New Yorker tells the story behind the story about the recently found Auschwitz photo album
This week in the magazine, Alec Wilkinson writes about a rare album of photographs from the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, in southern Poland. The album, which was delivered to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007, belonged to Karl Hoecker, adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz from May, 1944, to January, 1945. Wilkinson writes:
“If the album consisted only of photographs of people who hadn’t been seen at Auschwitz, and of areas of Auschwitz that hadn’t been portrayed, or if it merely expanded the photographic record of Auschwitz, it would be valuable historically…but it has an enhanced value….In the fifty-four days between May 15 and July 8, 1944, a period partly covered in the Hoecker album, and called the Hungarian Deportation, four hundred and thirty-four thousand people were put aboard trains to Auschwitz—so many people that the crematoriums, which could dispose of a hundred and thirty-two thousand bodies a month, were overrun.”
Read entire article at New Yorker
“If the album consisted only of photographs of people who hadn’t been seen at Auschwitz, and of areas of Auschwitz that hadn’t been portrayed, or if it merely expanded the photographic record of Auschwitz, it would be valuable historically…but it has an enhanced value….In the fifty-four days between May 15 and July 8, 1944, a period partly covered in the Hoecker album, and called the Hungarian Deportation, four hundred and thirty-four thousand people were put aboard trains to Auschwitz—so many people that the crematoriums, which could dispose of a hundred and thirty-two thousand bodies a month, were overrun.”