Auschwitz was abandoned and evacuated on Jan. 18, 1945, and liberated by Soviet forces on Jan. 27. Many of the Hocker photos were taken at Solahutte, an Alpine-style recreation lodge the SS used on the far reaches of the camp complex alongside the Sola River.
Though they as yet have no plans to exhibit the Hocker album photos, curators at the Holocaust Memorial Museum have created an online display of them on the museum's Web site (ushmm.org) that will be available this week. In many cases they have contrasted the Hocker images with those from the Auschwitz Album. In one, SS women alight from a bus at Solahutte for a day of recreation; meanwhile, in a picture from the Auschwitz Album taken at about the same time, haggard and travel-weary women and children get off a cattle car at the camp.
Museum curators have avoided describing the album as something like "monsters at play" or "killers at their leisure." Cohen said the photos were instructive in that they showed the murderers were, in some sense, people who also behaved as ordinary human beings. "In their self-image, they were good men, good comrades, even civilized," she said.
Sarah Bloomfield, the museum's director, said she believed that other undiscovered caches of photos or documents concerning the Holocaust existed in attics and might soon be lost to history.
The donor, who had asked to remain anonymous, was in his 90s when he contacted the museum, and he died this summer. He told the museum's curators that he found the photo album in a Frankfurt, Germany, apartment where he lived in 1946.
The photos of the Auschwitz Album were discovered by Lili Jacob, a Hungarian Jew who was deported in May 1944 to Auschwitz, near Krakow in Poland. She was transferred to another camp, Dora-Mittelbau in Germany, where she discovered the pictures in a bedside table in an abandoned SS barracks.
She was stunned to recognize pictures of herself, her rabbi and her brothers ages 9 and 11, both of whom she later discovered had been gassed immediately after arrival.
Hocker fled Auschwitz before the camp's liberation. When he was captured by the British he was carrying false documents identifying him as a combat soldier. After the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, West German authorities tracked down Hocker in Engershausen, his hometown, where he was working as a bank official.
He was convicted of war crimes and served seven years before his release in 1970, after which he was rehired by the bank. Hocker died in 2000 at 89.
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