Solahutte- The SS Resort

I think the pictures themselves have already been posted elsewhere, but I don't think the resort's story has.
"Everybody has heard of Auschwitz, the place where the most appalling crimes against humanity were perpetrated: the gas chambers where hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, mostly Jews, were murdered; slave factories where tens of thousands toiled in terrible conditions on starvation rations; daily degradation, casual brutality and torture; and the infamous experiments on children conducted by the equally infamous Dr Josef Mengele.

In our mind’s eye we see a railway line leading under an arch to a concrete ramp beyond where, every day, cattle-cars arrived bearing their human cargo.

Here the SS made their “selections”.

Adults capable of work went to the slave factories, the rest – the elderly and infirm, children and women with young children – were sent to the gas chambers.

But this place – Birkenau – was only one of several camps.

Two other large camps and many smaller ones also fell under the Auschwitz umbrella.

The two large camps were the original camp, on the site of a former Polish army barracks, called the Stammlager and a third camp, called Monowitz, was constructed to house slave workers for the nearby “Buna” factory, built by IG Farben to make synthetic oil and rubber from coal.

Much of our knowledge of Auschwitz comes from the testimony of survivors – invariably harrowing and often very courageous.

But there is one part of the Auschwitz complex about which the accounts of survivors are silent because few prisoners ever saw it.

In the middle of a nearby forest was a little-known resort called Solahütte.

By 1944 about 4,500 SS officers, men and women, were stationed in Auschwitz and its satellites.

Solahütte was a retreat for them, somewhere they could be at their ease, wind down and relax.

This SS country club was largely unknown until 2007 when an album of photographs taken by former SS-Obersturmführer (First Lieutenant) Karl-Friedrich Höcker, adjutant to the Auschwitz Kommandant, SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Richard Bär, was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The earliest photograph, in extraordinary detail, shows Höcker with the Kommandant.

It is dated June 21, 1944.

The date is significant – this was when the slaughter of Jews in Auschwitz was at its height."
http://www.express.co.uk/news/history/560416/Solah-tte-Auschwitz-holiday-retreat-SS-Nazis-rest-recreation

 

Absolutely appalling. Thank you for this. It shows the mindset of those SS involved. Absolutely zero remorse or feeling of any wrong doing.

 

Vermin.