The Summer Camp For Auschwitz Personnel
- May 10, 2023
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 30
Twenty miles south of Auschwitz, on a lake fed by the Sola River, the SS built a lodge where camp staff could unwind. Guards and officers who'd performed “exemplary” work at the camp were rewarded with trips there to hunt, sing around a fire, and eat fresh blueberries. A photo album that surfaced decades later shows exactly what that looked like, and it's one of the strangest, most disturbing documents to come out of the Holocaust, not because of what it shows, but because of what it doesn't.
A Reward for Good Work
The retreat was called Solahütte, a rustic lodge on Międzybrodzkie Lake used by German personnel running the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, about 30 kilometres from the main camp. Archival records show guards were sent there as a reward for things like the “successful use of their weapons” during an escape attempt by prisoners, days of leave handed out for stopping people from fleeing a death camp. Between May 1944 and January 1945, someone at Auschwitz carried a camera to Solahütte and photographed the staff there again and again: singing in a group of nearly a hundred on a hillside, hunting in the surrounding forest, decorating a Christmas tree in December 1944 while the gas chambers a short drive away were still in use.
The retreat wasn't built by outside contractors. Auschwitz prisoners constructed it and kept up its grounds, working under the supervision of Franz Hössler, the same officer who later shows up in the album relaxing there himself. That makes Solahütte, technically, a small subcamp of Auschwitz: a resort built by slave labor so the people running the death camp next door would have somewhere pleasant to unwind.
The site didn't stay abandoned after the war. Poland's communist government eventually expanded it into a proper resort with a dance hall, restaurant and hotel, a getaway for mining officials and other Communist Party figures, and even hosted a visit from Leonid Brezhnev's son at one point. After communism fell, the place was left to rot, picked over by looters and explorers, until the original buildings were finally torn down around 2010 and 2011. There's no plaque or marker at the site today noting what it once was.
The Man Who Kept the Album
The photographs all came from one album, and it's now known as the Höcker Album, after the SS officer believed to have owned it. Karl Höcker was adjutant to Richard Baer, the last commandant of Auschwitz, meaning it was Höcker's job to make sure nothing important happening at the camp went unreported to his boss. He appears in more of the album's 116 photographs than anyone else, and he's the only person who ever appears alone in any of them, which is how historians identified him as its owner.
Also scattered through the album are young women known as Helferinnen, German for “helpers.” They weren't guards. They were typists, telephone and telegraph operators, trained at an SS school and sent to Auschwitz to handle the camp's paperwork and communications. In the photographs, they're shown laughing on a fence rail, eating blueberries Höcker had brought them, listening to an accordion player. Nothing in the album shows them anywhere near the parts of the camp where people were actually being killed.
A Party for the Man Who Ran the Hungarian Deportations
One of the most striking dates in the album is July 15, 1944. That day, dozens of SS officers gathered at Solahütte for a farewell party honoring Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz's founding commandant, who was heading off to a new posting. Höss wasn't leaving because the killing had slowed down. He was leaving because he'd just finished overseeing the deportation and murder of the vast majority of Hungary's Jewish population, one of the fastest, most concentrated mass killing operations of the entire Holocaust, and Berlin considered the job largely done.
The photos from that day show Höss posing with a group that includes Josef Kramer, later known as the Beast of Belsen and executed by the British in 1945, and Josef Mengele, the camp physician whose experiments on twins and other prisoners made him one of the most infamous doctors in history. It's one of only a handful of photographs known to exist of Mengele at Auschwitz. A separate photo from a week later, July 22, shows the Helferinnen and a group of officers pretending to weep over empty blueberry bowls for the camera, a small joke, taken the day before Soviet troops liberated the Majdanek camp roughly 180 miles away and forced a thousand of its prisoners onto a march to Auschwitz, of whom only half survived. You can find more on Höss's own role in building that system in our piece on the architecture of industrialised murder at Auschwitz.
The Other Men in the Photos
Höcker and Höss aren't the only recognizable faces. Historians have also identified Otto Moll, who ran the crematoria at Birkenau and personally oversaw the gassing operations, relaxing in several frames. Franz Hössler, commander of the women's camp, appears too. He would later be hanged for crimes committed at Bergen-Belsen. None of them look like men responsible for organizing mass murder. They look like men on a work trip, which is precisely what made the album so unsettling once historians finally got a proper look at it.
Found in an Apartment, Hidden for Sixty Years
The album's own story is almost as strange as its contents. In 1946, a US Army officer working with the Counter Intelligence Corps, the branch investigating Nazi war criminals for American prosecutors, found it in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt and brought it home with him. He held onto it privately for sixty years. In December 2006, now elderly, he wrote to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum offering to donate it, on the condition that his identity never be revealed. The museum received the album the following month, and archivists spent months working out exactly who and what it showed before anything was made public.
Two Trials, Twenty-Four Years Apart
Karl Höcker didn't disappear after the war. He went back to work as a bank teller in West Germany and stayed there for close to two decades before anyone came looking for him. He was tried in Frankfurt in the early 1960s alongside other former Auschwitz staff, and in August 1965 was sentenced to seven years for aiding and abetting the murder of more than a thousand people. He always denied being present for the selections on the ramp where new arrivals were split between forced labor and the gas chambers, and prosecutors were never able to prove otherwise, so the more serious charges never stuck. He served five years and went straight back to his old job at the bank.
That wasn't the end of it. In 1989, a court in Bielefeld put him on trial a second time, this time over his earlier posting at Majdanek, where records showed he had personally acquired more than 3,600 kilograms of Zyklon B used to gas prisoners there. He was sentenced to four more years, served two, and was released in 1992. He died in 2000, at 89, having spent more of his life free than in prison for what he did.
A Photo Album Becomes a Play
The album has had an unexpected second life recently. Playwright Moisés Kaufman turned the story of its discovery and its aftermath into Here There Are Blueberries, a documentary play that became a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist and ran an extended Off-Broadway engagement in New York before touring nationally in 2025. Part of what makes the play land is a detail that came out during the research: after the photos were published online, a German businessman recognized his own grandfather smiling in one of them, and had to reckon publicly with exactly what that meant.
That's really the whole story the album tells. It isn't a document of violence. It's a document of the people who carried it out taking a few days off, and the fact that it looks so much like any other office retreat is precisely what makes it one of the more chilling artifacts to survive the Holocaust.
