The banality of the Auschwitz Nazis
In December 2022 I wrote a review for TheArticle of an exhibition called Seeing Auschwitz. It was an original creation by Musealia in collaboration with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and was shown at a gallery in South Kensington. It was one of the most moving and original exhibitions for years. As the curators pointed out at the beginning of the exhibition, a relatively small number of photographs, nearly all taken by the Nazis, influence how we “see” Auschwitz. Seeing Auschwitz presented the less well-known photographs taken by victims themselves and aerial photos taken by the Allies. But perhaps the most striking were the photos taken by Nazis in their off-duty moments, many of them relaxing with young German women who also worked at Auschwitz.
Here There Are Blueberries is an astonishing play, shown at Stratford East until this Saturday, 28 February. Moises Kaufman, who co-wrote the play, came across images from Auschwitz on the front page of The New York Times, including some of the photos shown at Seeing Auschwitz. He contacted Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. In December 2006 she had received an album of photos from Auschwitz. Kaufman’s play tells the story of the 116 photos in the album and who appears in the photos. The photo album was sent to the museum by a member of United States intelligence who had come across the photo album while he was in Germany. At first Erfelding was sceptical. She and her colleagues were familiar with photos of prisoners at Auschwitz, often as they were being taken off the trains as they arrived at the camp, and even photos of the crematoria taken by Sonderkommandos. But photos of the Nazi officers relaxing in the sunshine were extremely unusual.
Kaufman and co-writer Amanda Gronich have created a fascinating detective story, following Rebecca and her colleagues at the Holocaust Museum as they try to find out who are in the photos, where they were taken and why. The cast is outstanding, but perhaps best of all are the sets and the extraordinary use of maps of Auschwitz and the photos, zooming in on details.
Through their research they managed to find out who were in the photos. It turns out that they were among the leading Nazi officials at Auschwitz. There are figures like Dr. Josef Mengele, infamous for his experiments on Jewish children; the most notorious camp commandant, Rudolf Höss; Richard Baer, the final commandant of Auschwitz; Josef Kramer, the commandant of the Birkenau extermination camp and Karl-Friedrich Höcker, Baer’s adjutant. It turns out that the album of photos had belonged to Höcker, but was discovered by a Jewish prisoner.
Who, though, were the young women photographed with these officials? Unlike the men they were not key figures at Auschwitz. They were switchboard operators and other menial workers. One of the photos of the young women shows them enjoying bowls of blueberries; hence the title of the play.
Perhaps the most breathtaking moment in the whole play (spoiler alert) comes when we find out the day some of these photos were taken and what exactly the Nazi hierarchy were celebrating. “These people are singing with an accordion or eating blueberries or lighting a Christmas tree,” Kaufman told one interviewer. “So my purpose in writing the play was to understand how human beings find a way to come to terms with that kind of murder and at the same time lead what appears to be from the photographs normal, quotidian lives.”
What is striking is the complete absence from the play of atrocities and even of the prisoners at Auschwitz. These could be scenes of Germans on holiday. This absence could be partly explained by the background of these Nazis. Höcker himself was a bank teller before the war, a job he would eventually return to – after a brief spell in prison. Others, such as the commandant Rudolf Höss and the SS officer Franz Hössler, were hanged for their war crimes. As a younger man Hössler worked in a warehouse, while Richard Baer, the Auschwitz commandant between May 1944 and February 1945 had, before the war, trained as a confectioner. Like The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis’s novel (later also a film), Here There Are Blueberries explores the same, profoundly disturbing subject: the mundane, domestic, and cheerful lives of SS officers and their families living in immediate proximity to Auschwitz. Far more than the Eichmann trial, the images of the Höcker Album reveal what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil”.
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