Sept. 21



USA:

Photos depict Auschwitz through eyes of camp's Nazi leadership

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday unveiled a photo album
containing 116 rare photographs of senior SS officers and other officials
at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The photos were taken between May and December 1944. Many were taken as
the gas chambers and crematories were operating at and above capacity as
the Nazis frantically sought to eliminate Jews in Europe as the war neared
its end.

The German camp in Poland was liberated by the Soviets on Jan. 27, 1945.
The images were in an album that had been maintained by Karl Hoecker, the
adjutant to the camp commandant.

Hoecker's personal album depicts a sing-a-long with an accordion player
and about 70 SS men, including Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious
for his bizarre and cruel medical experiments. Mengele was joined by other
infamous camp leaders, including Josef Kramer and Rudolf Hoess.

The eight photos of Mengele are the first authenticated pictures of him at
Auschwitz, museum officials said.

Also among the images are SS guards and Nazi on numerous hunting trips,
Hoecker lighting the camp's Christmas tree, and female SS auxiliaries
eating blueberries and then mockingly crying and posing with empty bowls.

Judith Cohen, director of museum's Photographic Reference Collection said
the album "adds nuance and illustration to the things that were hard to
imagine, namely that the SS officers were able to simultaneously lead
normal lives they were able to socialize on one day and commit mass
murder on another, and not recognize the contradiction inherent in it,"
she said.

"The fact that they're engaged in common activities makes what they were
doing all the more horrific," Cohen said.

Cohen said the Christmas tree lighting pictures also evidenced the SS
officers' oblivion to what was happening on the front. "It's three weeks
before Auschwitz was evacuated, and they're lighting a Christmas tree?"
she said. "The social lives of the officers continued up until the end."

The museum in Washington obtained the photos earlier this year from a
retired U.S. Army intelligence officer who found the album in an apartment
while stationed in Germany in 1946. The donor, who asked to remain
anonymous, died this summer.

"It's hard to fathom the kind of people who ran these camps and one always
struggles to understand who they were and how they saw themselves," museum
director Sara Bloomfield said in a statement.

"These unique photographs vividly illustrate the contented world they
enjoyed while overseeing a world of unimaginable suffering," she said.
"They offer an important perspective on the psychology of those
perpetrating genocide."

The album provides a stark contrast to the only other known collection of
photographs taken at Auschwitz.

The so-called Auschwitz Album is a compilation of pictures taken by SS
photographers in spring 1944 and discovered by a survivor in another camp.
Those images show the arrival of Hungarian Jews, who at the time made up
the last remaining sizable Jewish community in Europe.

Curators currently do not have plans to exhibit the Hoecker album photos,
but they are displayed online at the museum's Web site,
http://www.ushmm.org

Cohen said the discovery of these photographs is important on a narrow
perspective because "we have photographic evidence of people whose
activites are well known, but whose visages are not known." She said that
from an archival point of view, it is good to have photographs of Mengele.

"People were under the impression we already knew all there was to learn,
and this shows us that new artifacts are waiting to be uncovered," Cohen
said.

On the Net: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

http://www.ushmm.org/research/collections/highlights/auschwitz/

(source: Associated Press)








UKRAINE:

Research team uncovers Nazi horrors in Ukraine


A team of French researchers has uncovered more than 2,500 sites in
Ukraine where executions were carried out under the German World War II
occupation, according to a report released Thursday.

The team has researched 700 sites where executions by shooting took place,
with the number of victims ranging from five to 100,000.

The total killed - many of them Jews - remains unknown. According to
estimates, around 1.5 million Jews were murdered in Ukraine during the
German occupation.

Seven years ago, a research team under the French priest Patrick Debois,
whose grandfather died as a prisoner-of-war in Ukraine, began probing the
death sites.

They work by interviewing eyewitnesses, as well as by evaluating
archaeological and forensic evidence. The work is 60-per-cent funded by
the French Shoah Foundation.

At the beginning of the month, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre criticized
Germany for not doing enough to apprehend war criminals.

Kurt Schrimm, who heads the special prosecutions office in Ludwigsburg in
south-western Germany, said the slowing pace was related to the scarcity
of legally acceptable evidence 62 years after the end of World War II.

"That evidence exists only in cases that are few and far between," he told
Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in an interview. Often important documents
were missing or witnesses had died of old age.

"We are doing as much as we can," said Schrimm, adding that it was unfair
to compare his work to that of the US Office of Special Investigations
which unmasks European immigrants suspected of crimes during World War II.

The Wiesenthal centre, founded in 1977 and named after the late "Nazi
hunter" Simon Wiesenthal, is based in Los Angeles.

(source: DPA)