207 Unseen Photos Reveal the Early Days of Nazi Concentration Camps

1945, Nazi Germany had just surrendered. Amid the rubble of the Third Reich, the Allied soldiers had triumphed. Now they'd won all their battles out in the field, they could enter the Holy of Holies, the Führer's private residences up in the Bavarian Alps, the Berghof and the Eagle's Nest. And to celebrate their victory, they wanted to go home bearing trophies. So they filled their luggage with paintings, flags, and photo albums. All these souvenirs would be scattered around the world. 80 years later, some of them are still resurfacing. Some are sold at flea markets, while others are donated to research.

Among those found recently is this photo album. It's an exceptional discovery. Its cover, damaged by the years, bears the SS runes and a title, Erinnerungen, memories. Between its covers, no less than 207 unpublished photos, unknown faces, and mysterious places, all just waiting to be explored. For a historian, coming across a collection of more than 200 photos is a bit like winning the lottery. It's a real treasure, an incredible source such as we rarely ever find. Taken between the late 1920s and 1943, the photos tell a story that begins long before the Nazis came to power.

It might seem like everything has already been said about the Third Reich, but these photos reveal a period that remains little known, that of the very first Nazi concentration camps. They were the true schools of violence for SS men, and they prefigured the extermination camps. In these photos, we see the future mass murderers who will be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. And the central question still asked to this day is, why did these men become mass murderers? Ideology alone is not a sufficient driving force to kill women and children. So why did the vast majority of them do so? Who were these men?

How did they become such zealous servants of a murderous regime? It's the man who unearthed the album who will find the answers right there in the photos, historian Stefan Hördler. It is he who will lead the investigation that will make the images speak and lift the veil on the genesis of the concentration camp system and the men who shaped it. At 46 years old, the German Stefan Hördler is one of the most renowned historians of Nazism in the business. His knowledge of Nazi executioners contributed to the 2015 conviction of Oskar Gröning, former SS man at Auschwitz.

Hördler is also a specialist in the visual legacy that the criminals of the Third Reich left behind them. A few years ago, in a book by a British historian, a previously unpublished photograph caught his eye. It depicted a group of men in uniform in front of a gate. It was obvious to me that these people in the photos were not just anyone. These were future concentration camp commanders. This photo was taken in front of the entrance to the Lichtenburg camp in November 1934.

Lichtenburg isn't a name that's widely known to the general public, but it's one that the historian knows very well. Located in Saxony-Anhalt, near the village of Prettin, it's a former castle that was converted into a concentration camp by the Nazis in 1933, only 3 months after the Dachau camp, known as the training ground for the whole concentration camp system. Dachau is well anchored in the collective memory as one of the central camps of the system. Lichtenburg, though, has been totally forgotten.

Even though it played a fundamental role in both the establishment of the concentration camp system and the training of its men. The historian knew that the discovery of new photos of this forgotten camp would make it possible to reestablish the role it played. But there was a problem. The source of the photo in question was an American collector who had since died. This photo will be the starting point of a quest lasting several years. When I saw this photo of Lichtenburg, I thought there must be others.

I searched for them for years in a more or less systematic way until I came across a collector who was in possession of a photo album about the SS in Lichtenburg that contained, among others, this same photo. And the collector agreed to part with the album. The historian finally holds the photo album in his hands. He will say no more about how he obtained it, so as not to promote the market for Nazi memorabilia. Leafing through it, famous faces, such as that of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and the Reich's number two man, jump out at you. But what interests Stefan Hördler are the unknowns, these young men in their 20s. When I held this album in my hands for

the first time and flipped through it, I immediately recognized people I had already seen in other sources. All I can say is that without these men, the concentration camp system would never have been able to function. Ever at the cutting edge of technology, the Nazis were fanatic about photography. In the early concentration camps, SS photographers were commissioned to take pictures of prisoners and of everyday life in order to show everyone the benefits of so-called reeducation through labor, as well as to document work or official visits. These photos were presented in albums provided to party members and dignitaries of the regime, but also to their minions as souvenirs.

Of all the private SS albums, the most famous is that of Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz. Stefan Hördler was on the team that analyzed its 116 seemingly innocuous shots. This is the executioner's point of view, and it must be critically deconstructed if we are to grasp the true function of the photos. And we suddenly discover that these men and women we see playing nicely together are actually celebrating the end of a massacre during which, between May and June 1944, more than 325,000 people were murdered. That's what these seemingly ordinary photos show. It's by putting them into context that the photos reveal their true meaning.

The historian will tackle his new discovery by drawing on all the expertise and knowledge he's acquired during 20 years of research. It's quite a challenge because this album is different from all the others. The photos are pasted in completely randomly and without any annotation. The album is like an empty shell. You have to know how to read the photos, how to interpret them. What motivated me to take this on was the fact that by deciphering these photos you can identify individuals, networks, and individual careers that reveal new

aspects of how the concentration camp system functioned. Hurdler has posted some of the photos on the walls of his office in order to compare the faces with other shots and documents he's assembled over the years. They were all taken in different places and also at different periods. Only a few have a date if they appear on a blackboard or a calendar. But the expert draws on other clues, in particular, the men's uniforms. The collars and other elements of the uniforms provide us with clues. Here, for example, we see SS 3 on this collar. This corresponds to the third unit of the political section.

It's a unit that was at its peak in 1934. This allows us to date a whole bunch of other photos. This V on the uniforms distinguishes all these men as fighters from the very beginning. Here, we see an armband with the inscription Thuringen, which means that this man served in the Buchenwald concentration camp. The places where they were stationed, Saxony Anhalt and Thuringia, have been identified as well as when the first photos were taken, the end of the '20s. But the real difficulty is the identity of the men. In the 207 photos, there are hundreds of faces.

After leafing through the album for the first time, I immediately noticed that the same person appears in a lot of the photos. He gives some examples. This person Here, he's in the middle. [snorts] Here, on the right. In this group photo he's at the back. And here's a full-length photo. This person appears in half of the photos in the album. And I know that I have already come across this individual in my previous research.

This man is SS Kurt Schreiber, born in 1911 in the Leipzig region, deep in the countryside of Mülbeck. He's also there in the oldest photos of the album, in family shots or working in the fields. It's starting from him that Stefan Hurdler can trace the story that's told in these photos. It's a singular journey and one that's intertwined with the course of history. After the Great War, the farming family moved to the village of Flemsdorf where Kurt attended primary and secondary school. The family was financially comfortable. Usually, in these SS albums, there are no photos from before military service.

Photography was an expensive hobby. It's exceptional to have a large number of photos from this period. Towards the end of the 1920s, the Weimar Republic came to an end. The countryside and the remote regions, like where the Schreiber family lived, weren't spared the economic crisis and all the political struggles. Here, as in the big cities, the Nazi militias, the SA, confronted the communists and socialists and violence was the order of the day.

It was also the period when young adults like Schreiber, 18 at the time, forged a political consciousness. In 1929, Adolf Hitler appointed an agronomist from Munich, a certain Heinrich Himmler, as head of the SS. Under his leadership, the organization rapidly rose to prominence. Handpicked and racially irreproachable, the SS men would become the pillars, the elite of the Third Reich. To attract new members, the regional SS groups, called the Standarten, were proliferating. Group number one was in Munich, number three in Nuremberg, number 15 in Berlin, and number 26 in Halle an der Saale, in the Schreiber region.

These are men's organizations that come together around the same idea, national socialism. It is the common ground they all share in both the cities and the countryside. One photo in the album shows Kurt Schreiber arms crossed in the middle of a group of men in uniform, the Standarte 26 unit. On the blackboard, we can see the date, December 28th, 1932. Kurt was 21 years old at the time. He joined the SS a month before Adolf Hitler came to power. In this photo taken before 1933, we see young, one might say naive, men who are dedicated national socialists.

They're proud to participate in what they consider an important movement. The photo shows that they were already familiar with organizational charts, with the acceptance of a Führer, with paramilitary hierarchies, with the uniforms and the rhetoric. They are indeed already imbued with the essential elements of Nazi ideology, racism, social exclusion. But there's still no sign that they'll become mass murderers. At the end of January 1933, Hitler came to power. His political opponents were immediately hunted down. In Schreiber's region, a group of SS men attacked a communist meeting in Eisleben, only 60 km from Flemsdorf, Kurt Schreiber's village.

The result, four dead, including one SS man. The attackers were part of the young SS group called the 26 Standarte. Was Schreiber part of this expedition? Was this his first taste of violence? To find out more about this event, nicknamed Bloody Sunday, the historian goes to the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. The German National Archives are the main source for the history of the Third Reich. Hurdler finds there a film on the commemoration of Bloody Sunday, shot a year after the events.

The SS were celebrating a comrade who had died a martyr. Will Stefan Hurdler find Schreiber in these images? Kurt Schreiber isn't there in the images, but another figure catches the historian's eye. It's Ludolf von Alvensleben. No doubt about it. Through this group photo, Ludolf von Alvensleben creates a direct link with the album. It was taken 6 days after Bloody Sunday at Schockwitz Castle, which belonged to the SS Alvensleben. We see Schreiber surrounded by 25 SS men and a cook.

The photo was taken on a Saturday. So, these men must have spent the weekend there. They were SS men who worked in other jobs during the week, but at the weekends were trained in uniform. We believe that this castle in Alvensleben as served as a base for holding military training and weapons exercises during this initial phase of the SS. This photo was exceptional. Until now, we had no evidence of the existence of this kind of informal training. The SS was formed secretly with the support of an entire network, but was still one of several Nazi Party organizations that had no particular power.

But all that changed mere days after Bloody Sunday, when Hermann Göring, then Prussia's Minister of the Interior, granted the SS the status of auxiliary policeman. They were recognizable by their white armbands, and they could now carry a weapon, arrest political opponents, lock them up, and torture them. Being appointed an auxiliary police officer means that you serve as a state official at several levels. So, if you're also a member of the SS, that's augmented by the status of auxiliary police officer.

Once you're working as a police officer, you get to wear the uniform every day. Not just once a week at meetings. And so, the SS uniform becomes the uniform of the police. In one of the photos in the album, Kurt Schreiber can clearly be seen with a white armband. The former son was making progress in his career. Soon, there wasn't enough room in the prisons to incarcerate the regime's many enemies. So, the Nazis decided to open their first concentration camp, Dachau in Bavaria, was opened at the end of March 1933. 3 months later, Göring needed a similar camp in his region of Prussia. The chosen location, Lichtenburg, was 130 km from Berlin.

It was a disused 16th century castle near the village of Prettin on the Elbe. It had already been used as a prison under the German Empire, but was closed in 1928 because of its appalling sanitary conditions. But that didn't stop the Nazis from turning Lichtenburg on June the 12th, 1933, only 6 months after they seized power, into a concentration camp. Göring insisted that the guards should be recruited exclusively from among the SS auxiliary police. Lichtenburg was only 60 km from Flamsdorf, Schreiber's hometown. So, a few weeks after the camp opened, the young SS man volunteered to serve there.

Kurt Schreiber is one of those who had already undergone a number of training courses and learned certain rituals. He turned out to be particularly suited to working as an auxiliary police officer, equipped with just a baton at first. Then, when he became a guard in the concentration camp, he was armed with a pistol. And the amazing thing is that we have all these steps documented in these photos. Dozens of other young people were also applying to Lichtenburg. Thanks to his years of research, this isn't the first time Stefan Hördler has seen these faces. So, he sets about comparing the photographs with other sources, documents he's found in the German

National Archives. Who are these men? What connects them to Kurt Schreiber? In the original photo of the gate, he thinks he recognizes Arthur Rödel, the former postal worker. Rödel was the head of the SS in Lichtenburg, and as such, Schreiber's superior. Arthur Rödel helped set up the SS in Munich. He also set up the special units responsible for the persecution of political opponents after 1933. He's a holder of the Blutorden, the Order of Blood, awarded to those who participated in Hitler's failed putsch in 1923. On the right, there's Egon Zill, a very short man who was a non-commissioned officer back when his height disqualified him from this rank.

To which he only rose when he joined the SS at an early age. A baker by training, Zill joined the SS in 1926. In Lichtenburg, he was appointed adjutant to the commander. The historian also manages to identify the young recruits, the men without rank. In particular, this jovial man, embraced by Kurt Schreiber, Otto Reinecke, a farmer. Present in several photos in different places, the two men seem to be very close. And Hördler also recognizes Wilhelm Schäfer, a mason by profession.

By cross-checking their places of origin, the historian discovers that these men all come from the same region. The core of the Lichtenburg staff in the years '33 to '34 came from central Germany. These were men who joined the SS very early, before it had even 100 members, and before Heinrich Himmler himself became the head of the SS. This shows us that these men already had established links in the regional SS organizations, and not just from when they were serving in the camps.

They brought these links and networks with them into the camps, and that's a revelation that we owe to this album. The historian decides to head for Lichtenburg, the forgotten camp where the careers of these young SS men began. The importance of this place is quite obvious in Schreiber's album. With all the military exercises, parades, and official visits, nearly half of the photos were taken here in this gloomy castle transformed into a concentration camp. Once through the gate, Stefan Hördler arrives in the courtyard of the SS with the offices of the commandant or and the guards' quarters.

Behind these buildings was the courtyard with the prisoners' dormitories. Prisoners arrived in Lichtenburg in June 1933. They were German political opponents, communists, and socialists. Among them, Ernst Reuter, the former Social Democratic Mayor of Magdeburg, the comedian Wolfgang Langhoff, and the Berlin lawyer Hans Litten. An inmate testifies to the SS gave to the prisoners. As soon as we got out of the cars, the SS men surrounded us. A group leader from Standartenführer took charge of our reception shouting, "Come on, run. Get moving, you dirty pigs of reds. We're going

to straighten you out here." Some of them moved us along with their rifle butts and with rubber truncheons. Others started fun to trip us up and make us fall. The leader announced, "Unless we say so, none of you will get out of here alive." The fanaticism of these men who worked in the concentration camp system began from day one. There was torture and there were acts of violence all the time. You can't necessarily see this in the photos. What they show is a parallel universe that only exists through the lens.

The parallel universe of these men was all the moments that bind the group together, football matches, excursions organized by the party, drinking sessions, and fancy dress. In short, anything that contrasted with the hell of the concentration camps. The victims are mostly absent from the photos, except for this one astonishing shot that shows the guards along with the prisoners of the camp. All that distinguishes them is the uniforms. These are intriguing photos that tell a lot of stories, especially about the guards.

Their postures show that they took some time to find the right stance to take on their new roles. These guards had often worked as auxiliary policemen in their region. They may even have arrested them for the first time then come across them later in the Lichtenburg camp. Only 2 months after the opening of the camp, the SS committed their first murder. The victim was a communist worker who had dared to criticize the Nazi regime. The SS dragged him into the castle and beat him to death.

Hurd's documents attest that among the killers was Wilhelm Schäfer, one of the men in the album. Schäfer and his men were neither punished nor reprimanded. Here, we have important stages that we have to closely examine. The first torture, the first murder. The first murder in a community. Little by little, an addiction to violence took hold. For some of them, it wasn't just an addiction. It was a pleasure. None of the men of Lichtenberg lived behind closed doors, isolated from the rest of society.

Kurt Schreiber visited his village, Flemsdorf, on many occasions, especially for the harvest festival, always in his SS uniform. In Prettin, the neighboring village to Lichtenberg, everyone knew what was going on in the camp. The photos show the SS personnel mingling with the population as the children look on. A local businessman even filmed parades in the streets of Prettin. In the front row, we can see SS Egon Zill, easily recognizable by his small size. Villagers and SS men even got together for festivals held within the concentration camp itself. In 1936, there were 700 SS men stationed in Lichtenberg.

Their sheer numbers, of course, had an influence on a population of 2,000 inhabitants. They frequented public places in the city, had romantic relationships with women in the area, and some even started families. Obviously, the existence of the camp had a great influence on the village. As for the prisoners, over a thousand of them eventually, they were exploited in full view of everyone for a great deal of forced labor. It was they who built the city park. Inaugurated in 1936, it was the pride of the whole town. In Prettin, everyone was quite comfortable with the presence of the concentration camp.

Lichtenberg very soon caught the interest of the regime's high-ranking dignitaries. The photo show Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, during an inspection in the autumn of 1934. The man behind him is Theodor Eicke, former commandant of Dachau and inspector of all concentration camps. He was to have a considerable influence on the history of Lichtenberg. In search of facts about this visit, Stefan Hurdler goes to the Prettin archives. A series of documents catches eye. They show that SS Officer Eicke arrived in Lichtenberg in May 1934 to take over the running of the camp.

This shows the importance of Lichtenberg. You might say that Eicke's takeover of the camp was a kind of coup by which he established his authority over the running of the camp. In so doing, he united the two camp networks, the Bavarian network and the Prussian network. This tells us one thing. The genesis of the concentration camp system was not linear. Men from different regions and networks competed for their positions and tried to promote their own men. The camp was now integrated into a new institution created by the SS and under Eicke's command, the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps.

This was the beginning of the Nazi concentration camp system, soon to extend throughout occupied Europe. Lichtenberg became a training center for executioners and its methods, the model to follow. To start with, an internal regulation of the 1st of June, 1934, bearing the motto, "Tolerance is synonymous with weakness." established the punishments to be suffered by the prisoners locked up in these cells on dry bread and water and with stone beds. For example, 3 days in jail for being late in getting out of bed during the morning call. 5 days for a non-regulation haircut. 8 days for damaging one's clothes.

14 days and 25 lashes for making disparaging remarks about the Führer and National Socialism. 42 days for trying to organize a hunger strike. Daring to defend oneself physically merited the death penalty. Lichtenberg was not an extermination camp. Those places of systematic mass murder where later hundreds and thousands of people were killed every day. But it was a starting point for the violence. Lichtenberg is like an historical window that we can open to glimpse the future evolution of the concentration camp system. In the summer of 1937, the Lichtenberg camp was transformed.

The castle had become too small to accommodate new prisoners. From now on, it was to be used to lock up women and to train the guards who watch over them. In 4 years, hundreds of SS men served in this school of violence. They were now ready to take on responsibilities in the new camps that were proliferating. For the majority of them, the next stop was the Buchenwald camp near Weimar. Built in 1937, it was a new style of camp composed of barracks on virgin and isolated land. Buchenwald was designed to be extended if necessary.

The vast majority of prisoners from Lichtenburg were transferred here. And with them, the guards. Kurt Schreiber, Otto Reinecke, and Wilhelm Schäfer. If these same men found themselves transferred together, it was not by chance. They needed experienced men, specialists. Whole groups were transferred from one camp to another to make these camps work. The men were all experts in camp construction and administration, as well as in violence and later mass murder. And they all moved from one camp to the other.

The two comrades, Schreiber and Reinecke, patrolled the barbed wire. They were experienced guards who knew how to treat prisoners. In the album, one detail is striking. There are very few photos that show Schreiber's presence in Buchenwald. Through documents found in the national archives, Stefan discovers that the SS man left the camp and his duties there on March 31st, 1938. Something must have happened in his life. Was Schreiber perhaps feeling remorse? The reasons for his decision remain unknown. But they didn't necessarily reveal a questioning of the system or a critical attitude towards the camps.

When we compare the files of other SS men, we see that many of them resigned at that time. the reasons were as varied as the people themselves. And often personal ones. They returned to civilian life and resumed their previous activity. What this spate of resignations in 1938 shows is that it was possible to leave the service for any reason. Men were no way obliged to stay. The precise reasons for his departure will remain one of the mysteries of Schreiber's career. Resignations were still possible in 1938, but they stopped a year later when war broke out.

The album reveals, however, that the SS man did not remain in civilian life for long. In the summer of 1939, the former farmer was back with the SS, assigned to the Flossenbürg camp in Bavaria. The special feature of this camp was its quarries, where German and later Czech, Polish, Soviet, and French prisoners were forced in extreme working conditions to extract granite blocks. This material was to be used for the Führer's megalomaniac projects, and in particular for the transformation of Berlin under the new name of Germania.

Located in the middle of the town, the camp and its staff interacted with the population as they already had in Lichtenburg. The photos in the album show that Schreiber had risen through the ranks. In Flossenbürg, he was training new guards. With the beginning of the war, the young men were all sent to the front and the older men had to replace them. Many of them remained in the concentration camp system until 1945. Among those we see with Schreiber is Arno Böcher. He became commandant of a camp in occupied Poland, in Plaszow near Krakow, at the same time that Schindler's List was drawn up there.

Promoted once again, Kurt Schreiber became the head of the work commandos. He was now in direct contact with the prisoners. And in this position, Kurt Schreiber had a key role. In charge not only of the forced labor and the prisoners at Flossenbürg, but also of their living conditions. It's he who decided who was and who was not fit to work. On Schreiber's watch, the prisoners died of exhaustion at work in the quarries, but also of hunger, torture, and ill-treatment. After the war, US Army investigators confronted him with the survivors' statements. Many testimonies attest that you were one of the worst brutes in the camp, one of the most feared SS men.

You are accused of beating people with a whip or a baton in such a way that they fainted from blood loss. Many of them died as a result. In Flossenbürg, Schreiber was enjoying his golden years, surrounded by his group of friends. There he met Otto Reinecke, his jovial pal from Lichtenburg, and later little Egon Zill, who would become his commander. The complicity between the network's elders contributed to the perfect management of the camp. As for 2 years war raged in Europe, Schreiber made a career away from the front and married the daughter of a local entrepreneur.

The son of a farmer had made his mark. When you compare the photos taken in Lichtenburg in 1933 and 34 with those from Flossenbürg, you can see that a few years later, Schreiber had found his place in the system. His poses reflect a kind of self-confidence, even of self-importance. He enjoyed his influential position within the Kommandantur, which gave him the power of life or death over human beings on a daily basis. Schreiber and his pals were relishing this staging of their own success. But group photos with prisoners were now out of the question. In Flossenbürg, more than a third of those prisoners died. In June 1941, after the invasion of the USSR by the Wehrmacht,

the violence escalated again. Soviet prisoners of war arrived en masse in the German concentration camps. Sworn enemies of the Nazis, they were treated with the greatest cruelty by the SS, especially in Buchenwald, where Wilhelm Schäfer, Schreiber's former comrade who participated in the first murder committed in Lichtenburg, had been active for 4 years. He took part in the executions of Soviet prisoners in a cynical and macabre ritual that has been reconstructed at the Buchenwald Memorial. Under the pretext of a medical examination, the prisoners were brought before the SS, who were disguised as doctors. The former commander explained the process. After the teeth were examined, one of the SS men examined the heart and lungs.

Then the prisoner went to another room to be measured. The moment he had his back to the measure, the SS man would kick the wall. This was the signal for the shooter who was on the other side. Two other non-commissioned officers would then move the body to another room and the pools of blood would be cleaned with a garden hose. And in this way 8,000 men were murdered at Buchenwald. And Wilhelm Schäfer was a member of what was known at Buchenwald as Commando 99. It was the telephone number used to assemble the men.

These executions were carried out in all the camps and were a first step towards systematic mass extermination well before that of the Jews. Lichtenberg's men were on the front line everywhere. Arthur Rödel was the commandant of Gross-Rosen. Otto Reinecke transferred to Auschwitz in 1940. And Kurt Schreiber was sent to Flossenbürg. In 1942 Kurt Schreiber was awarded the Service Cross Second Class. Take a close look at who was awarded this distinction during the years 1941 and 1942. And you'll find that there were a lot of SS men who had actively participated in the murder of Soviet prisoners of war. At the end of 1941 the Nazis began to

deport Jews from the ghettos and occupied territories to exterminate them in the gas chambers of the killing centers in the East. For this murderous enterprise Lichtenberg's men were indispensable. It had taken them just 10 years to climb the ladder. 16 of them were to run concentration and extermination camps throughout the Reich. They made up a third of all camp commanders in the system. And even Kurt Schreiber was given command of Zwodau, an outpost camp of Flossenbürg.

There is no trace in the album of these years of mass murder. The last photo dates from 1943. It shows Schreiber in the uniform of SS-Hauptscharführer or platoon captain, the highest rank that a non-commissioned officer could attain. The small K on his collar indicates that he is part of the Kommandantur, the directors of the camp. Platoon captain is the most frequent rank of non-commissioned officers like Kurt Schreiber. Without them daily life in a concentration camp would be impossible. Their know-how was essential to make the system work.

The end of the war put an end to the careers of the SS. Flossenbürg, Kurt Schreiber's camp, was liberated in April 1945. SS officer Schreiber was arrested by the Americans. He was 34 years old at the time. Number six. Kurt Schreiber too was there in the dock. To justify the cruelties of which he was accused he replied, "I have simply done my duty. I have obeyed orders." Schreiber was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Wilhelm Schäfer, the Buchenwald killer, escaped justice and hid under a false name in the GDR. He was unmasked and executed in 1961.

Sentenced to life Egon Zill was released after only 8 years in prison. He returned to live in Dachau, one of the places where he had committed his crimes, and died in 1974. Released in 1952 Kurt Schreiber settled in Flossenbürg in a newly built district on the site of the former camp. He became the owner of a quarry. His neighbor was none other than his old friend Otto Reinecke, who never had any trouble with the law. He ran his own transport company. In 1971 Schreiber died in a car accident at the age of 60.

His obituary reads "The community mourns one of its most respected citizens." But the extraordinary SS album tells a completely different story. That of the thousands of anonymous servants who were indispensable to the concentration camp system.