The Summer Camp For Auschwitz Personnel
In the heart of the Holocaust, a grotesque paradox was unfolding. Just 30 kilometres south of Auschwitz, a place where over a million people met their brutal fate, the perpetrators of this horror were indulging in leisure and recreation. Photographs taken between May and December 1944 reveal Auschwitz officers and guards relaxing at the SS resort of Solahütte. These images, held by the United States National Holocaust Museum, offer a chilling insight into the “social life” of the very people responsible for mass murder, even as countless innocents perished nearby.
Solahütte, a retreat located along the Sola River, was an oasis for the SS officers, a reprieve from their grisly duties at Auschwitz. The SS rewarded those who performed their roles “exemplarily” at the camp with trips to Solahütte, where they could hunt, sing, and even celebrate Christmas. One image hauntingly captures a man decorating a Christmas tree—a holiday in hell as the atrocities at Auschwitz continued unabated just kilometres away.
The images in the album, which belonged to Karl Höcker, adjutant to Auschwitz’s final commandant Richard Baer, reveal the SS officers in moments of carefree joy. Some are seen singing songs, others are hunting in the forest. In one of the most disturbing images, Höcker and his companions are caught in a staged performance, where some women playfully pretend to weep after turning their bowls upside down, pretending they are empty. This was on 22 July 1944. Just a day later, the Soviets liberated Majdanek, the first concentration camp to fall, sending thousands of prisoners on a forced march to Auschwitz, of which only half survived.
The women in these photographs, known as Helferinnen (meaning ‘helpers’), were not guards but typists, telegraph clerks, and secretaries at Auschwitz. These women were chosen for their racial purity and were seen as potential companions for SS officers. As Holocaust historian David Wilkinson notes, these women were part of a system that treated genocide as a normal, bureaucratic function—an unimaginable dissonance between their ordinary appearance and the horrors unfolding in the nearby camp.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of this album is the presence of Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s infamous doctor. Known for his monstrous medical experiments on prisoners, including children, Mengele appears in several photographs, blending in seamlessly with his fellow officers. These photos are among the very few existing of Mengele during his time at Auschwitz, offering a rare visual link to a man responsible for some of the most barbaric war crimes ever committed.
Despite the carefree smiles and jovial camaraderie, these photos are a harrowing reminder of the duality of human nature—the SS officers could relax, joke, and enjoy themselves while overseeing a system designed for mass murder. Judith Cohen, director of the museum’s photographic reference collection, chillingly observed, “there are no photos depicting anything abhorrent, and that’s precisely what makes them so horrible.” These images normalise the individuals responsible for the unimaginable suffering in Auschwitz, making it all the more difficult to reconcile the reality of their actions with the images of them in repose.
Later in this series of photographs, “the women and the officer turn their bowls to the camera; some invert them to show that they are empty,” Wilkinson writes. “One woman pretends to weep.
The scene took place on July 22, 1944. On July 23rd the Soviets liberated Majdanek, the first concentration camp to fall. Majdanek was about a hundred and eighty miles northeast of Auschwitz. When the camp was abandoned, a thousand prisoners were force-marched to Auschwitz. Only half of them arrived.
The Trial of Karl Höcker
Karl Höcker, the man behind these photos, presents a compelling case of the banality of evil. As adjutant to Richard Baer, Höcker was intricately involved in the running of Auschwitz, yet he later claimed that he neither wanted the events at Auschwitz to happen, nor did he participate in them. “I didn’t harm anyone and no one died at Auschwitz because of me,” he declared at his trial in Frankfurt in 1963. Despite these claims, he was convicted of aiding and abetting the murders of 1,000 Jews and sentenced to seven years in prison, serving five before being released.
Following the war, Höcker lived in obscurity, working as a bank clerk until his arrest. His assertion that he had no role in the atrocities at Auschwitz rings hollow when juxtaposed with the images of him smiling and enjoying the amenities at Solahütte. These photos, which he took as personal keepsakes, serve as a stark reminder that those who commit evil often rationalise their actions and maintain a sense of personal innocence.
Solahütte: A Darkly Twisted Resort
The existence of Solahütte itself is a chilling testament to the horrors of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. Here, SS personnel who participated in the industrial-scale murder of Jews, Poles, Roma, and other victims were rewarded with relaxation and recreation. Archival records reveal that guards like SS Private Johann Antoni and SS man Hans Kartusch were given eight days’ leave at Solahütte as a reward for the “successful use of their weapons” during a prisoner escape attempt. This reward system shows how deeply ingrained the Nazi ideology was in the camp’s operations—a world where mass murder was seen as an accomplishment worthy of reward.
As the SS members took time off, hundreds were being murdered nearby at Auschwitz.
This photograph, taken at Auschwitz, shows “nearly a hundred officers arrayed like a glee club up the side of a hill. The accordion player stands across the road,” Wilkinson writes. “All the men are singing except those in the very front, who perhaps feel too important for it.”
The group includes Richard Baer; Rudolf Hoess, who had supervised the building of Auschwitz and had been its first commandant; and Josef Mengele, the doctor who performed infamous medical experiments on twins and other prisoners. This album contains eight pictures of Mengele—the only known photographs of him at Auschwitz.
“Hoecker was born in Engerhausen, Germany, in December 1911, the youngest child of six. His father, a bricklayer, died in the First World War, leaving his family impoverished. Hoecker worked at a bank, then joined the SS in 1933.
At the beginning of the war, he was drafted into the SS Fighting Corps, and in 1940 he was sent to work at Neuengamme concentration camp, near Hamburg.
In 1942, he was transferred to Majdanek, where he was adjutant during the Harvest Festival of November 1943, when all the Jews from three camps, including Majdanek, were assembled and shot, in order to prevent uprisings. Forty-two thousand prisoners were killed in two days”.
“Rudolf Hoess, in ‘Death Dealer,’ a memoir he wrote after his arrest, noted that the adjutant ‘has a special position of trust. He must ensure that no important event in the camp remains unknown to the Commandant”, Wilkinson writes.
“A few days before Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, in January 1945, Hoecker and Baer fled to Germany, where Baer was made commandant of the Dora-Mittelbau camp, and Hoecker was again his adjutant.
When that camp was liberated by American troops, in April, Hoecker and Baer followed the advice of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, which was that SS officers insinuate themselves among the troops, in the hope of being taken for ordinary soldiers.
Hoecker joined a fighting unit that was captured by the British in northern Germany. He spent a year and a half in a POW camp, and was released, apparently because no one recognised him”.
The “small, chubby, bald man wearing a suit”, Wilkinson writes, “is Carl Clauberg, a doctor who performed sterilization experiments on women, using acid.
He was tried by the Soviets, in 1948, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He was released early and arrested again, by the Germans; he died in 1957, awaiting his second trial”.
Hoecker in his summer uniform — “a little wilted, his sleeves rolled”, Wilkinson writes. After the war, Hoecker went back to his bank job. But “in 1952, he turned himself in for having belonged to the SS”, Wilkinson writes. He was sentenced to nine months that he never served.
Hoecker was tried again in 1963 at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, found guilty of “aiding and abetting the death of a thousand people on four occasions,” and received a seven-year sentence—but escaped more serious charges because he insisted that he had never been on the selection ramp where prisoners were divided between work duty and the gas chambers. He served part of his sentence, “was paroled in 1970, returned again to his job at the bank, and died, at eighty-nine, in 2000”.
A Legacy of Pain
The photographs in this album, while depicting a seemingly normal “social life,” stand as a grotesque reminder of the capacity for evil within ordinary individuals. These SS officers and their female companions were not born monsters. They were products of a system that dehumanised its victims and elevated genocide to a matter of state policy. The photos offer an important perspective on the psychology of those who perpetrated the Holocaust, highlighting the chasm between their inner worlds and the realities of their victims.
While similar images exist for other camps such as Sachsenhausen, Dachau, and Buchenwald, this is the first such collection to be discovered for Auschwitz. These images are more than just historical documentation—they are a chilling testament to the capacity for ordinary people to commit extraordinary evil, and they offer an unsettling glimpse into the world of the Auschwitz SS, whose lives of leisure starkly contrasted with the suffering they orchestrated and oversaw.
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