Solahütte

Solahütte
General view of the Solahütte guest-house of the Nazi German personnel and administration of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex during the Holocaust in occupied Poland. Photograph from the Höcker Album
Lake Międzybrodzkie on the Soła river at the foot of Międzybrodzie Bialskie village, located 30 kilometres (19 mi) south of Auschwitz; about half-an-hour drive along Road DW 948

Solahütte ( Solehütte, Soletal, SS-Hütte Soletal, or SS Hütte Porabka) was a little-known resort for the Nazi German guards, administrators, and auxiliary personnel of the Auschwitz/Birkenau/Buna facilities during the Holocaust in occupied Poland. Solahütte can be considered a tiny subcamp of Auschwitz because Auschwitz prisoners, overseen by Franz Hössler, constructed the rustic getaway facility, and a crew of detainees did ongoing grounds-keeping and cleanup work there also. Postcards of the era sent by German staff sometimes bore the resort hamlet's mysterious pre-printed return address "SS Hütte Soletal" but otherwise the place remained largely unknown until 2007, when the Höcker Album of vintage Auschwitz photographs was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum which then released images online for study.

Wartime snapshots made at Solahütte are somewhat jarring because of the lightheartedness of the people pictured: some of history's most infamous war criminals are shown cheerily singing along to accordion music, loafing on deckchairs, or giggling over desserts with female Nazi staff of the Helferinnen or Aufseherinnen. Among the SS Officers photographed at Solahütte were Oswald Pohl (executed through the Nuremberg Tribunal), Rudolf Höss (executed through the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland), and Josef Mengele (nicknamed the "Angel of Death"). The latter was almost never seen photographed in his SS uniform with Auschwitz colleagues until the Solahütte snapshots and a select few other images became known.