A German historian stumbled across a series of saddening photos secretly taken during the beginning stages of the Holocaust of Jewish families being deported from their homes by the Nazi regime.
The thirteen photos taken over 80 years ago illuminate one of the most sinister points in history, showing henchmen of the Third Reich forcing Jewish families and members of the community in the Silesian city of Breslau, today Wrocław in Poland, to gather outside a restaurant near the train station for deportation.
Surrounded by armed members of The Gestapo — the secret police force that mercilessly investigated and exposed enemies of the State during the Nazis party’s reign — the unsuspecting civilians carrying troves of luggage could not imagine what was in store for them.
“They look quite calm. It seems clear they did not know they were about to be murdered,” Steffen Heidrich, the historian who recognized the photos, told The Observer last month.
“This was fairly early in the history of these deportations and so they obviously did not expect it.”
Almost all seen in the pictures are believed to have been killed only a few days after they were taken by SS leader and orchestrated of the holocaust Heinrich Himmler’s mobile killing units — the Einsatzgruppen — in a mass shooting in Lithuania in November 1941, while others are believed to have been killed on a later date in Poland in April 1942, documents show.
On Nov. 21, 1941, over 1,000 of Breslau’s residents were detained by members of the Gestapo, then stuffed inhumanly into trains for four days to be deported to Fort IX of the Kaunas Fortress in Kovno, Lithuania.
Upon their arrival, members of Einsatzgruppe A would be ordered to kill the deportees on orders passed down by one of the leading architects and overseers of the “Final Solution,” Reinhard Heydrich.
The killings would be carried out by a sub-group of the mobile death unit, Einsatzkommando 3 under the command of Karl Jäger.
It’s estimated between 45,000 to 50,000 Jews were murdered at the fort.
Again, on April 9, 1942, nearly 1,000 Jews were rounded up outside the same restaurant before being transported by train to Izbica — a ghetto in eastern Poland with an almost equal death rate to the infamous Warsaw ghetto.
Two people on this later transport survived, according to The Observer.
Heidrich discovered the photographs in an archive in Dresden, Germany, while working with fellow researchers to catalog a large cache.
“When I first picked these photographs up it was an electrifying moment,” Heidrich told the outlet.
“It was clear they were scenes of a deportation. I Googled the name of the restaurant to confirm the location. The other photos, most of which are in a very poor condition, were of Jewish life in the DDR [the former East Germany], or of Jewish life in Dresden before the Shoah [Holocaust], so it was unexpected to find the deportation scenes there.”
The historian, along with other researchers at the Freie Universität in Berlin, hopes that surviving friends and younger relatives will be able to recognize someone of those uprooted from their lives and killed by the Nazis with the series of publicly available photos.
Alina Bothe, director of the university project, believes the photos were taken by an architect named Albert Hadda, who secretly snapped them through a wall or a car window during the deportation.
“The accidental and sensational archival discovery opens new perspectives on the expulsion of the Jews who were persecuted in Breslau,” she told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last month.
Hadda, a jew himself, was deported in 1944 to a labor camp but escaped back to Breslau, where he hid until liberation by the Soviet Union.
After the war, Hadda lived in Frankfurt, working for Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius before immigrating to Israel.
More than six million Jews were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust — one-third of the Jewish population worldwide.
It’s estimated that over two million of those killed were carried out by members of Third Reichs Einsatzgruppe — which is commonly referred to as the “Holocaust by bullets” before and during the creation of the death camps.
Roughly 1.3 million Jews who lived under Nazi rule or in one of Germany’s allies survived to see the end of the war.
The images were shared last month as part of International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the international research project #LastSeen, which published the photos on its website as a stark reminder of the horrors orchestrated by the Nazi regime.
Anyone who does recognize people from the photographs is encouraged to contact the project via email on its website.