Nazis on retreat: the SS holiday camp near Auschwitz – in pictures
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When author William Ryan came across photos of Nazi criminals at a luxury retreat just a few miles from Auschwitz, he was inspired to write his novel The Constant Soldier, about the last days of the war as seen from a holiday hut

(Mirror.)

What is disconcerting about them is the contrast between how relaxed the SS appear and what was happening at the camp. In this photograph Höcker, a bank clerk before the war, pats his dog, Favorit. It is disconcerting that someone involved in the industrial murder of his fellow human beings should be smiling and playing with a pet.

In all likelihood, most Axis officials must have considered their tasks of exterminating ‘inferiors’ as jobs like any other; only a minority of them saw their jobs as atrocious. The reason for this attitude is simple: the Fascist bourgeoisie normalized these atrocities so that committing them would be easier. Capital takes precedence above all else, including human life.

Click here for events that happened today (April 12).

1871: Ioannis Metaxas, Greek parafascist, was born in Ithaca.
1885: Hermann Hoth, Axis commanding officer, came to be.
1932: Heinrich Prinz zu Sayn‐Wittgenstein joined the HJ in Freiburg im Breisgau.
1933: The Deutsche Studentenschaft (student activists) declared a four‐week programme of cultural cleansing (which would culminate on May 10, 1933 with a mass burning of blacklisted books, specifically Jewish, Marxist and other ‘un‐German’ literature).
1934: The Third Reich issued orders to prevent ‘improper usage of protective custody’ to prevent those who did not deserve to be sent to concentration camps from being sent there; this ruling remained valid until 1938.
1940: Luftflotte 5 formed in Hamburg under the command of Generaloberst Erhard Milch for operations in Norway; Milch would soon establish his headquarters in Oslo. Additionally, Fascist submarine U‐37 sank British ship Stancliffe with one torpedo northeast of the Shetland Islands, Scotland at 0942 hours, slaughtering twenty‐one victims.
1941: The Third Reich’s head of state arrived at Mönichkirchen via his personal train Amerika, and he would remain in his village to oversee the operations in the Balkan Peninsula. As well, the Wehrmacht captured Belgrade in the Serbian region of Yugoslavia as other Axis troops also crossed the border into Yugoslavia, joining the invasion. On the Danube River in Yugoslavia, Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers sunk river monitor Drava (slaughtering fifty‐four but leaving a baker’s dozen survivors) while forcing three others, Morava, Sava, and Vardar, to be scuttled. To the south in Greece, SS troops overran British and Australian troops south of Vevi, forcing the Allies to fall back from the Aliakmon Line to the Mount Olympus Line to block the Axis troops at Vevi from advancing further. Additionally, the Axis captured Bardia, Libya. At Tobruk, the Axis probing attacks with tanks and armored cars became repulsed. Meanwhile, columns of Axis troops were dispatched to move toward the Libyan–Egyptian border to cut off the Allied forces in Libya.
1942: Four thousand Axis troops landed at Manokwari, but Axis attacks on Minhia, Thadodan, and Alebo on the Minhia‐Taungdwingyi‐Pyinmana defensive line in Burma ceased because of Allied troops, and some tankers reported seeing captured British tanks pressed into Axis service. Coincidentally, the Axis artillery bombardment of Corregidor island in the Philippine Islands commenced. Meanwhile, many Allied prisoners of war continued to die while being marched northward during the Bataan Death March from starvation, dehydration, disease, and murders.
1943: The Fascists claimed to have discovered over 4,000 bodies of Polish officers, reportedly deported by the Soviets in 1940, in a mass grave near Smolensk, Russia. As well, the Reich’s head of state named Martin Bormann his secretary.
1944: Berlin authorized the withdrawal of Axis forces from Sevastopol, Russia, but the delay in this decision caused heavier losses than necessary; more than 61,000 Axis troops commenced evacuation from the Crimea in Russia. Aside from that, Helsinki rejected Soviet demands for peace, and the Axis wiped out a small pocket of troops (elements of Soviet 206th Rifle Division and Soviet 3rd Guards Airborne Division) west of Târgu Frumos, Romania. Meanwhile, King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy, realizing that the Allies viewed his earlier support of the Fascist régime with suspicion, transferred most of his power to Crown Prince Umberto, though he held on to the throne.
1945: Oberstleutnant Gerhard Prawitt, the commandant of the Oflag IV‐C prisoner of war camp at Colditz Castle in the Reich, received an unsigned letter from the office of Heinrich Himmler stating that all important prisoners at Colditz were to be prepared for transfer in the following morning where they would be held as hostages for negotiations with the Western Allies.
1961: General Pedro A. del Valle (despite formerly working for the Allies) referenced the protofascist propaganda ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ during a speech before the organization United States Daughters of 1812, claiming a link between Judaism and Communism.