Nazi's photo album shows life of a top Auschwitz officer | 60 Minutes

When a new play by acclaimed writer-director Moisés Kaufman opened on Broadway last week, it had already been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It is based on the true story of an awit

photo

album

that was sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC in 2007. Museum historians weren't sure what to do with it at first, but the

album

turned out to be the scrapbook of a Nazi and SS

officer

who helped run the daily operations of Owitz, where about 1.1 million people mostly live. The Jews were murdered between 1940 and 1945. The album does not show prisoners or gas chambers.

What it does show are some of history's most notorious killers apparently having fun. That's what museum officials found so chilling and what Moises Kaufman spent 14 years creating a The game about history will continue at a time when I saw the

photo

graphs for the first time, I got goosebumps and I remember thinking : "You know, a lot of people in my family died in Aitz and these are the people who were doing it and they don't seem to be doing it." I have some remorse seeing that in such a clearly articulated photograph it is terrifying. This is scary because they all look a lot like us.

The photographs may seem ordinary at first. SS

officer

s at dinners drinking socializing flirting with their young Nazi secretaries, but when these photographs were taken. the Germans were losing the war and exterminating more Jews and awit than at any other time in the Holocaust several images show an SS officer giving cranberries to his secretaries while a man plays an accordion the inscription says here are cranberries Moses Kaufman chose that For the title of your work, you wanted the audience to have the experience that we had when looking at the photographs. What was it about the series of women eating blueberries that caught your attention so much that there were only teenage girls who were secretaries? photographer their empty plates, but there is one of the women who pretends to cry and is very sad because she ran out of blueberries and outside the frame there are 1.1 million people who are being murdered, so how do you go about your daily

life

and at the same time do you participate?

In one of the greatest killing machines in human history, legend has it rain from a clear sky. Kaufman's work focuses on museum historians who worked with survivors and even descendants of the Nazis to discover which album the images appear to be. Straight out of a vacation scrapbook, no one had seen images like these before. There are few clever photos because the Nazis worked hard to hide their crimes. I count 116 photographs. Kaufman's main character is Rebecca Reing, the Holocaust Museum historian played by actress Elizabeth. stalman This is when the album becomes an obsession for me, the real Rebel Rebecca received the album from a former US counterintelligence officer who she said she founded in 1946 in an abandoned apartment in the devastated city of Frankfurt, while hunting Nazi war criminals.

She donated it to the museum. but she wanted to remain anonymous, how did you find out who did this? I didn't see any trains I didn't see anything I recognized that it was maybe the third time I was flipping through it and that's when I saw Joseph Mangala There are no photos of Dr. Joseph mangala on awit he had been found before to see the album we went to a control facility high security climate in Maryland where the original pages are stored that is Dr mangala that is mangala and these remain the only known photos of mangala while he was stationed at the camp mangala was known to prisoners in the asts as the angel of death.

He performed gruesome medical experiments primarily on children and often stood on the platform when trains arrived selecting who would be sent to work and who would immediately die in the gas chambers. mangala, these are some of the most infamous officers in the camp, so you'll see there's Bayer. Richard Bayer is on the first page of the album. He was the last awit commander who helped historians identify his aide Carl Hawker and it turned out that this was Hawker's personal album. Cherished Memories behind the scenes of a massacre May 1944 is when Hawker came to Ashwoods, yes, so this is all of his time in Ashwoods before the war.

Hawker had been a struggling bank teller and becoming an SS officer in Aitz was considered a big step forward. He had worked in the Midic camp before this, so he had experience with prisoners arriving with gas chamber selections. He signed receipts for zeyon B, the lethal gas used to kill people. He is a crucial COG in the Nazi killing machine. The 116 photos. on the album it

shows

Aitz as Carl Hawker wanted to remember him wow it's a mix of sincere and really official stuff this is his dog his dog's name is favorite I mean the surprising thing about them is how normal yeah yeah I mean , who does not?

I took a photo of them shaking hands with their dog mhm so this is the Ule fire of 1944, which is Nazi Christmas. They know the Soviets are coming. They are not far away. You can probably hear the bombs. Yes, the album reveals something else that museum officials had not seen. Before the Nazis built a resort in Awit, it was called Sulah Huta. These images show a meeting of senior SS officers there in July 1944. Rebecca rebels and believes it was a party congratulating themselves for successfully murdering over 350,000 Hungarian Jews in just 55 days. It sounds like they're singing, they are, and this front row is really what museum director Sarah Bloomfield calls the criminals' chorus, so you've got Hucker, you've got OT M, the head of the gas chamber section. , there is Rudolph Hurst, the former commander of The former commander of Aitz Mangala is here, they are celebrating the successful mass murder of Su.

Yeah, so you know someone labeled it a metropolis of death and that's what it was. It functioned as an assembly line factory. Irene Weiss had to wait that day. After Carl Hawker began working there, she arrived when she was 13 on a train full of Jews from Hungary, separated from her parents and four of her siblings. She says that she found herself on the platform holding her younger sister Edith's hand as they approached Dr. Manga and all. it was in a matter of seconds you know that stick fell between us he he held

life

and death with that stick suddenly I was alone she didn't know it at the time but that moment was captured by a Nazi photographer documenting the arrival and processing of hungarian jews appears in one of the only other aitz albums this photo has been colorized this is the group already going to the gas chamber where are you in this photo?

Well I'm here, it's you, it's me, here so this is the moment after you were separated from your little sister Edith, the same moment yes, that's what I'm seeing, I can't leave, I left her. Irene Weiss never saw Edith, her parents, or her living siblings again, which she has. This photo is of her mother Leia sitting on the floor right behind her brothers Gerson and Reuben in Aitz. After taking this photo, they were taken to a gas chamber, they had to kill the children so they wouldn't be a new generation and they discovered that if they also killed the mothers then they didn't have to worry about the chaos that would create separating the children.

Children would not be upset about being separated and mothers would not be upset. Wife spent the next eight months working outside one of those gas chambers, she sorted shoes and other belongings of the dead. We saw these columns of women, mothers and children and they came through the door talking to us and told them they were entering a bathhouse. Know? asking questions where are you from and half an hour later the chimney was spitting fire and that continued day after day and night after night, so you saw thousands of women and children entering gas chambers and you talked to some of them in the last seconds. of his life

minutes

of his life yes, but we couldn't cry it was something amazing this goes beyond crying tears are for normal pain that type of brutality on the part of humanity is so deep that you know people say Broken Heart, The heart keeps working but the soul never forgets Irene Weiss was not surprised by the photos in Carl Hawker's album, but when they were made public they made headlines around the world.

Tillman T read about them online in Germany during his lunch break and there was an article with new photos. from aitz have appeared yes, I thought this was interesting when he looked at the photos, he was surprised to see his grandfather, Dr. hin bom Cotter, in the first image, it was not 100% % clear, but then I flipped two more images and It was absolutely 100% clear that it was him. He knew that his grandfather was the head doctor at the Soen Housen concentration camp and had performed medical experiments on prisoners and sent thousands of people to be killed in other camps, but Tab was not sure why his grandfather had gone to Aitz in Germany.

He is the one who connected with Rebecca Oring and soon discovered how deeply involved his grandfather was in the Holocaust. When you see your grandfather's photo, does that feel like your grandfather to me, strictly speaking? They are two different people. The grandfather I knew was quite The normal grandfather and the SS officer are different people for me, it is impossible to reconcile them. It's difficult, difficult. Really T now helps the museum search for more photographs and documents by communicating with other descendants of Nazis, of course you want to be a part. some kind of movement that will help prevent things like this from happening again you know your grandfather and you know what he did it makes you think differently about human beings than we are all capable of absolutely absolutely how highly educated doctors could be people whose entire professional purpose was to heal and become systematic killers, the work on Hawker's album by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Grck, his co-writer and longtime collaborator, raises difficult questions not only about our past but also about ourselves when we look at these images that we are looking through the lens of how they saw what they were doing why it's important to see AST through their eyes because they didn't wake up every morning thinking I'm an evil monster.

I'm going to do monstrous and evil things. They woke up every day and left. about their lives full of justifications and beliefs in what they were doing, makes us wonder what I am capable of doing. I think that's what's happening when they come in and sit here and say, who would I have been in that? Imagine that the most dangerous animal in the world is man because other animals will hurt you if they are hungry or it is their nature to hunt, but man can become an animal in a short time, all he needs is permission as soon as he is asked. give permission from above.

The government's advances accelerate even a hint of permission that it's okay to attack this group or exclude this group or shame that group. It's happening, it's never stopped.