NAZI PSYCHOPATHS AT PLAY

Nazi Psychopaths Had A Wonderful War!

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has announced the existence of a recently donated photograph album depicting life inside Auschwitz during the Nazi extermination camp’s last six months of operation. An online display of the collection is available HERE.

The album, created by SS-Obersturmführer Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz from May 1944 until the Germans evacuated in January 1945, was in the possession of a former US Army Intelligence officer who gave it to the Museum last January. The Höcker is one of only a handful of records showing life inside the camp during the war. Most remarkably, it focuses almost exclusively on the Nazi leadership at Auschwitz, including their socializing and relaxation at Solahütte, an Alpine-style recreation lodge situated in a remote corner of the camp.

What is most monstrous about these photographs is that they depict no monsters. No spaced-out, khat-chewing raiders ripping around in technical trucks. No rampaging, machete-wielding mobs caught up in the vortex of spontaneous violence. One is struck here by the sheer ordinariness of the happy people smiling back at the camera, people who at those very moments were willing, even enthusiastic accessories to the most horrific crime in human history. They were functionaries, bureaucrats, administering the machinery of genocide with professional detachment and absolute moral disinterest. Clock in and kill the Jews. Clock out and catch a movie with the wife. And, unlike the rest of the German nation, the people in these photographs lacked even the false excuse, “We never really knew.” To the contrary, these were the accountants who worked the numbers, the stockmen who inventoried the gold teeth and shoes, the musclemen who slammed and locked shut the doors to the showers and the crematoria. These people knew full well, and still they drank wine and poked at volleyballs, kissed their kids goodnight and made love to their wives. Theirs was a monstrous mediocrity, a humdrum monstrosity. Call it the power of mimetic suggestion. Call it the banality of evil. It remains the most frightening and shameful specter rising out of the blood-fogged history of mankind.

“Do you need to be told that whatever has been, can still be?” - T.S. Eliot

MORE: Auschwitz through the lens of the SS: Photos of Nazi leadership at the camp