Wilhelm Brasse
Photo: AFP
Auschwitz photographer Wilhelm Brasse dies at 95
Death camp photographer took over 50,000 pictures; had key role in setting up Auschwitz museum
Wilhelm Brasse, a former Auschwitz prisoner whose photographs from inside the Nazi death camp provided a chilling historical chronicle of the horrors committed there, has died at the age of 95, an Auschwitz Museum historian said on Wednesday.
Brasse, who died on Tuesday, was sent to the camp after he was caught in 1940 trying to flee Nazi occupied Poland to join the Polish military in exile. He was put in a work detail which had to haul bodies from the gas chambers to be incinerated.
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He was also ordered to take photographs of the medical experiments conducted by camp doctors on inmates.
"He tried to come back to photography (after the war) but it was too difficult for him," Auschwitz museum historian Teresa Wontor-Cichy said. "The fact of having taken such pictures was disturbing for him."
The Nazis killed some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, at Auschwitz, located near the Polish village of Oswiecim.
Brasse's pictures, among the few photographic records of the death camp, were recovered from Nazi files at the end of World War Two and they are now a centre-piece of the exhibits at the Auschwitz museum.
Over the five years he spent at the camp, Brasse shot some 50,000 pictures, of which nearly 40,000 survived.
Brasse, who was of mixed Austrian-Polish descent, was active in setting up the Auschwitz museum and spent years after the war helping educate young people, especially from Germany, about the holocaust.
In 2005, Polish director Irek Dobrowolski released a documentary film about Brasse's life, called "The Portraitist" ("Portrecista").
Brasse will be buried on Thursday in the city of Zywiec, southern Poland.
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