Wilhelm Brasse

Wilhelm Brasse (3 December 1917 – 23 October 2012) was a Polish professional photographer and a prisoner in Auschwitz during World War II. He became known as the "famous photographer of Auschwitz concentration camp". His life and work were the subject of the 2005 Polish television documentary film The Portraitist (Portrecista), which first aired in the Proud to Present series on the Polish TVP1 on 1 January 2006.

He was assigned to the camp's Erkennungsdienst, which photographed events in the camp, including medical experiments, and created portraits for the inmates' files. Brasse estimated that he took 40,000 to 50,000 "identity pictures" from 1940 until 1945, before being moved to another concentration camp in Austria, where he was liberated by the American forces in May 1945.

Death He died in Żywiec at the age of 94. He was married. He had two children and five grandchildren, and lived with his wife until his death. His death was announced by an Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum historian.

The Auschwitz photographs

Trained before the beginning of World War II as a portrait photographer at his aunt's studio, he was ordered by his SS supervisors to photograph "prisoners' work, criminal medical experiments, [and] portraits of the prisoners for the files."

Mengele had insisted that Brasse take the "identity" portraits of Auschwitz prisoners "in three poses: from the front and from each side." After taking hundreds of thousands of such photographs, Brasse and Bronisław Jureczek (another prisoner from the photo laboratory) disobeyed later Nazi orders to destroy them, saving 38,916 photographs, yet only some of the surviving photos have been identified as Brasse's work, including the mugshots of 14 years old prisoner Czesława Kwoka.

Similar individual "identification photographs" or "mug shots" of prisoners of Auschwitz and other German concentration camps are accessible in the searchable online Photo Archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Biographical information cards including these photographs, each corresponding to a concentration camp inmate, are also distributed to Holocaust Memorial Museum visitors as they enter. Partially featured on the USHMM official website is a photograph of the photo mural on a wall of its 3rd floor permanent exhibit. A photograph of Lena Lakony, an adult female Auschwitz inmate by Wilhelm Brasse, is accessible from the USHMM Photo Archives. The USHMM official website also features similar "identification photographs" credited to the "National Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum" (the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Poland), but without identifying the photographer (who may or may not be Brasse), as illustrations in "Persecution of Homosexuals in the Third Reich".

Documentary film: The Portraitist

A 52-minute Polish documentary film about his life and work, The Portraitist (Portrecista, Poland, 2005), directed by Irek Dobrowolski and produced by Anna Dobrowolska, was first shown on Polish television station TVP1 on 1 January 2006, in the "Proud to present" series. It premiered at West London Synagogue in London on 19 March 2007, with a second screening by popular demand on 22 April 2007. In the film Brasse relates the "story behind some pictures in the Auschwitz museum archives that he remembers taking."

As the synopsis for the film emphasizes, after taking thousands of photographs from 1940 until 1945, documenting "cruelty which goes beyond all words ... for future generations," Brasse could no longer continue with his profession.

Filmography Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State (BBC and PBS, 2005), episodes 1 and 2 ("Surprising Beginnings" and "Orders & Initiatives") ["Auschwitz: 1940–1945"]. The Portraitist (, TVP1, 2005; original language: Polish, subtitles: English; official trailer).