Wilhelm Brasse. Photographer. 3444. Auschwitz 1940–1945

In March 2010 Maria Anna Potocka conducted an interview with Wilhelm Brasse. The outcome is the book with edited tales of the prisoner-cum-chief-photographer of Auschwitz, together with a film with fragments of the interview. There is an introduction by the historian Teresa Wontor-Cichy from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the academic editor. The book is generously illustrated with photographs from Wilhelm Brasse’s own archives, as well as the Photographic Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Yad Vashem.

Wilhelm Brasse was born in 1917 in Żywiec of an Austrian father and a Polish mother. Before the war he worked in a photographic studio in Katowice. For refusal to join the Wehrmacht, he was sent to Auschwitz, where from 1941 to 1945 he worked in the Recognition Service as a photographer. He took tens of thousands of photographs of prisoners, hundreds of portraits of SS-men and documented some so-called medical experiments. After the war ended, he returned to Żywiec where he has been living to this day.