Pictures from the Album of a Concentration Camp Commandant
The exhibition catalogue presents for the first time some two hundred photographs from the service album of the first Commandant of Sachsenhausen, Karl Otto Koch, which were found by the Sachsenhausen Memorial in the archives of the Russian Secret Service. In this album not only the construction and setting-up phase of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp but also the development of the concentration camp system in Germany from 1933 to July 1937 is documented from the point of view of the SS perpetrators.
#The pictures document the rise of Koch from being an SS officer to being an expert on the reorganisation and reconstruction of concentration camps. The pictures are accompanied by scholarly commentaries; their perpetrator perspective is moreover balanced by reports by former inmates which make reference to the pictures and provide an alternative view of them. The exhibition catalogue also includes a comprehensive depiction of the formation phase of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, articles on the early concentration camps at Hohnstein, Sachsenburg, Columbia and Esterwegen, on the self-image of the SS and on photo-historical and biographical aspects.
