Wilhelm Brasse

Auschwitz photographer; Born: December 3, 1917; Died: October 23, 2012. WILHELM Brasse, who has died aged 95, was one of several photographers who captured haunting images of naked and emaciated children at Auschwitz standing shoulder to shoulder and of adult prisoners instriped clothing posing for police-stylemugshots.

A Polish photographer who was arrested and sent to Auschwitz early in the SecondWorldWar, he was put to work documenting his fellow prisoners, an emotionally devastating task which tormented him long after his liberation.

Mr Brasse, who was born in 1917 and was not Jewish, was sent to Auschwitz at 22 as a political prisoner for trying to sneak out of German-occupied Poland in the spring of 1940.

Because he had worked before the war in a photography studio in Katowice, southern Poland, he was put to work in the camp’s photography and identification department.

The job helped to save his life, enabling him to get better treatment and food than many others. Because heworked with the SS, the elite Nazi force, he was also kept cleaner “so as not to offend the SS men”, he recalled in an interview in 2006.

After thewar, he had nightmares for years of the Nazi victims hewas forced to photograph. Amongthem were emaciated Jewish girls who were about to undergo cruel medical experiments under the infamous Dr Josef Mengele.

“I didn’t return tomy profession, because those Jewish kids, and the naked Jewish girls, constantly flashed before my eyes,” he said. “Even more so because I knewthat later, after taking their pictures, theywould just go to the gas.”

In the interview, Mr Brasse said he believed he took about 40,000 to 50,000 of the identity photographs the Nazis used to register their prisoners – part of the Nazi obsession with documenting their work. These pictures are among some of the notorious images associated with the camp.

Mr Brassewas not alone in documenting prisoners. There were other photographers and an estimated 200,000 such pictures were probably taken. Most were destroyed.

It is difficult to say which of the surviving photoswere taken by Mr Brasse because they generally did not carry the photographer’sname. Some he remembered andwas able to identify later.

At the end of the war, with the Soviet army about to liberate Auschwitz, the Germans ordered the photos to be destroyed. Mr Brasse and others refused the order and managed to save about 40,000 of them.

Though early on in his captivity Mr Brasse was the only professional photographer in the SS documentation office, eventually some other prisoners took over taking ID photos.

Mr Brassewas given newassignments, including taking the pictures of prisoner’s tattoos and pictures for Dr Mengele.

Dr Mengele ordered pictures of various prisoners he planned to performhis experiments on, including Jewish twins, dwarfs, stunted people and people with noma, a disease common in the malnourished which can result in the loss of flesh.

“I had to take close-ups. He said sometimes you will be able to see thewhole bone of the jaw, and that I have to do close-ups of it. I did the close-ups, in harsh light, and you could see to the bone,” Mr Brasse said. “Later, my boss called me in, and Dr Mengele expressed his happiness with the pictures I’d taken, that I’d taken them just as he had needed them to be done.”

Mr Brasse said he never had the right to refuse what Dr Mengele or the other Germans demanded.

“It was an order, and prisoners didn’t have the right to disagree. I couldn’t say ‘I won’t do that’,” he recalled in 2006.

“I only listened to what I had to do and because I didn’t harm anyone by what I was doing, I tried to address them politely.”