German Forces

Fun and games, Auschwitz, July, 1944.

USHMM.

This is photograph #34739 in the collection of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), and comes from the photograph album compiled by Camp Adjutant Karl Hoecker, mid-1944. It shows SS officers of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and visiting officers participating in a sing-song, led by an accordionist, at the SS leisure facility of Solahuette, near Auschwitz, probably 29 July, 1944, on which date the temporary resumption of camp command by Rudolf Hoess ended. Apart from Hoess and substantive camp commander Richard Baer, officers pictured include Karl Hoecker, Camp Adjutant, Josef Mengele and Josef Kramer (the final commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration/transit camp). Hoecker's album is remarkable in that it shows the SS at play in mid-1944, at which time the massive task of liquidating Hungary's Jews (the reason for Hoess's temporary resumption of command) was proceeding just a short way away while, not very much more distant, the Soviets' Operation Bagration was destroying German Army Group Centre and thus dismantling the whole German position in the East. The contents on the album can be examined on the USHMM website. Madness. JR.