Höcker Album

According to the museum, the photograph album was found by an unnamed American counterintelligence officer who was billeted in Frankfurt after Germany's surrender in 1945.

The captions of the photographs, and the people featured in the images, quickly confirmed that it depicts life in and around the Auschwitz camps.

These images are regarded as the most striking, because they show cheerful staff officers singing, drinking and eating while, in the camp itself, tremendous suffering is taking place.

Other officers depicted at these celebrations alongside Mengele and Höss include Josef Kramer, Franz Hoessler, Walter Schmidetzki, Anton Thumann, Otto Moll and Max Sell.

So many Hungarian Jews were killed in the Auschwitz camps during that period that the crematoria were incapable of consuming all the bodies, so open pits were dug for that purpose.

While accounts from survivors and other SS officers all but placed him there, prosecutors could locate no conclusive evidence to prove the claim.

On 3 May 1989 a district court in the German city of Bielefeld sentenced Höcker to four years' imprisonment for his involvement in gassing to death prisoners, primarily Polish Jews, in the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.

Camp records showed that between May 1943 and May 1944 Höcker had acquired at least 3,610 kilograms (7,960 lb) of Zyklon B poisonous gas for use in Majdanek from the Hamburg firm of Tesch & Stabenow.

Black and white photograph of about three men in SS uniform and about 10 women in uniform smiling wide on a wooden bridge. One of the men plays an accordion.
Nazi officers and auxiliaries having fun at Solahütte .
Three men in SS uniform stand outdoors looking at viewer's right.
From left to right, Baer, Mengele and Höss at Solahütte.