By ALLAN HALL

Last updated at 23:35 19 September 2007

Laughing and pulling faces for the camera, the uniformed men and women line up for a sing-song.







In another photo, nurses in starched aprons smile beneath the gaze of smart young officers.

Yet another picture shows a group of girls sitting along a fence eating bowls of blueberries. They turn their bowls upside down to show they have all eaten their portions.

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Only the men's uniforms and the SS insignia on their collars offer a clue to the identity of those in the photographs.

They are all staff at the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz, pictured on their time off from the business of running Hitler's death factory.

The pictures, revealed for first time, were taken from the personal scrapbook of Karl Hocker, the adjutant to the commandant of the camp in Poland where 1.1million prisoners, mostly Jews, were murdered.

Among them also are photos of a handsome, well-groomed SS doctor whose name itself has become synonymous with the Holocaust.

Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, is seen for the first time at Auschwitz, sharing a conversation with his superiors.

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The photos represent a sensational historical find for the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.

They underline the sickening hypocrisy of the servants of Nazism - morally bankrupt, illimitably cruel - and yet able to laugh, joke, drink and sunbathe as if they were no different to anyone else.

None of the pictures show their benighted victims or depict the paraphernalia of carrying out murder on an industrial scale.

It was Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the Holocaust Museum, who opened the letter from a former United States Army intelligence officer in December last year.

He said he wanted to donate photographs of Auschwitz he had found when he lived in a Frankfurt apartment in 1946.

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Although Auschwitz may be the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, there are few photos of the place taken before its liberation in 1945.

In January Miss Erbelding received a package containing 16 cardboard pages with the photos pasted on both sides - and their historical significance quickly became apparent.

As the Zyklon B gas killed prisoners at a rate of 6,000 a day, and as Mengele and his cronies performed hideous medical experiments on other inmates, here were men and women charged with the smooth running of the camp taking time out to enjoy life.

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In all, there are 116 pictures, beginning with a photo from June 21, 1944, of Hocker and the then commandant, Richard Baer, both in full SS regalia.

The album also contains eight photos of Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for participating in the selection of arriving prisoners for his barbaric medical experiments.

"These are the first authenticated pictures of Mengele at Auschwitz," said the museum.

One of the pictures, taken on July 22, 1944, shows a group of cheerful young women who worked as SS communications specialists eating bowls of fresh blueberries.

Many were taken at Solahuette, an SS rest-and-relaxation facility built in the style of an Alpine lodge a few miles away from the camp.

The Holocaust Museum has put the photos on its website - ushmm.org - while it deliberates whether or not to make them part of a permanent display.

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The museum says the photos are instructive in that they showed the murderers were, in their self-image, "good men, good comrades, even civilised".

Hocker fled Auschwitz before the camp's liberation. When he was captured by the British, he was carrying false documents identifying him as a combat soldier, but was released after 18 months.

In the Sixties he was tracked down to Engershausen, his hometown, where he was working as a bank official.

He was convicted of war crimes and served seven years before his release in 1970, when he walked out of prison and was rehired by the bank. He died in 2000 at 89.

"It's hard to fathom the kind of people who ran these camps and one always struggles to understand who they were and how they saw themselves," said museum director Sara Bloomfield.

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"These unique photographs vividly illustrate the contented world they enjoyed while overseeing a world of unimaginable suffering.

"They offer an important perspective on the psychology of those perpetrating genocide."

The album complements the only other known collection of photographs taken at Auschwitz, published as the "Auschwitz Album" in 1980.

Those images specifically depict the arrival of Hungarian Jews at the camp in late May 1944, and the selection process that the SS imposed on them.

The American donor, who had asked to remain anonymous, was in his 90s when he contacted the museum. He died this summer.