The Auschwitz Album, a collection of photographs taken by the Nazis at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, will be re-released in French on Friday, with thoughtful annotations by historians who have carefully scrutinized it.
An Album from Auschwitz: How the Nazis Photographed their Crimes (editions du Seuil) is the work of French Tal Bruttmann and Germans Stefan Hördler and Christoph Kreutzmüller.
The German edition of her book was published in 2019. The French translation is by Olivier Mannoni, also a translator of Mein Kampf.
The critical edition of Adolf Hitler’s programmatic book, published in French in 1924-1925 by Fayard in 2021, following the 2016 German version, had already shown how the Nazi production could be transformed into support for a story that was accessible to everyone is accessible to those who want to understand the genocidal mechanisms of National Socialism.
This “album” was made in 1944 by two SS photographers. And historians start from the same ambition: to deconstruct what was originally intended to glorify the Nazi project for Europe.
“These are images, a completely different object than the text. And although Mein Kampf has been extensively commented on, no one has looked at these photographs before us. In general, the analysis of photos is rarely integrated into the work of historians,” Tal Bruttmann told AFP.
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“World famous” photos
In the case of Auschwitz-Birkenau, an extermination camp in southern Poland where 1.1 million people were murdered, the SS documents the reception work for Jewish deportees from Hungary.
Officially, the aim is to “relocate” population groups designated as undesirable and to select the individuals who are able to work. In fact, the photographers know they are capturing the last moments of the convicts in the gas chambers.
“These photos are world famous,” says the historian. If you are looking for pictures of Auschwitz, you will come across them. They are in the documentation, in the books, in all the museums that talk about the Shoah. So they are rooted in representations and have watered popular culture.
But “if you’ve seen them in isolation, you probably don’t know they’re from this album of 197 photos taken by the SS. We found that,” adds Tal Bruttmann.
From Auschwitz to Miami
The lawyer and historian of the deportation Serge Klarsfeld had cleared up the history of this album after its discovery. Brought to the Dora camp by its first owner, a German woman, it was accidentally found there by a 19-year-old deportee, Lili Jacob, in the bedside table of a former SS room.
She sees many people she knew in the photos, including her parents. She will cling to this preciously preserved object, taken with her during her post-war emigration to Miami.
Serge Klarsfeld will find her under her married name and persuade her to leave the album to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.
In the foreword he writes: “It took thirty-five years (…) Forty years were still needed to create this book [celui publié vendredi] answers most open questions”.
What the three historians, who bring together “very different fields”, shed light on are both the conditions of these recordings and what they teach us about Auschwitz.
“A lot can be learned from this for our understanding,” emphasizes Tal Bruttmann.
“While the assassination process itself is masked, the photos reflect an attempt to fix the arrival process (…) as an established value chain,” the authors conclude.
Printed on fine paper, the book costs 49 euros, with the support of the Franco-German Youth Office and the Foundation for Remembrance of the Shoah.