THE AUSCHWITZ PHOTOGRAPHER

While imprisoned by the Nazis, Wilhelm Brasse was tasked with cataloguing horrific scenes behind the wire, as well as the faces of his fellow prisoners

How one man captured the horrors of the Holocaust

After the invasion of Poland, a young photographer named Wilhelm Brasse refused to join the Nazis and was arrested while trying to escape to Hungary. Transferred to Auschwitz on 31 August 1940, he was given the prisoner number 3444 and forced into hard labour expanding the camp. Once his skills as a photographer and developer were realised, Brasse was put to work as part of the Erkennungsdienst, Auschwitz’s Identification Service. Chief among his duties was to take photographs of inmates, and it’s estimated Brasse took between 40,000 and 50,000 photographs of prisoners at the camp.

As well as his work for the Identification Service, Brasse’s skills were called upon to capture keepsake portraits for the camp guards, and even to create colour postcards to be sold by his Nazi boss, SS Oberscharführer Bernhard Walter. He was also forced to catalogue the horrific medical experiments and unnecessary surgery carried out by the Nazis. In this work, Brasse encountered one of Auschwitz’s most despicable war criminals, Josef Mengele, who conducted inhumane experiments on inmates.

In 1945, with the Red Army approaching the camp, Brasse was ordered to destroy the photographs but refused, choosing to hide the images so that the world would be able to see what had happened at Auschwitz. Though his images are now an indelible part of the dreadful but essential record of the Holocaust, Brasse’s own story was largely untold. In their new book

The Auschwitz Photographer, authors Luca Crippa and Maurizio Onnis have pieced together Brasse’s story, including his life before the war and his experiences during imprisonment, using research from the Auschwitz-birkenau Musuem and Yad Vashem Photo Archive in Jerusalem.

We would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce these images: © The Archival Collection of the Auschwitz-birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim and Yad Vashem, Photo Archive, Jerusalem.

Wilhelm Brasse pictured in 1938, before his imprisonment in Auschwitz

Prisoner selection, May 1944

Czesława Kwoka (1928-43) was assaulted by Kapo Wacek Ruski just before Brasse took her portrait. Imprisoned in 1942 and registered under the number 26947, Czesława was a Polish political prisoner (Ppole)

ABOVE: Jozef Pysz, imprisoned in July 1940. Number 1420 Ppole. He was one of the earliest prisoners in the camp

BELOW: Franz Slokau. Imprisoned in August 1942, number 57860 Pol:s (Slovenian political prisoner)

ABOVE: An unknown prisoner, imprisoned in May 1942. Number 7425 Jude (Jewish). Women had begun to arrive in the camp in March 1942

LEFT: Birkenau, Poland, May 1944. Jewish prisoners wait near gas chamber number 4, before being sent to their deaths

ABOVE: Krystyna Trzesniewska (192943). A Polish political prisoner who was photographed by Brasse, Krystyna was taken to Auschwitz in 1942 with her father and was registered under the number 27129

BELOW: Stefania Stiebler. Imprisoned in June 1942, she was a Yugoslavian political prisoner and Jew – 7602 Pol:j – who worked in the camp offices and played an active role in the resistance movement

RIGHT: Birkenau, Poland, May 1944. Women and children on their way to gas chamber number 4

The Auschwitz Photographer, by Luca Crippa and Maurizio Onnis, is on sale now

BELOW: Stanislaw Watycha (1906-41). Imprisoned in August 1941, number 20107 Ppole. Stanislaw, a teacher, was shot on 11 November 1941 – Polish Independence Day – along with 150 other prisoners in one of the first executions involving Block 11’s infamous ‘Death Wall’

ABOVE: August Wittek (1874-1942). Imprisoned in July 1942, number 54098 Aso (‘asocial’)