Looking at the bright smiles and laughing faces of the men and women in these photos, you would be forgiven for thinking they were a group of friends enjoying a fun summer holiday.
The candid images, which have recently been circulating online, give a chilling insight into the parallel lives of the guards who worked at the camp, which saw over 1.1 million people murdered during World War II. On May 3, 1989, a district court in the German city of Bielefeld sentenced him to a further four years imprisonment for his involvement in the gassing murders of prisoners at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.His haunting photo album from his time as a Nazi was discovered by an anonymous American counterintelligence officer who was stationed in Frankfurt after Germany’s surrender in 1945.
The last pictures in the album show guards lighting a Yule tree at Christmas time and of a hunting trip in the first week of January 1945. Two weeks later, the Nazis began evacuating the camps, with Auschwitz being liberated on January 27, 1945. Höss was the longest serving commandment of the camp and personally oversaw mass murder there for more than three years.
This, along with the ashes, were dumped in nearby rivers, ponds, or scattered in the fields as fertiliser and used as landfill for uneven ground.