Heinrich Himmler (o segundo pola esquerda) visita a planta de IG Farben en Auschwitz III, xullo de 1942.
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, visiting the IG Farben plant, Auschwitz III, German-occupied Poland, July 1942. Left to right: Rudolf Brandt, Heinrich Himmler, Max Faust (an IG Farben engineer who was head of building operations at Auschwitz III), possibly Ernst-Heinrich Schmauser, and the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß. For the names, see USHMM. Himmler visited Auschwitz on 17 and 18 July 1942. His visit included watching a gassing. The visit was significant because he was inspecting the expansion of Auschwitz II, the extermination camp, and Auschwitz III, an IG Farben plant. For a description of the visit, see Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS, Henry Holt & Company, 1990, pp. 389–396. An album of photographs of the visit was taken by the camp's Politische Abteilung Erkennungsdienst ("Political Department Identification Service"), under the control of the commandant Rudolf Höß. The Erkennungsdienst photographed "internal camp events", prisoners, visiting dignitaries, and building projects (Michael Berkowitz, The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality, University of California Press, 2007, pp. 97, 268, n. 129). SS officers Bernard Walter and Ernst Hofmann, who took the Auschwitz Album photographs, ran the Erkennungsdienst (Berkowitz 2007, pp. 94, 101); Auschwitz State Museum). The Erkennungsdienst photographs were in the camp when it was liberated. They were handed by former inmates to the Polish Red Cross and transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 1947. When making the film Night and Fog (1956), the filmmakers were given access to them (Sylvie Lindeperg, "Night and Fog: A History of Gazes" in Pollock and Silverman (eds.), Concentrationary Cinema, Berghahn Books, 2011, p. 60). According to Yad Vashem, one of the Himmler photographs (not this one) was taken by the prisoner Wilhelm Brasse (see Category:Wilhelm Brasse). This is probably not correct. Brasse worked for the Erkennungsdienst (The Guardian), but although he has written about the photographs he took, he has not mentioned photographing Himmler. The Auschwitz prisoner Rudolf Vrba witnessed Himmler's visit to Auschwitz I. He said that there were several photographers. The camp put on a show for Himmler because Rudolf Höß wanted to impress him. The prisoners were allowed to wash and have clean clothes, a band played, and people lined up at the gates to greet Himmler. Vrba wrote in his book I Cannot Forgive (1964), p. 14: The photographic sycophants scurried before him, their Leicas and their cine-cinemas clicking and whirring. They postured and pranced backwards, shooting from their knees, from their stomachs, searching frantically for new, improbable angles on a little piece of history, darting to and fro like tugs before an ocean liner. The Himmler album may have appeared as evidence in Poland's Auschwitz trial in 1947. Several of the photographs were published after the war. Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz, University of North Carolina Press, 2005, p. 514, refers to one appearing in 1952. Max Faust complained that the photographs' publication was associating him with Himmler. Faust testified during the IG Farben trial (Subsequent Nuremberg trials), 1947–1948 (see Archiv des Fritz Bauer Instituts, Nürnberger Nachfolgeprozess Fall VI, Prosecution Exhibit 1991, reel 033, pp. 353–355). Whether the photographs were part of the evidence, I don't know. Faust also testified in Wollheim v. IG Farben (1952) and during the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–1965). See Wollheim Memorial.