Editorial: A reason to remember

Sunday, Sept. 23, 2007 | 7:27 a.m.

A Nazi officer's World War II photo album, exhibited this week online by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, provides a chilling portrait of how evil hides in the guise of humanity.

As adjutant to the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp, SS Officer Karl Hocker kept a photo album filled with cheery and smiling faces of his comrades. There is no indication that these are the people responsible for the calculating mass exterminations of Jews and others deemed as enemies of the Third Reich.

While millions were packed into boxcars to be beaten, starved and methodically murdered, Hocker and his colleagues enjoyed a good life. The pictures show officers relaxing at a hunting lodge over drinks, enjoying the company of young women in the Nazi auxiliary and participating in a sing-along with an accordion player.

"In their self-image, they were good men, good comrades, even civilized," Judith Cohen, a historian at the Holocaust museum in Washington, told The New York Times.

The exhibit at www.ushmm.org contrasts Hocker's album with the Auschwitz Album, which depicts the arrival of scores of Hungarian Jews. The juxtaposition is stomach churning, offering the ugly reality of the Nazis' cold, calculating brand of evil. In the Auschwitz Album, haggard Jews, weary from travel in a cattle car, are herded into groups, many to await their execution.

In the Hocker album, Nazis mug for the camera. Even the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, notorious for his cruel human experiments, is pictured with a smile.

"That's what is so frightening - these people were human beings," Holocaust museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding said on the Times' Web site. "Men did this to other men. The problem of genocide is still with us. The photos remind us of what human beings are capable of when they succumb to anti-Semitism, racism and hatred."

That is why we can never forget the Holocaust. As is evident with the Hocker album, the face of evil is often adorned with a smile.