Inside an SS officer’s Auschwitz photo album

In 2007, Dr. Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, was sent an album of old photographs, apparently taken in Europe in the 1940s. Nothing strange about that: her role at the museum has seen her receive donations of wartime memorabilia – letters, diaries, mementos, snapshots – almost every day of the year.

In this case, however, the donor, an 87-year-old retired US lieutenant colonel, claimed that the photographs, discovered in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt while on US government business back in 1946, had been taken at Auschwitz, the largest and most murderous Nazi concentration camp.

Erbelding was doubtful. “I knew that practically no photographs were taken in the camp,” she tells me now. “We have a few pictures taken in 1944 showing people’s heads being shaved and waiting outside the gas chamber. There are also pictures of Heinrich Himmler’s visit in 1942. But Auschwitz was located in an area of ​​German-occupied Poland that was very secure. So I knew it was he has you would be wrong.”

He wasn’t. The 32-page album in his possession had a total of 116 black and white images, both amateur and professional, showing Nazis in the concentration camp; sometimes at work, but more often during free time. Some see the man who now thought he collected the pictures (and took the ones in which he does not appear): Karl Höcker, a former bank clerk who joined the SS and served as administrative assistant to Richard Baer, ​​the last commandant of Auschwitz.

There are pictures of Nazis in the camp sharing a joke and a drink, or lighting candles on a Christmas tree. There are others of young female communication specialists (Helpers) lounging on deckchairs in the sun, or perched on a fence, smiling while eating blueberries. One group shot shows several members of the camp’s high command (including Josef Kramer, Rudolf Höss and Josef Mengele) singing as an accordionist plays. Dressed in full Nazi uniform, they are almost certainly celebrating, Erbelding now believes, the successful completion of a plan to exterminate 350,000 Hungarian Jews.

That picture is one of many taken at Solahütte, a holiday chalet that the Nazis repurposed as a place for camp commanders and their families to spend some down time. Occupying an idyllic location above Lake Międzybrodzkie, it was only 20 miles from the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Strikingly, of all the photographs in Höcker’s album, not one shows a camp prisoner. “They are really selfies of an SS officer,” says Amanda Gronich, an American writer who specializes in adapting true stories for stage and screen. “And I don’t mean that glibly. I mean that [taking selfies] it was exactly what they were doing.” As artless as holiday snaps, the photos are shocking in their cheerful depiction of a seemingly carefree life going on alongside one of history’s most notorious killing machines.

These images and the mysterious story of their discovery form the backbone of Here Are Blueberries – a Pulitzer-nominated play, conceived and co-written by Gronich with playwright Moisés Kaufman – which has its UK premiere in East London this month. Combining large-scale projections with a script embroidered from real-life testimonies, it is both a provocative piece of immersive theater and a gripping detective story.

In Höcker’s album, the photographs are accompanied only by the briefest of handwritten captions (one of which gives the play its title) so Erbelding and her colleague Judy Cohen, who both appear as characters on stage, spent months decoding them, identifying them as carefully as they could and establishing 1944 as the date the pictures were taken. “Although we think that at least one was taken in the first week of January 1945, two weeks before Auschwitz was evacuated,” clarifies Erbelding. “The guards know the Soviets are coming, but there is a picture of them going on a hunting trip. And instead of destroying the photos, which he should have done, Höcker carefully sticks them in an album. It is delusional. It suggests that to some extent, the Nazi command really believed that the Germans were still going to win.”

The album overturns several widespread misconceptions about the management of the Nazi death camps, not least the assumption that the staff were all men. In fact, “apple-cheeked young women” were regularly employed as Helpers in Auschwitz, a position in which, the play argues, they would have intimate knowledge of the horrors being committed.

“For some of these young women, serving in the Third Reich was a chance to leave home,” says Gronich. “It was an adventure. They were teenagers who went and maybe even find a husband.”

Perhaps more significantly, both the photographs and the play are radically unconventional in looking at Auschwitz through the eyes of a Nazi, rather than that of their victims. An early scene in the play reconstructs a conversation between Erbelding and her boss about the ethics of promoting such an opinion in the context of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, with the latter insisting, “We don’t want to elevate the Nazis, to give them any kind of platform,” before agreeing that museum visitors should be free to draw their own conclusions.

Kaufman, whose father is a Holocaust survivor, was inspired to write the play (first uploaded as a work in progress in 2018) by an article in the New York Times which reproduced some of the images from the Höcker album under the title “In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Relax and Frolic”.

“The Holocaust has been written about more than any other historical event,” he tells me, “and, as an artist, I have always thought, everything that needs to be said has already been said”. Then he saw the photos and immediately had two thoughts. “First of all, how can you be so happy when, out of the frame, you are killing 1.1 million people? And secondly, these photos are [doing something] new. There is a long history of people trying to distance themselves from the Nazis, to declare that the Nazis are monsters. By putting pictures like this in a play, you force the audience to walk in the shoes of the Nazis.”

In this way, Here Are Blueberries it feels like a piece of friends of a kind that The Area of ​​InterestJonathan Glazer’s 2024 Oscar-winning film, which brutally juxtaposes the domestic tranquility of the Auschwitz home where camp commandant Rudolf Höss and his young family lived, with the industrial horror unfolding just above the garden wall. Here Are Blueberries also includes photographs of that garden, given to Kaufman and Gronich by Höss’ grandson after he recognized his grandfather in some of Höcker’s photographs.

Looking at the image, it’s hard not to think of Hannah Arendt’s much-quoted phrase about “the banality of evil”. Kaufman tells me that on a research visit to Auschwitz he was struck by the presence of a fire cistern, placed there, he said, at the insistence of a 1940s insurance company that refused to insure the camp without it. Erbelding remembers seeing beautiful patterns on the walls of the secretarial office, presumably stencilled there by women to “cheer up” their daily environment.

Perhaps above all, the play leaves the audience with several tantalizing questions, not the least of which is why the anonymous donor kept the photos secret for so long after discovering them in Frankfurt in the 40s – and what finally prompted him to hand them over to the museum, 60 years later? “This question keeps me up at night,” says Kaufman. “Because we will never know.” When the Holocaust Memorial Museum tried to re-establish contact with the Lieutenant Colonel only months after he had given the album, they were informed that he had died.

But we know what became of Höcker. In 1965, he was tried as part of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials and sentenced to seven years in prison for aiding and abetting more than 1,000 murders during his time in the camp; he continued to deny any responsibility, insisting “I didn’t hurt anyone… nor did anyone die in Auschwitz because of me.” After his release from prison, he returned to his job as head teller at a local bank; died in January 2000, aged 88.

If the photos had been provided 10 years earlier, it would have been possible that Gronich and Kaufman could have requested a conversation with Höcker, perhaps even a meeting. What could they have liked to ask? “Tell me how you got here,” suggests Kaufman. “Tell me how you convinced yourself that this kind of behavior was possible.”

He also wanted to know why Höcker took the photos in the first place? “Oh I know why he took them,” he says. “He thought the Reich would last 1,000 years and he wanted to document how he had helped. He was a bank teller who, suddenly, was second in command in an enterprise involving 200,000 people. He couldn’t believe his luck.”

Here There Blueberries is in East StratfordLondon E15, from 31 January to 28 February

Try full access to The Telegraph for free today. Discover their award-winning website and essential news app, as well as useful tools and expert guides for your money, health and holidays.