A newly released series of photos taken at Auschwitz and sent last year to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shows Nazi officers and female SS members in a bafflingly banal (cf. Hannah Arendt) array of activities: singing, relaxing, laughing on group getaways, and even lighting Christmas trees.

International Herald Tribune:

For example, one of the Höcker pictures, shot on July 22, 1944, shows a group of cheerful young women who worked as SS communications specialists eating bowls of fresh blueberries. One turns her bowl upside down and makes a mock frown because she has finished her portion.

On that day, said Judith Cohen, a historian at the Holocaust museum in Washington, 150 new prisoners arrived at the Birkenau site. Of that group, 21 men and 12 women were selected for work, the rest transported immediately to the gas chambers.

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Click here to see The New York Times’ narrated slide show featuring several photos from the museum’s collection.

Follow this link to see the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s web site.