The Forgotten Story of the WWII Prisoner Who Documented Thousands of Lost Souls
June 28, 2021
Historians Crippa and Onnis paint a cinematic portrait of Wilhelm Brasse, a political prisoner who took thousands of photographs of fellow inmates during his five-year incarceration at Auschwitz. Of Austrian and Polish descent, Brasse (1917–2012) worked as a teenager at his uncle’s photography studio. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he tried to escape to France to join the Free Polish Army, but was arrested and eventually sent to Auschwitz, where he was recruited to join the camp’s Identification Service. Though the Germans mainly wanted to make sure “they were murdering the right person,” Brasse spent hours retouching photos of the “living dead” in order to “present them to history with their dignity intact.” He also took portraits of S.S. officers and documented Josef Mengele’s medical experiments. In January 1945, as the Russians approached Auschwitz, Brasse refused orders to destroy the photographs; many are now on display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Relying on a BBC documentary and other secondary sources, the authors recreate plenty of dramatic episodes, but Brasse’s interior world remains somewhat elusive throughout. Still, readers will be captivated by this unlikely story of survival and compassion under the cruelest of circumstances. Photos.