Sonderkommando photographs

The Sonderkommando photographs are four blurred photographs taken secretly in August 1944 inside the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Along with a few photographs in the Auschwitz Album, they are the only ones known to exist of events around the gas chambers.

The images were taken within 15–30 minutes of each other by an inmate inside Auschwitz-Birkenau, the extermination camp within the Auschwitz complex. Usually named only as Alex, a Jewish prisoner from Greece, the photographer was a member of the Sonderkommando, inmates forced to work in and around the gas chambers. Several sources identified him as Alberto Errera, a Greek naval officer. He took two shots from inside one of the gas chambers and two outside, shooting from the hip, unable to aim the camera with any precision. The Polish resistance smuggled the film out of the camp in a toothpaste tube.

The photographs were numbered 280–283 by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Nos. 280 and 281 show the cremation of corpses in a fire pit, shot through the black frame of the gas chamber's doorway or window. No. 282 shows a group of naked women just before they enter the gas chamber. No. 283 is an image of trees, the result of the photographer aiming too high.

The Sonderkommando ("special commandos") in Auschwitz were mostly Jewish inmates, and at one point a few Russian prisoners-of-war, who were forced to work in the crematoria. The crematoria contained the Entkleidungskammer (undressing rooms), gas chambers and furnaces. In the summer of 1944 the camp had up to 1,000 Sonderkommando working in four crematoria (nos. II-V), and a bunker with extra gas chambers, housed in a thatched brick building known as the "little white house".

After inmates had been "selected" as unfit for work by the SS, the Sonderkommando usually took them to the undressing room, then walked them to the gas chamber, telling them they were being taken to the bathing and disinfection room. To avoid panic, inmates were given a numbered hook for their belongings in the undressing room to make them believe they would be returning.

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