Son Recognizes Father as SS Man in Auschwitz Photograph

More than a million people visit the Auschwitz Museum each year. Many of them search for information about family members who lost their lives in the camp. It is highly unusual, however, for a son to recognize his father in one of the photographs—when the father is wearing an SS uniform.

The story began in the spring of 2007. A group of visitors arrived from Germany. After touring the main exhibition, they joined an educational workshop at the Roma and Hungarian exhibitions. After the summing up remarks, one of the participants came up to Jacek Lech of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

“He was an older man, about 65 or 70. He told me that he recognized his father in one of the pictures in Block no. 4,” Lech recalls. “I asked him if he was sure that it was Block no. 4, because visitors usually recognize relatives in the pictures of prisoners, which hang in blocks no. 6 and 7. He confirmed that it was Block no. 4, and said that he would give me more precise information the next time he came back to the Museum.”

In late July, the man returned to the Museum. This time, he had a family album with him. He asked if he could go to Block no. 4, where one of the rooms contains photographs from Lili Jacob’s famous album depicting the procedures used with an arriving transport of Jews. “We stood in front of one of the pictures showing an SS physician on the ramp selecting new arrivals for death in the gas chambers,” recalls Lech. “The German visitor pointed to a young man wearing an SS uniform, standing to the left of the physician, and said, ‘That young man in the SS uniform is my father.’ He laid the album on the window sill and showed me four photos from the album.”

One showed a man in an SS uniform during drills, the second showed him with his unit, the third showed him in an SS dress uniform, and the fourth, taken after the war, showed the same man, in civilian clothing, with his family. It was undoubtedly the same man as in the 1944 photograph from Birkenau. Lech recalls that the visitor seemed shocked. “He hadn’t known anything about [his father’s] wartime past.”

We know little about the SS man. He was born near Potsdam in 1906. After passing final school exams, he worked as an apprentice to a carpet dealer. Later, he became a deacon with the Knights of Malta, got married in 1937, and settled in Berlin with his wife.

“The son knew almost nothing about his father’s wartime fate,” says Lech. “He was born in 1942, and said only that his father was held by the British until 1947, and became a pastor a year later. He died in 1988. His widow told her son that his father had served an internship as an orderly in a mental institution in Berlin in 1937, and might have been at one of the Nazi euthanasia centers in 1941.”

The staff of the death camps in occupied Poland were recruited from the euthanasia centers organized under Aktion T4. The man in question might therefore have ended up in Auschwitz, leaving his wife and newborn son behind in Berlin.

No information about this particular SS man has been found in the personnel records in the Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. However, this does not mean that the individual in question did not serve in Auschwitz, since the Germans destroyed an enormous number of documents before liberation. Lech says that the son recalled “finding transfer orders to Auschwitz dated 1942 at home, along with a receipt from the camp storehouse for a pair of suspenders and other SS uniform accessories.”

One of the documentation centers in Berlin might contain information about the man’s wartime record. The son knows that there are some records there, but German law prevents him from obtaining them while his mother is still alive. During his last visit, the man said he would contact the Museum as soon as he receives any new information. Perhaps we will then learn the solution to this puzzle.

Photos from Auschwitz. The Lili Jacob Album

More than 430 thousand Jews were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz in 1944. Among them was 18-year-old Lili Jacob, along with her whole family and the rest of the Jewish community of the small Carpathian locality of Bilke (formerly Subcarpathian Rus, Czechoslovakia; under Hungarian rule during the war; now Zakarpattia Oblast, Ukraine).

Of her whole family, only Lili survived the war. After an odyssey through the concentration camps, she was liberated at the Dora-Mittelbau camp in Germany in April 1945. In the abandoned SS quarters there, she found a photo album marked with the title Aussiedlung der Juden aus Ungarn (The deportation of the Hungarian Jews) She recognized family members in one picture, and herself in another photo, taken by the Nazis a year earlier in the Birkenau women’s camp.

Almost 200 pictures taken by SS photographers document the process of receiving a transport on the ramp in Birkenau, from the moment when the people disembark from the freight cars, through selection, to the time when they are taken to their death in the gas chambers. The people selected as fit for labor and registered as prisoners in the camp can also be seen in the photographs.

The National Jewish Museum in Prague made copies of the photographs in 1946, thanks to which some of them were published in Bratislava in 1949 as The Tragedy of the Slovak Jews, under the editorship of F. Steiner. In 1956, the Czech historian Erich Kulka, himself a former Auschwitz prisoner, sent prints of some of the photographs to the Auschwitz Museum. Since then, they have been an important element in the permanent exhibition on the destruction of the Jews in Auschwitz.

Lili Jacob donated the original album to the Yad Vashem memorial institution in Israel in 1980.