SHOAH

Wilhelm Brasse Dies at 94; Documented Nazis’ Victims

Auschwitz Museum, via Associated Press

Prisoner identity photographs, taken by Wilhelm Brasse, of Czeslawa Kwoka of Poland. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Czeslawa arrived with her family at Auschwitz on Dec. 13, 1942, and died on March 12, 1943. She was 14.

By DENNIS HEVESI

There were images of living virtual skeletons; of prisoners standing shoulder-to-shoulder in striped uniforms; of people with deformities; of disemboweled victims of purported medical experiments.

Czarek Sokolowski/Associated Press

Wilhelm Brasse in 2006.

And there were tens of thousands of prisoner identification photos: three of each inmate, one taken from the front, one from the side, the third at an angle, usually with a cap on the prisoner’s head.

Many of those photographs were made by a young man named Wilhelm Brasse, who died on Tuesday at 94 in Zywiec, Poland. He took them because, like the more than two million other inmates who died or somehow managed to survive at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during World War II, he had no choice.

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

What Mr. Brasse did do was preserve thousands of those pictures, despite an order to destroy them.

“The photographs were taken for administrative purposes, documentation and personal amusement for the Nazis,” Judith Cohen, the director of the photo archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, said Wednesday. “However, the same photographs that were commissioned by the Germans later became some of the most damning evidence of their crimes.”

She continued: “And one of Brasse’s great acts of heroism is that when he was ordered to burn all of the mug shots, he saved tens of thousands. It’s part of the lasting evidence of the horrors of Auschwitz.”

Jaroslaw Mensfelt, a spokesman at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, where many of the photos are exhibited, confirmed Mr. Brasse’s death.

Like photographs, memories were etched in Mr. Brasse’s mind. “They put the spade handle onto the prisoner’s neck and dangle his legs until he suffocated; I saw that several times,” he said in a 2010 interview for “Portrecista” (The Portraitist), a Polish documentary about his experiences. “They were killing Jews in that way.”

In a 2009 interview for Agence France-Presse he said: “We photographed all the prisoners at the beginning — Jews, all nationalities. But after No. 35,000, we didn’t photograph Jews any more. They weren’t recorded. That’s because they were being taken straight to the gas chambers.”

Mr. Brasse, who was not Jewish, was 22 when he was arrested by the Nazis in August 1940 while trying to cross the border into Hungary, hoping eventually to join Polish exiles in France. Fluent in German, he was given a chance to join the German Army, but refused.

Born in Austria on Dec. 3, 1917, to Rudolf and Helena Brasse (his father was Austrian and his mother was Polish), Mr. Brasse grew up in Zywiec, in south-central Poland. He was working in a photo studio in Katowice, near the German border, when the Nazis invaded.

“When he arrived at Auschwitz he was sent to work as a laborer,” said Janina Struk, the author of “Photographing the Holocaust” (2004). “When they found out he was a photographer, he was put in charge of the Erkennungsdienst, the identification department.”

Besides the individual prisoners he photographed for identification, Mr. Brasse was also forced to photograph young Jewish girls, disabled people, dwarfs, twins and victims of the medical experiments performed by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele and his colleague Dr. Eduard Wirths.

“The Nazis had a morbid curiosity for documenting these things — internal operations, like taking out the womb and examining it,” Ms. Struk said.

In the book, she quotes Mr. Brasse as saying: “They’d bring the women into the room and strip them naked” and “inject them with a kind of anesthetic, unless they were Jewish, in which case experiments would be performed without” anesthesia.

In January 1945, as Soviet troops advanced toward Auschwitz, Mr. Brasse was one of thousands of inmates evacuated to concentration camps farther west. He was liberated by American troops on May 6, 1945.

After returning to Poland, Mr. Brasse married and had two children. He opened a business making sausage casings. He had tried to work again as a photographer, but was too haunted by his experiences.

“When I tried to photograph young girls, for example, dressed normally,” he told Agence France-Presse, “all I’d see would be these Jewish children.”