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 people in these black and white images appear to not have a care in the world as they are snapped sunbathing, dancing and drinking with glee.
What you cannot see however is the stomach-turning crimes against humanity unfolding just kilometres away at the notoriously evil Auschwitz concentration camp, where these figures worked.
The dark reality is that the smiling men and women in these happy holiday snaps are Nazis enjoying some leisurely time off from participating in the mass extermination of over six million people during the Holocaust.
Most of the pictures were taken at Solahütte, a recreation resort built by prisoners for their captors’ to enjoy.
It was located just south of Auschwitz on the Sola River and was frequented by Nazis as a place to rest and recharge during their time off.
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.
Smiling female guards are seen happily posing for images, beaming officers sunbathe peacefully in deck chairs, while a happy gas chamber supervisor smiles widely as he listens to music.
These eerie snaps are among 116 taken between June 1944 and January 1945, the last six months that Auschwitz was in operation.
The album was put together by camp guard Karl Höcker, who joined the SS in 1933 and the Nazi party in 1937.
He described the album as being a memento of the “good times” he enjoyed while working at Auschwitz.
Höcker was captured by the British in April 1945 following the surrender of the German Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp, but was released the following year.
He was eventually sentenced to just seven years in prison in 1965 for aiding and abetting in over 1,000 murders at Auschwitz. He was released in 1970 and worked as a bank teller until his retirement.
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.
Höcker was released from prison in 1992 and died on January 30, 2000.
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.
Described online as “faces of pure evil”, the cheerful images were taken during Auschwitz’s most lethal period, where 400,000 Hungarian Jews were being murdered in the gas chambers as an integral part of Hitler’s ‘final solution’.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II, was the largest Nazi concentration camp, established in 1941 in the Polish village of Brzezinka.
The detailed notes on the photographs, and those featured in the images, provide a rare insight into life around Auschwitz.
They feature notorious S.S. camp officers, including Rudolf Höss, Josef Kramer, Franz Hössler and Dr. Josef Mengele, otherwise known as the ‘Angel of Death’ for his evil medical experiments.
The very first pictures in the album depict Richard Baer, the last Auschwitz camp commandant between 1944 and 1945, and Baer’s adjutant, Karl Höcker.
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.
Museum archivist Rebeca Erberlding recognised the historic importance of the album and the eerie significance of the seemingly “normal” looking happy snaps.
“They do not look evil (the Nazis); they’re smiling. They’re playing with their dogs,” she said.
“They look like they might resemble a neighbour that you have. And, yes, that is correct, that humans have this capacity.”
Solahütte resort was converted into a restaurant at the Międzybrodzie Bialskie holiday resort, before the building was eventually completely demolished in 2011.