Neil Lewis of the New York Times reports on a stunning artifact recently donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: a photo album of the daily life of the SS officers of Auschwitz.
Compiled by Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant, the scrapbook includes 116 photos, some of young men and women enjoying themselves at sing-alongs, relaxing at an Alpine lodge and cheekily turning their bowls upside down after eating fresh blueberries. The book also includes the only known photos of Josef Mengele, the notorious camp doctor, taken of him at Auschwitz.
The NYT provides an excellent slide show narrated by USHM archivist Rebecca Erbelding, who discusses the magnitude of this recent find and its chilling depiction of “the banality of evil.” Also, I highly recommend visiting the USHM website to see all the photographs. I have only picked out the ones of Höcker playing with his dog Favorit.
With all the OJ Simpson coverage this last week, you may not have heard of the recent finding by ORB, a British polling agency, that 1.2 million Iraqi civilians have been killed since the start of the war.
On a final note, Ken Burns’s documentary The War begins this Sunday on PBS. Perhaps revisiting the reality of war through the eyes of those who lived it will finally register with our representatives and our president. Perhaps they’ll realize that the acceptable collateral damage of war equals human lives. And that it’s not acceptable. It’s barbaric.
