Roger Cohen: What those pictures of guards at Auschwitz tell us
... How fresh-faced and playful the SS women look in the 116 photographs that, 62 years after the liberation of the Nazi camp, have found their way by a circuitous route to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is not easy to imagine these young ladies moving on from a picnic to administer death wholesale.
In thinking about the Holocaust, we have grown accustomed to images of the Nazis’ victims: shadowy naked figures on the edge of ditches about to be dispatched by the SS-Einsatzgruppen; huddled wide-eyed children; skeletal human simulacra; piles of bones. Getting the perpetrators in focus is harder.
But here, revealed by these newly discovered photographs, are the German murderers in all their dumb humanity, flirting and joking and lighting Christmas trees, as if what awaited them after the frolicking were just the bus to some dull job in a dental office rather than the supervision of Auschwitz’s industrialized killing machine....
I wish I could say I was surprised by the photos (on display at the museum Web site — www.ushmm.org). My years in Germany eroded my capacity for shock. The walk from Buchenwald’s brick-chimneyed crematorium to the genteel streets of Weimar — home to Schiller and Goethe, birthplace of the Bauhaus — is illusion-stripping. In 1942, Buchenwald prisoners were ordered to make wooden boxes to protect Schiller’s work....
Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote in 1960 of a Germany “overcrowded with absentees,” full of people “who happen to be in this country fleeing from this country.” With the years, Germany has gained confidence, pried open locked drawers, filled some of the absences. But these photos are an invitation to do more.
Inevitably, they pose the question: What would you have done? Filled your mouth with blueberries or balked and paid the mortal price?...
Read entire article at NYT
In thinking about the Holocaust, we have grown accustomed to images of the Nazis’ victims: shadowy naked figures on the edge of ditches about to be dispatched by the SS-Einsatzgruppen; huddled wide-eyed children; skeletal human simulacra; piles of bones. Getting the perpetrators in focus is harder.
But here, revealed by these newly discovered photographs, are the German murderers in all their dumb humanity, flirting and joking and lighting Christmas trees, as if what awaited them after the frolicking were just the bus to some dull job in a dental office rather than the supervision of Auschwitz’s industrialized killing machine....
I wish I could say I was surprised by the photos (on display at the museum Web site — www.ushmm.org). My years in Germany eroded my capacity for shock. The walk from Buchenwald’s brick-chimneyed crematorium to the genteel streets of Weimar — home to Schiller and Goethe, birthplace of the Bauhaus — is illusion-stripping. In 1942, Buchenwald prisoners were ordered to make wooden boxes to protect Schiller’s work....
Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote in 1960 of a Germany “overcrowded with absentees,” full of people “who happen to be in this country fleeing from this country.” With the years, Germany has gained confidence, pried open locked drawers, filled some of the absences. But these photos are an invitation to do more.
Inevitably, they pose the question: What would you have done? Filled your mouth with blueberries or balked and paid the mortal price?...