Sing-Alongs, Blueberry-Picking And Genocide

Photos of banal SS camp life and carnage at Auschwitz are badly organized, but still jarring, in 'Scrapbooks from Hell.'

Nazi officers in a scene from “Scrapbooks from Hell.”

by Curt Schleier
Special To The Jewish Week

Though at times overly dramatic and poorly organized, “Nazi Scrapbooks From Hell: The Auschwitz Albums,” which airs Sunday on cable TV, still has the power to infuriate — especially as Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) nears. It is about two sets of photos taken at roughly the same at Auschwitz but with jarringly different themes.
A former army counter-intelligence officer who discovered it while stationed in Germany after the war donated the first set to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The photos apparently belonged to Karl Höcker, adjunct to the commandant of the Auschwitz complex.
A couple of things make these pictures especially interesting. First, Höcker arrived at the camp towards the end of May 1944, around the time Nazis

were delivering 8,000 Hungarian Jews a day for execution. The numbers were so overwhelming (about 437,000 all told in just a few months), the ovens couldn’t handle the volume. So the remains of many were burned in huge bonfires outside.
As important, these weren’t photos of the victims, but of the perpetrators at play (including the only known photo of Josef Mengele taken at the camp). After a hard day in the office beating and killing Jews, the SS returned to hearth and home for cocktail parties, sing-alongs and weekend excursions to pick blueberries.
As Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the museum notes, “it shows the killers as humans (and) pushes our comfort level where we don’t want to go.” She’s correct; it is much more comforting to think of the Nazis as animals than human like us.
The documentary also shows photos taken about the time by two SS photographers at Auschwitz. Called the Jacob Photos, they were discovered by survivor Lily Jacob and are currently displayed at Yad Vashem. They show the Nazis at work, beginning with the unloading of prisoners from their cattle cars and ending with flames. Only the gas chambers were not shown in operation.
This would have been much more effective if the two sets of photos were juxtaposed against each other. Instead the filmmaker spends roughly the first third of his film on the Nazis at play photos, frankly leaving the impression that this is what the entire documentary will be about. The Jacob album materializes out of nowhere and strikes a discordant note when it is introduced.
SS Officer Höcker was never convicted of causing any deaths in the camp; no one could testify that they saw him sending people to the ovens. Instead, he served seven years in prison and died peacefully in his sleep as a free man. The film spends an inordinate amount of time with a couple of forensic photographers attempting to determine if the man whose back is shown in the Jacob photos deciding who lives and dies is Höcker. As Michael Berenbaum, director of the Ziering Holocaust Institute in California notes, “I’m not sure what difference it makes if he’s the person or not.”
Why waste good film on this issue? Even if they could prove it, what were they going to do, dig him up and hang him?
Also, there’s a moment where the cameras zoom in on what appear to be tiny sculptures of Jews being herded into the camps. The lights change from bright yellow to red and symphonic music plays louder in the background. It’s not necessary. What we’re witnessing is dramatic enough and false special effects are overkill that diminish rather than enhance.
Frankly, there is a good half hour documentary buried here. Still, it is more important for this story be told than to dismiss it because it isn’t told well. n
“Nazi Scrapbooks From Hell: The Auschwitz Albums” airs Sunday, April 27 at 9 p.m. on the National Geographic Channel.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization