Tag: nazi

By the time a new play opened last week off-Broadway by acclaimed writer and director Moises Kaufman, it had already been nominated for a Pulitzer prize. It’s based on the true story of a photo album from Auschwitz that was sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC in 2007. Museum historians weren’t sure what to make of it at first, but the album turned out to be the scrapbook of a Nazi – an SS officer – who helped run the day-to-day operations of Auschwitz, where about 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered between 1940 and 1945. The album doesn’t show any prisoners or gas chambers, what it does show are some of the most notorious killers in history seemingly enjoying themselves. That’s what museum officials found so chilling, and what Moises Kaufman spent 14 years creating a play about.

Moises Kaufman: When I first saw the photographs I got goosebumps, and I– I remember thinking– you know, s– many of the people in my family died in Auschwitz. And these are the people who were doing it. And they don’t seem to have any remorse. Seeing that in a photograph so clearly articulated is terrifying. This is terrifying because they all look so much like us. 

The photographs may appear unremarkable at first – SS officers at dinner parties drinking, socializing, flirting with their young Nazi secretaries – but when these pictures were taken, the Germans were losing the war and exterminating more Jews in Auschwitz than at any other time in the Holocaust. 

Several images show an SS officer giving his secretaries blueberries while a man plays an accordion. The inscription reads: “here there are blueberries.” Moises Kaufman picked that for the title of his play. 

Moises Kaufman: I wanted the audience to have the experience that we had looking at the photographs.

Anderson Cooper: What was it about the series of the women eating blueberries that– that so struck you?

Moises Kaufman: That they were just, you know, teenage girls who were secretaries. Everyone is showing the photographer their empty plates, there’s one of the women who’s pretend crying. So she’s so sad because she’s run out of blueberries and outside of the frame, there’s 1.1 million people who are being killed. So how do you lead your daily life and at the same time participate in one of the largest killing machines in the history of mankind?

Kaufman’s play is centered on the museum historians who worked with survivors and even descendants of Nazis themselves to uncover what the album was. 

No one had ever seen images like these before. There are few photos of Auschwitz because the Nazis worked hard to conceal their crimes.

Kaufman’s main character is Rebecca Erbelding, a historian at the Holocaust museum, played by actor Elizabeth Stahlmann.

The real Rebecca Erbelding received the album from a former U.S. counterintelligence officer. He said he found it in 1946 in an abandoned apartment in war-torn Frankfurt while hunting down Nazi war criminals. He donated it to the museum but wanted to remain anonymous. 

Anderson Cooper: How did you go about finding out who made this?

Rebecca Erbelding: I didn’t see any trains. I didn’t see anything I recognized. It was maybe the third time flipping through it, and that’s when I saw Josef Mengele.

No pictures of Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz had ever been found before. To see the album, we went to a high security, climate-controlled facility in Maryland where the original pages are stored. 

Anderson Cooper: That’s Dr. Mengele.

Rebecca Erbelding: That’s Mengele. And these are still the only known photos of Mengele while he was stationed at the camp.

Mengele was known by prisoners at Auschwitz as the “angel of death.” He conducted gruesome medical experiments, mostly on children, and often stood on the platform when trains arrived, selecting who would be sent to work and who would die immediately in gas chambers.

Rebecca Erbelding: Not only is it Mengele, these are some of the most infamous officers at the camp. So you see there’s Baer. 

Richard Baer is on the album’s first page, he was the last commandant of Auschwitz. That helped historians identify his deputy, Karl Höcker. And it turned out this was Höcker’s personal album – his cherished memories behind the scenes of a massacre.

Anderson Cooper: May 1944 is when Höcker got to Auschwitz.

Rebecca Erbelding: Yes. So this is the entirety of his time at Auschwitz.

Before the war Höcker had been a struggling bank teller. Becoming an SS officer at Auschwitz was considered a big step up. 

Rebecca Erbelding: He had been staffed at the Majdanek camp before this and so he had experience with prisoners arriving, with selections, with gas chambers. He signed receipts for Zyklon B, the lethal gas that was used for killing people. He is a crucial cog in the Nazi killing machine.

The 116 photos in the album show Auschwitz as Karl Höcker wanted to remember it. 

Anderson Cooper: Wow.

Rebecca Erbelding: It’s a mix of, like, candid things and really official. This is his dog. His dog’s name is “Favorit.”

Anderson Cooper: I mean what’s so stunning about them is how–

Rebecca Erbelding: Normal.

Anderson Cooper: Yeah.

Rebecca Erbelding: Yea.

Anderson Cooper: I mean, who hasn’t taken a photo of them shaking their dog’s hand?

Rebecca Erbelding: Uh-huh. So this is “Yule Fire 1944,” which is–

Anderson Cooper: Wow.

Rebecca Erbelding: — Nazi Christmas.

Rebecca Erbelding: They know that the Soviets are coming. They are not far. They can probably hear the bombs and here– here they’re lighting–

Anderson Cooper: And they’re lighting a Christmas tree.

Rebecca Erbelding: Yeah.

The album revealed something else museum officials hadn’t seen before. The Nazis built a vacation resort at Auschwitz. It was called Solahütte. These pictures show a gathering of top SS officers there in July 1944. Rebecca Erbelding believes it was a party – they were congratulating themselves for successfully murdering more than 350,000 Hungarian Jews in just 55 days. 

Anderson Cooper: This looks like they’re singing.

Rebecca Erbelding: They are. This front row is really what the director of the museum, Sara Bloomfield, calls the “chorus of criminals.” So you have Höcker. You have Otto Moll, the head of the gas chamber section. There’s Rudolf Höss.

Anderson Cooper: The former commandant of Auschwitz.

Rebecca Erbelding: The former commandant of Auschwitz. Mengele is here.

Anderson Cooper: They’re celebrating the– the successful– 

Rebecca Erbelding: The successful mass–

Anderson Cooper: –slaughter–

Rebecca Erbelding: –murder. Yeah.  

Irene Weiss: It was, somebody labeled it, a metropolis of death. And that’s what it was. It worked like an assembly line factory.

Irene Weiss got to Auschwitz the day after Karl Höcker started working there. She arrived when she was 13, on a train packed with Jews from Hungary. Separated from her parents and four of her siblings, she says she found herself on the platform holding her younger sister Edith’s hand as they approached Dr. Mengele. 

Irene Weiss: And everything was in a matter of seconds, you know, the stick came down between us. He held life and death with that stick. All of a sudden, 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. It appears in one of the only other albums of Auschwitz. This photo has been colorized. 

Irene Weiss: This is the group already going to the gas chamber.

Anderson Cooper: Wa– where are you in this picture?

Irene Weiss: Well, I am right here

Anderson Cooper: This is you–

Irene Weiss: That’s me right here.

Anderson Cooper: So this is the moment after you’d been separated from your little sister, Edith.

Irene Weiss: The very moment, yes. That’s what I’m looking at. I can’t leave. I left her.

Irene Weiss never saw Edith, her parents, or her brothers alive again. What she has is this photo. That’s her mother Leah sitting on the ground just behind her brothers Gershon and Reuben at Auschwitz. After this picture was taken, they were led into a gas chamber. 

Irene Weiss: They had to kill the children so there will not 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 that would create, separating.

Anderson Cooper: The children wouldn’t be upset by being separated?

Irene Weiss: And the mothers wouldn’t be– wouldn’t be upset.

Weiss spent the next eight months working outside one of those gas chambers. She sorted shoes and other belongings of the dead.

Irene Weiss: We saw these columns of women, mothers and children, and going into the door there talking to us. And they’re told they’re walking into a bathhouse, you know? They’re asking questions, “Where are you from?” And a half hour later, the chimney’s belching fire. And that went on day after day and night after night. 

Anderson Cooper: So you saw thousands of women, children walking into gas chambers?

Irene Weiss: Absolutely.

Anderson Cooper: And you talked to some of them. In the last seconds of their life, minutes of their life.

Irene Weiss: Yes, but we couldn’t cry. It was an amazing thing. This is beyond crying. Tears are for normal pain. That kind of brutality from fellow mankind is so deep that, you know, people say broken heart. The heart keeps working, but the soul never forgets.

Irene Weiss wasn’t surprised by the photos in Karl Höcker’s album, but when they were released publicly, they made headlines around the world. Tilman Taube read about them online in Germany while on his lunch break.

Tilman Taube: And there was an article, “New photos from Auschwitz have appeared.” I thought, “This is interesting.”

When he looked at the photos, he was surprised to see his grandfather – Dr. Heinz Baumkotter. 

Tilman Taube: On the first picture, it wasn’t 100% clear. But then I flipped two more pictures. It was absolutely 100% clear that– that was him.

Taube knew his grandfather was head physician at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and had done medical experiments on prisoners and sent thousands to be killed at other camps. But Taube wasn’t sure why his grandfather had gone to Auschwitz.

He connected with Rebecca Erbelding and soon discovered just how deeply involved his grandfather was in the Holocaust.

Anderson Cooper: When you see the picture of your grandfather, I mean, does that feel like your grandfather?

Tilman Taube: For me, strictly speaking, it’s two different persons. The grandfather that I knew was a rather normal grandfather. And the SS officer is– is a different person for me.

Anderson Cooper: It’s impossible to reconcile the two.

Tilman Taube: It’s difficult, difficult, really.

Taube now helps the museum search for more photos and documents by reaching out to other descendants of Nazis.

Tilman Taube: Of course, you want to be part of some kind of movement that helps preventing things like that from happening again.

Anderson Cooper: You know your grandfather and you know what he did. Does it make you think differently about human beings, what we are all capable of?

Tilman Taube: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

The play about the Höcker album by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, his co-writer and longtime collaborator, raises difficult questions… not just about our past, but about ourselves.

Amanda Gronich: When we look at these pictures, we’re looking through the lens of how they saw what they were doing.

Anderson Cooper: Why is it important to see Auschwitz through their eyes?

Amanda Gronich: Because they didn’t wake up each morning thinking, “I’m an evil monster. I’m going to do evil, monstrous things.” They woke up each day, and they went about their lives filled with justifications and beliefs in what they were doing. 

Anderson Cooper: It makes all of us ask the question, “Well, what am I capable of doing?”

Moises Kaufman: I think that’s what’s happening. When the audience comes in, they sit here and they go, “Who would I have been in that picture?” 

Irene Weiss: The most dangerous animal in the world is man because other animals will hurt you if they’re hungry or it’s their nature of hunting, but man can turn into an animal in no time. All he needs is permission. As soon as permission is given from higher-ups, from government, it accelerates. Even a hint of permission that it’s okay to attack this group or exclude this group or shame that group. It’s– it’s happening. I– it’s never stopped.

Produced by Nichole Marks. Associate producer, John Gallen. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by April Wilson.

Anderson Cooper

Anderson Cooper, anchor of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” has contributed to 60 Minutes since 2006. His exceptional reporting on big news events has earned Cooper a reputation as one of television’s preeminent newsmen.

The names Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald are infamous as the scene of atrocities — concentration camps, run by Adolf Hitler’s notorious SS.

But what you may be surprised to learn, as we were, is that two Nazi concentration camps were established on British soil in the Channel Islands, around 80 miles from the British mainland. The islands lie just off the coast of France, became possessions of the English crown around a thousand years ago – and were occupied by Germany for nearly five years during World War II. Even in the United Kingdom many people don’t know about the camps — and as we discovered, exactly what happened there is hotly disputed.

Holly Williams: It’s pretty well hidden, isn’t it?

Marcus Roberts: Yeah, well, if you–

Holly Williams: It’s all overgrown.

Marcus Roberts: If you didn’t know how to get here, you wouldn’t easily stumble across it.

Marcus Roberts: This was a sort of back entrance…

There’s not much left of the Third Reich’s Lager Sylt concentration camp… on the windswept island of Alderney — about three miles long and one and a half wide – nature is gradually swallowing up its crumbling concrete walls. 

Holly Williams: And the camp’s up here…–

Marcus Roberts: These take you straight into the– the camp.

Holly Williams: Wow.

Marcus Roberts is an Oxford-educated amateur historian who runs heritage tours. He’s spent years researching this forgotten chapter in British history. 

Marcus Roberts:  So undoubtedly if you wanted to put– a pin on the map, you could say, “This is where the Holocaust happened on British sovereign territory.”

When Germany invaded France in 1940, the British government calculated that the Channel Islands had no strategic value – and gave them up without a fight. Nearly all of the residents of Alderney decided to evacuate before the German troops arrived. On the empty island, the Germans set up two concentration camps – as well as labor camps. They brought in prisoners of war and forced laborers to build giant fortifications that still survive today — part of Hitler’s Atlantic wall to protect against Allied attack. A minority of them were Jewish – others were from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Spain. 

Holly Williams: I understand this was called the Tunnel of Death?

Marcus Roberts: Yes. It was notorious in the memory of prisoners. On two occasions, they were forced to cram in here in an apparent rehearsal for their own death. 

After the war, in 1945, the British military investigated the camps, and put the death toll on Alderney in the low hundreds. Some of those who lost their lives were buried under this plot of land. But Marcus Roberts and others argue that more than 10,000 must have died on the island – based on controversial calculations about the size of the labor force needed to build the fortifications. Roberts told us it’s because he’s Jewish that he’s determined to count all of the dead. 

Marcus Roberts: There is the– the Jewish instinct to, you know, leave no one behind

Holly Williams: You’re trying to make sure that all the Jewish dead are counted?

Marcus Roberts: Remembered. If you don’t remember a life, it’s as if they’ve never lived at all. 

Most academics dispute Roberts’ estimate of the death toll, but partly as a result of those disagreements, last year the British government appointed a team of researchers to comb through archives across Europe, and more accurately count the number of prisoners who died on Alderney. Dr. Gilly Carr — an archaeologist at Cambridge University — is coordinating the review.

Holly Williams: Why is this just a document search, not a dig?

Gilly Carr: It is likely that some of the people in mass graves were Jewish. And according to Halakha or Jewish law, you cannot disturb the dead. But the second reason is that according to prisoner statements, some people were dumped at sea or thrown off cliffs. What are we going to do? Dig up the entire island? Well, we can’t do that.

The researchers are drawing on rich material. The Nazis were meticulous record keepers — and British archives contain first hand testimonies from survivors.

Holly Williams: Look at this. “We were beaten with everything they could lay their hands on: with sticks, spades, pickaxes.” 

Gilly Carr: It sounds absolutely ghastly.

Holly Williams: “On certain days, five to six, up to 10 men died.”

Dr. Carr told us there’s no evidence that gas chambers were used on Alderney — but there were summary executions, and the prisoners built the Nazi fortifications on starvation rations.

Holly Williams: Were they taken to Alderney to be worked to death?

Gilly Carr: They were certainly seen as expendable. The aim was to get every ounce of work out of them. And if they died, it didn’t matter, and that was kind of perhaps “expected.”

Holly Williams: They were disposable human beings.

Gilly Carr: Yes. Yes.

Holly Williams: How did your father end up in Alderney?

At a pub in the Channel Islands, we met Gary Font. His father – Francisco Font – fought on the losing side in the Spanish Civil War, was arrested in France, handed over to the Germans, and sent to a concentration camp on Alderney. Francisco survived, and later married a British woman — Gary’s mother.

Gary Font: He witnessed– the execution of a young Soviet boy who decided to leave the working detail and to change his footwear. So he started to pick up these paper bags, and wrap them ’round his feet, and then tie them with string. And a SS guard had seen him do this, and walked up to him and– and shot him– point-blank range.

Gary told us his father’s experiences left him scarred. 

Gary Font: I saw the emotion on his face. Yeah, it’s a tough one.

Holly Williams: Do you think that emotion came from– that he had survived the War in Spain, and survived the camp here?

Gary Font: Yeah, exactly. That was the first time I realized, “Wow, you know, this man has a deep-rooted emotion inside of him that he could never get out.”

The British government’s effort to get the truth out – by recounting the dead – was commissioned by Lord Pickles – a former cabinet minister and now the U.K.’s envoy for post-Holocaust issues.

Lord Pickles: The figures vary, not by a few hundred, not by a few thousand, by– by tens of thousands. 

Holly Williams: So it was the controversy that prompted you to commission the review?

Lord Pickles: Yes. It seemed to me that the sensible thing was, “Well, okay. Let’s do that– this in the open. Let’s do it fully transparent.

He’s also asked the researchers to put names to as many of those killed as they can.

Lord Pickles: If you remember them as individuals, then it’s another blow against Hitler. Hitler wanted to eradicate the memory of people.

Holly Williams: So this is kind of an ongoing fight against Hitler and his ideas?

Lord Pickles: Hitler’s evil hand still continues to affect– to affect Europe and to affect the world.

But it’s taken nearly 80 years for the British government to re-examine what happened on Alderney — and to make its report public. The official British investigations in 1945 were classified for decades. And unlike the trials of Nazi officials in Nuremberg — the British authorities failed to prosecute a single German officer who worked on Alderney – even though many of them ended up in British prisoner of war camps.

Holly Williams: I mean just to be clear, these are possible war criminals. The British government has gathered evidence against– against them. And they are in British custody.

Gilly Carr: Yes, they are at this point, yes.

Holly Williams: A sort of slam-dunk case?

Gilly Carr: You’d have thought. 

That’s led Marcus Roberts and others to claim that the British government tried to cover-up the extent of the atrocities on Alderney. Dr. Carr told us that could be true — but one key document from the British War Office investigation that may explain why there were no prosecutions is missing.

Gilly Carr: It could have been shredded– decades ago as part of, “What do we need these files for anymore?

Holly Williams: But could it also have been shredded for more nefarious purposes?

Gilly Carr: I have no idea. In order for me to say there was a cover-up, I want to see the decisions taken. I want to look through those steps and to make up my own mind.

Holly Williams: Why might the British government have tried to cover up or whitewash what happened on Alderney and– and maybe more broadly, on the Channel Islands?

Gilly Carr: There are some things that– that happened that might not– that the British government might not necessarily have wanted a wider audience to know about. 

Those things – once feared too troubling for the broader public – happened on three of the other Channel Islands — where most residents did not evacuate before the occupation. When the Germans arrived, the locals mostly cooperated – often with little choice. Hitler’s portrait was hung outside this cinema on the island of Guernsey. Nazi propaganda showed the British police working for German troops. And British newspapers on the islands printed orders from Berlin.

Holly Williams: This is a British newspaper. And it’s got the swastika on top.

Linda Romeril: That’s right.

At the official archives on the island of Jersey, Linda Romeril showed us how British officials implemented Nazi policies — asking Jewish residents to identify themselves, and then confiscating their assets.

Linda Romeril: There was a huge amount of requisitioning of people’s houses, people’s property during the occupation period.

But some resisted — risking punishment to paint anti-nazi graffiti, and illegally listening to British news on the radio.

Jenny Lecoat: That’s my great aunt Louisa. I suspect that she was probably quite steely.

One member of the resistance was Louisa Gould — who hid an escaped Russian prisoner in her home for nearly two years. Jenny Lecoat told us when her great aunt Louisa was finally caught, she was sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany.

Holly Williams: She was killed in a Nazi gas chamber?

Jenny Lecoat: She was gassed to death, yeah.

Holly Williams: After the occupation, did the British government get in touch with your family to talk about what Louisa had done during the occupation, and about her murder by the Nazis?

Jenny Lecoat: The British government, I think, were kind of ashamed. They were horrified it had happened, and they didn’t really want to get too involved in what had gone on there.

Holly Williams: Not wanting to talk about the resistance? Or not wanting to talk about the occupation at all?

Jenny Lecoat: Well, it was such a mixed picture. There were people who had resisted the Germans as much as resistance was possible within a tiny, nine-by-five-mile island. And there were also people who’d collaborated. Some people had betrayed their own country. The only possible legislation was treason, which was still a hanging offense. They didn’t wanna get into that. That was the confusing, messy, dirty mixed picture of– of the Channel Islands occupation.

We’ll learn more about that messy, dirty history when the British government’s review of the death toll at the camps on Alderney is published next month. But it’s unlikely to satisfy everyone.

Marcus Roberts: Some kind of– ap– apology and, you know, moral recompense would be helpful.

Holly Williams: You– you want the British government to apologize–

Marcus Roberts: Yeah. I’d like–

Holly Williams: –for not having prosecuted alleged war criminals?

Marcus Roberts: Yeah. So I think it would be appropriate for them to recognize what should have been done, didn’t happen.

The horrors carried out on this tiny, remote island are difficult to imagine… the victims were silenced and buried… but now, nearly eight decades later, they’re finally being counted.

Produced by Justine Redman and Erin Lyall. Associate producer, Matthew Riley. Broadcast associate, Eliza Costas. Edited by Peter M. Berman.

Holly Williams

Holly Williams is a CBS News senior foreign correspondent based in the network’s CBS London bureau.