KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (194 page)

Hans Bonarewitz (on the cart), an alleged “professional criminal” recaptured after an escape, is led to the Mauthausen gallows in a macabre SS spectacle on July 30, 1942.
(BMI/Fotoarchiv der KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen)

Propaganda picture showing Soviet POWs arriving in Sachsenhausen in September 1941. Over the following months, the SS executed some forty thousand “commissars” in the concentration camps.
(Národní archiv, Prague)

Some of the nine thousand Soviet POWs murdered in Sachsenhausen in September and October 1941. The image was smuggled out of the camp by an inmate.
(Národní archiv, Prague)

Rudolf Höss and Auschwitz SS men relax at the Solahütte retreat in the summer of 1944. Front row, from left: adjutant Karl Höcker; crematorium chief Otto Moll (partially obscured); Höss; commandants Richard Baer (partially obscured) and Josef Kramer; camp compound leader Franz Hössler (partially obscured); Dr. Josef Mengele (partially obscured); and two other officers.
(USHMM)

A uniformed SS doctor (center) oversees the selection of 3,500 Jews deported from Subcarpathian Rus to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944. Those selected for immediate extermination (in the background) are led toward the crematorium complex.
(USHMM, courtesy of Yad Vashem)

Following the SS selection on arrival, Jewish women and children stand outside Birkenau crematorium III before they are gassed, May 1944.
(USHMM, courtesy of Yad Vashem)

Male and female prisoners from the privileged Canada Commando sort the belongings of murdered Jews outside the SS warehouses in Birkenau, May 1944.
(USHMM, courtesy of Yad Vashem)

Covert prisoner photograph from inside the Birkenau gas chambers documenting the open-air cremation of murdered Jews, August 1944
(State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim)

SS photograph of so-called Special Squad prisoners inside Birkenau crematorium II or III in 1943
(State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim)

On the morning of July 18, 1942, SS leader Heinrich Himmler (front row, left) inspects the IG Farben construction site in Auschwitz-Monowitz, led by the civilian chief engineer, Max Faust (center), and Commandant Rudolf Höss (right).
(State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim)

The head of the SS concentration camp system, Oswald Pohl (center), visits Auschwitz in 1944, accompanied by Commandant Richard Baer. Between them (in the background) is Karl Bischoff, the main SS architect of the crematorium complex.
(USHMM)

Majdanek guards celebrate a birthday in a Lublin dance hall and restaurant in March 1944.
(Landesarchiv North Rhine–Westphalia, Rhineland division, RWB 28432/3)