Extermination of Polish Jews – Album of Pictures. Lodz: Central Jewish Historical Committee in Poland, 1945. Polish, Russian, English, French, Yiddish and Hebrew.
The album, published in Lodz immediately after the Holocaust, contains 252 black-and-white pictures (on 104 plates) depicting the various stages of the destruction of Eastern-European Jewry – persecution, anti-Semitic propaganda, humiliation and torture in the ghettos, deportation, and extermination at the Death Camps – as they were documented by the Germans themselves. "It is characteristic for the mentality of these murderers, that they had a general liking for keeping 'charming' keepsakes of their criminal and cruel activities. The most popular form was to register their 'achievements' by taking amateur photographs […] We owe to this hobby of the Hitlerian criminalists a most important source of documentation. We posses (!) now a rich collection of photographs, which are an eloquent illustration of the crimes, committed by Hitlerian Germans" (from the foreword). At the end of the album, pictures documenting "The Life and Activity of Guerilla Detachments" and the life after the liberation. Two pictures show sketches of the Extermination Camps of Belzec and Sobibor ("An Attempt of Reconstruction of the Camp of Death in Belzec", "An Attempt of Reconstruction of the Camp of Death in Sobibor").
The pictures are accompanied by a foreword by Gershon Taffet and a short text by Dr. Phillip Friedman, briefly introducing the project of documenting the Holocaust, of which this album is part.
On the last pages, explanatory texts in Polish and English, giving the sources of the pictures printed in the album.
[21], 104, [15] ff., 25X34 cm. Good condition. Creases and minor stains. Inscribed by hand on front endpaper. Worn and slightly stained cover, partly detached. Small tears to spine.