Two rare photographs from the visit of Nazi criminal the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler together with Nazi criminal Fritz Brecht in the Auschwitz extermination camp in March 1941. The two are seen in the center of the photographs accompanied by high-ranking SS soldiers. The photographs are described on the back in German: “Fritz Bracht und Heinrich Himmler zu Besichtigung in Auschwitz, März 1941” – Fritz Bracht and Heinrich Himmler on a tour in Auschwitz, March 1941.
On April 27, 1940, Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of a concentration camp near the city of Auschwitz. Construction work began shortly thereafter. The camp was built around an abandoned Polish military camp near the city. The camp originally had eleven one-story buildings, and around it lived about 1,200 residents in huts. The Germans expelled the residents who lived in the area, and began training the area as a concentration camp. 300 Jews from and around the city were brought to the site for this purpose in April 1940. Fritz Bracht [1899-1945] was an SA Nazi officer, head of the Nazi party branch in Lower Schlesien and actually served as governor of Lower Schlesien from 1941 until his suicide in 1945. In March 1941 Fritz Bracht participated in a joint visit together With Heinrich Himmler in Auschwitz in order to explore with him the possibility of enlarging the Auschwitz extermination camp, where 10,900 people were staying at the time. This was the tour documented in the photos before us . As a result of that visit, it was decided to increase the camp’s capacity, and to establish a huge POW camp in Birkenau, near the original camp. The new camp designed to accommodate 100,000 people. The first camp was called Auschwitz I, and the second was Auschwitz II. The plan was launched, and the two returned in July 1942 to watch the extermination of Jews and Poles in the Birkenau gas chambers, before returning to Brecht’s villa in Katowice, where they had dinner with Rudolf Hess, commander of Auschwitz. Bracht, known as “The Beast of Auschwitz”, was honored by senior party officials including Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, who called him “one of the best.” At the end of the war when the Red Army entered Nazi Germany, Bracht and his wife committed suicide in Bad Kodova, Poland, by taking cyanide pills. Himmler, as is well known, also committed suicide at the end of the war by biting a cyanide pill.
Same size: 7.5×5.5 cm. Tear marks from an album on the back of the photos. Good condition.
