear witness to a double act of faith on the part of Boix and his friends: faith in the future, first of all, despite the murderous violence and arrogance of the executioners who like to put themselves on show; faith also in the capacity of photographic testimony to prove first against the criminals, then for history. In this sense, this photographic testimony is also an act of resistance. It should therefore be recognized as such.