Auschwitz Erkennungsdienst

[1] The Erkennungsdienst also took photographs of inmates, including gassings, experiments, escape attempts, suicides,[3] and portraits of registered prisoners (those not immediately murdered in the gas chambers) when they first arrived at the camp.

[1][6] Established by Rudolf Höss in December 1940 or January 1941,[7] the Erkennungsdienst was based on the ground floor of block 26 in Auschwitz I, where there was a studio and darkroom.

[13] On 17 and 18 July 1942, Walter or Hofmann photographed Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, during a visit to the camp.

He watched a gassing in its entirety, from the point of unloading the transport to emptying the gas chamber and burying the victims.

[16] From May to August 1944, for reasons unknown, Walter and Hofmann photographed transports of Jews from their arrival at Auschwitz II to the gas chamber.

It was used as evidence in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–1965), during which Walter testified at first that he had not been the photographer, but eventually he acknowledged having taken some of the images.

[14] As the Red Army approached Auschwitz from the east in January 1945, the SS ordered that the camp be dismantled and abandoned.

After the camp's liberation, prisoners carried the images in bags to the Polish Red Cross in Cracow, and in 1947 they were added to the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.