Parker Grimes

Service Learning Project

HIST 2700

Fall Semester 2002

  

Lost Album

 

 Introduction:

 

My grandfather was among the shocked allied soldiers who were horrified at the atrocities they saw in Mauthausen.  He took pictures of some of his experiences, and placed the photos inside the book where there were open spaces, guessing that no one would really believe what he saw there  without some proof.   Hence, his photos are mingled with those of the previous owner=s.   Mauthausen became an unforgettable name to him as he witnessed unimaginable sights of inhumanity. 

My grandfather did not speak of his experiences during the war very often.  So in order to understand where the album came from and what the pictures were documenting, I went to the Internet to explore the concentration camp that he had helped liberate.  

Mauthausen!

The concentration camp was built in 1938. Work began within a few weeks after Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany.  They chose a site that was near a quarry, a few  miles from the town of Mauthausen.  There were already some buildings there. The first prisoners (mostly political prisoners) built the prison that became the infamous concentration camp. It was designed to look like a fortress with the lookout/guard towers.

          Mauthausen was the most infamous concentration camp  for executions and deaths, some 36,000 from January 1939 through April 1945. Many of these died from the exhausting labor in the granite quarry; others were executed in the gas chamber or shot to death, beaten with clubs, attacked by dogs, starvation or exposure (standing out in freezing cold, naked, for 48 hours and having cold water thrown on them periodically).  Medical experiments were performed on some of the prisonersBwithout medication or anesthesia. Those with tattoos were skinned and the skin was then used for lampshades, etc.  Organs were removed and given as gifts. 

One Internet site describes the policy of death by labor:

The Mauthausen camp was one of the most infamous in the entire Nazi alternate universe of human destruction. Many people, most of whom were innocent of any crimes, were tortured to death in its rock quarry, and in the tunnels of Mauthausen-Gusen, the most infamous of the sub-camps. The policy of death through work was instituted by Chief of SS, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. Prisoners were to be given only the most primitive tools, and also, whenever possible, they were to work with their bare hands. This policy was known as AAPrimitivbauweise@@. In Mauthausen it resulted in a harsh, stone world, deprived of any human kindness and compassion. It is there today still... sitting on a small mountain-top in the astonishingly beautiful and bucolic Austrian countryside, maintained by the Austrian government. http://remember.org/camps/mauthausen/mau‑introduction.html

 

Mauthausen was liberated on May 5 1945.  When Grandfather=s unit got there thousands of dead bodies were piled in many areas, and thousands of what has been described as walking dead was rejoicing as the Americans arrived.  It is estimated that 199,400 prisoners were kept at Mauthausen, and 119,000 died there.   On the 3^rd of May, guarding of the prisoners was turned over to a police unit from Vienna.  May 4^th no prisoners were sent to work at the quarry; the officer in charge of the crematorium killed all of the prisoners that worked there in an effort to hide grizzly details of that work.  On May 5^th American tanks rolled into Mauthausen and the gates were opened by the prisoners.

Grandfather had told us that they made the towns people of the nearby town of Lenz walk through the camp.  Then they ordered them to dress in their Sunday best clothes and give all of the dead a proper burial.  No coffins were used; there were too many dead and it was imperative to bury them soon and try to disinfect the camp to slow down the deaths that were continuing to happen.  The local people denied knowing anything about the camp, but many prisoners had been paraded down their streets through the years, so they were not believed.  The townspeople were forced to pick the bodies up and put them in the transports and the pick them up again and lay them in the mass grave, side by side and bury them.  Photos from these experiences of an American soldier at the conclusion of the war are placed side by side the pictures taken by a German soldier from the beginning of the war.

My Uncle Ted was the most interested in war experiences.  His questions brought more details than one usually heard from  Grandfather.  Ted also has a neighbor, Herbert  Schroeter, who had been an officer in the German Army.  He served in more remote areas of the war and thought the stories of atrocities that they heard during the war were propaganda from the other side.  Uncle Ted showed the album to his German friend who recognized places, scenes, etc.  in the photos.  From this, Uncle Ted documented each picture.  So from Ted Hawkins= personal research, and Herbert Schroeter=s personal knowledge, I have gleaned the following:

The soldier that created the album was from Hamelburg.   Hamelburg had a battalion of soldiers that was  anxiously awaiting the out break of hostilities. They got involved  with the surprise attack on Poland. They seemed to be a communications group and used horses. Horses were a main source of transportation for the Germans. They never did have the trucks and tractors that the Allies  had. 

This group was one of the first groups into Poland and you can see from  the pictures that they belittled the Jews. You can also see that the army group they were with killed Jews and left them lying in the streets. You can also see that certain buildings were on fire set on the first  floor to smoke out and kill the occupants justified by eliminated snipers. The uniforms that soldiers wore were regular army and not SS  troops. The SS was not there doing their thing until later. These  pictures implicate the army with the actions of the first 3 days.You can follow his trail by identifying the terrain and signs. One of  the good shots is along the Vistula River. Another is a few shots of  thatched roof homes. These were either Polish or Czech. There are a  number of shots of Prague, Czech. I went to the library to find out  what city it was and the old buildings and landmarks are still there and  look just the same as the black and white pictures. It also looks like  he went to Greece probably after Mussolini failed in his arrogantattempt  to add Greece to the Italian map.  After that, he seems to reappear in Germany close to his home town. He  may have been wounded, rotated, or killed. His album could have been  returned to his family at that time because Loren found it in a place not  far from where this soldier started.  (Ted Hawkins interview, 2002.)

 Grandfather gave the photo album to my brother Ashley in 1994.  Ashley and Ted began working together at that point in trying to document the album and preserve it.  In 1998, contact was made with the United States Holocaust Memorial  Museum in Washington D.C. describing the album and the activities, locations, etc, of the German soldier.  Due to their interest in the album, arrangements were made to send it to the museum.  Correspondence from the Senior Historian was turned over to the archivist, Dr. Henry Mayer.   Some important facts came from this album that had not been documented for sure before.  It had been declared by the Germans that the regular army had nothing to do with slaughter of the Polish people.  It was claimed that all of that took place with the SS or Hitler=s special forces.  The pictures in the photo album show regular army in Poland a few days after German invasion harassing, frightening and killing people.  A number of pictures were taken in Warsaw on Strazazka Street which shows Polish people lying dead in the streets and buildings on fire, German regular army with guns, and places them there within the first three days after the invasion.

 The museum copied the pictures and returned the photo album to Ashley Grimes, so it is back in the family=s possession. 

The album has pictures that show the war from the German=s viewpoint.  It documents street names, places, ranks of soldiers and officers, etc. There are a few photos in it that were used as propaganda for Hitler, showing him being friendly and kind to a child, for one. There is one picture that shows the whole story: A soldier harassing a man and a child.  The soldier is laughing; the father is concerned; the child is frightened.  Added to this are the photos taken at the liberation of Mauthausen, so altogether one gets a clear picture and better understanding of WWII.

 

Projects Intended Audience:

The intended audience for this project is potentially a wide range of people.  This project has two main goals, 1) to publish the photographs and the information that we have discovered to anyone who is interested in WWII and 2) to potentially discover more information about the album, the original owner, or any related information about any of the photographs.  The world wide web is an excellent place to publish this information because of the global availability which it provides.  Anybody interested in the information will be able to access it and provide their input where applicable.

 

Contact Persons:

The first person I needed to contact was Ashley Grimes, current owner of the photo album.  It was given to him by our grandfather Lorenzo Hawkins before he died.  After Ashley obtained the album it had an interesting journey.  Ashley has wanted to do create a web site about the photo album and he gave me his full support. 

When Ashley obtained the album several things took place.  Ted Hawkins, was also very interested in the photo album.  He suggested that it be donated to a museum to be examined and shared.  Ashley agreed and arrangements were made to send the album to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Ted also made a simple web page and posted a few pictures there to show the museum and see if they were interested.  That simple web site was also an attempt to do the same thing as this project though not on the same scale and that site is no longer in existence.  The album was sent to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and they gave Ashley a choice between giving the album to them permanently with a Deed of Trust or just allowing them to make a copy of the album and return it.  The museum representative expressed the fact that they had a lot of photographical records similar to this one that were contained in a warehouse, mostly untouched and that this album would more than likely end up in the same warehouse to be revealed indefinitely.  Feeling that the album would be valued more by family than a warehouse drawer Ashley requested that they just make a copy and return the original album to him.  Valuable information was gained from the museum about the album.  Some of the correspondence between Ashley, Ted and historians at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum are available to read on the web site.

 

Workload:

 This project required more work than I had anticipated.  A majority of the photo album had been scanned page by page by Ashley in 1997.  Each page was a high resolution image 3300 X 2410, with an average file size of 22.6 MB.  I obtained a copy of the scanned images on a CD.  Working with the world wide web one has to be very conservative with computer memory.  One aspect of web design is speed, how long will it take for a web page to load.  Keeping in mind the relatively slow bandwidth of most internet users I needed to keep the files reasonably small in file size, not too small dimension size, and relatively good quality wise.  Keeping these constraints in mind I determined I needed to extract each individual image and save it at a reasonable size and quality.  This was by far the most time consuming efforts of the project.  The information discovered about the album was available from the efforts of Ted and Ashley.  However, the correspondence which took place about the album happened in 1998 and we had to do some Adigging@ to find it.

Other considerations that affected the workload of this project included where the site would be hosted, how we wanted to handle information that might be submitted, and other aspects of web design.  The web development portion of the project was second in the amount of time required to complete this project next to the photo editing process.

 Timetable:

 The project started at the first of the fall 2002 semester by contacting Ashley and telling other family members about the project.  I received the photographs on CD the third week of the semester.  I immediately began working on the photographs at that time.  I tried to work on this project little by little over time.  The image preparation was a very tedious task.  Spending hours at a time on the images was very common throughout the project.  The images are glued to black felt paper in the photo album, most of which are not glued in straight causing me much grief when I had to extract each individual photo from the scanned page. I discovered toward the end of the semester that I didn=t have all of the pages from the album.  Ashley had scanned the pages I had on CD in 1997, however he had forgotten that he never completed the project of scanning all the pages.  This discovery came late in the project so all of the photographs will not be on the web site when this paper is turned in.  Ashley doesn=t have the resources to scan the rest of the album at this time.  I will continue to add photographs when they are available.  In all there are over two hundred photographs.   

By week 8 of the semester I had discussed with family members what we wanted the site to look like and got a general outline of what it would contain.  I enlisted the help of my Mother and together we did research on the web about the album.  We discovered several interesting sites that relate to this project, one of which I have already referenced.  Also during week 8 I decided to learn a scripting language called PHP to do the web development in.  PHP will be discussed in more detail later, however it is a server side scripting computer language widely used among web programmers.  It is arguably the most widely used language on the internet because it is so useful.  I did not know the syntax of PHP when I decided to use it so I had to learn it.  Learning PHP occurred gradually over the semester.  I would spend a couple hours a week for about four weeks playing with it an learning the syntax. 

By week 15 I finally had a site up and running on its temporary server.  The site was not complete at this stage and because I am picky about how things look and feel I anticipate that the development of the web site will continue for some time after the project=s due date, there will be a functioning web site all of the time however.    

Finally this report came during week 16.  Web sites require maintenance and any web site is never truly complete.  I anticipate adding more information as it is revealed.  The site is currently located on my web space which I have been granted on the SUU computer science department=s server.  This is not a permanent home, we are still deciding as a family where it will be hosted and who will maintain it.  Because of the limitations of the server which it is temporarily on, the site cannot be displayed in its entirety.  We are still deciding where to have the web site hosted permanently, I anticipate that a final decision will be made before January 2003.  When it is at its permanent home I will make sure the link to the site is sent to be included with this report.

Technology-Related Resources and Applications:

As one might imaging this project required quite a lot of technology related resources.  I used  Adobe Photoshop 6.0 to do all of the image editing and processing, a very powerful and useful tool for image processing.  Photo Shop allowed me to cut the individual pictures from the scanned pages and save them for the web at the resolution, dimensions, and file size that I needed.  I did all of the work on my home PC including contacting people via email and internet chats.  I used several other programs including UlraEdit, Front Page, Word Perfect, FTP programs, Xemacs, my favorite web browser Internet Explorer, Apache Web server, etc. 

I chose PHP as the language to develop the web site for a number of reasons.  First a little about PHP.  It is a server side computer language, meaning, the .php files reside on some web server and when a person out surfing the www requests through their web browser (the client) to access the .php file it is executed as a program on the server and the output is handed to the client=s browser and displayed.  This allows a programmer like myself to create a web page that can actually do things like allow people to submit information via a form which every web user is familiar with.  PHP also supports the use of a data base.  I chose to use MySQL database to as a tool for this project as well.  At this time the only place I have access to a MySQL database is on my home computer.  The server the site is on currently does not support MySQL so until we transfer the site to its permanent server home there will be some things missing from the site namely the comments by Herb Schroeter that go along with the pictures.  Because there are about two hundred comments, the only feasible way to handle them is with a database.  A database also makes future additional comments very easy to deal with.  As a family we have discussed were to

have the site hosted.  We need a server with PHP and MySQL support, we have investigated several options that will cost about $8.00 a month.  This is a very reasonable price which my family feels is worth the investment. 

 

Conclusion: