News
Museum Acquires Previously Unknown Auschwitz Photos
January 3, Oświęcim (PAP-Polish Press Agency) – The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has acquired a collection of 87 unique black-and-white photographs, taken after liberation in the fall of 1945 and at the beginning of 1946, from Warsaw resident and former prisoner Zbigniew Klawender, Museum Archives head Piotr Setkiewicz told PAP.
Setkiewicz pointed out that there are very few photographs of the Auschwitz camp in existence. SS men seldom took pictures during the war. Nor did many people do so after the war. “The photographs that we have acquired are unique,” he added. “We have no other pictures of the camp from immediately after liberation in our collection.”
Buildings in the Auschwitz I-Main Camp and the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp can be seen in the photographs. One such structure is the wooden politischeabteilung building, headquarters of the camp Gestapo, which burned down after liberation. Only the outlines of its foundations remained.
The fencing of the camp for German POWs that the NKVD opened after the war in the Auschwitz I-Main Camp is visible in the background of other photographs. The decorations visible at certain places in some of the photographs are another point of interest. Mass rallies were organized on holidays immediately after the war. Polish and Soviet flags are hung on the crematorium I building in one of the photographs. “Today, this seems, to put it delicately, distasteful,” said Setkiewicz.
“The photographs make it easier to understand how the camp looked immediately after liberation,” Setkiewicz added, “because pseudo-conservationist modifications were introduced, changing the appearance of certain places, in the first years that the Museum was in existence.” The Museum was opened in 1947.
