Malibu resident photographs a Nazi archive of 50 million documents containing detailed lists and directives for death camp prisoners and other Gestapo documents.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
While there is a small group of people who continue to deny the atrocities of the Holocaust, their position is invalidated by the very numbers they refute. As captured in a new photographic exhibit by Malibu resident Richard Ehrlich, the genocide of six million people in World War II was catalogued meticulously by the Nazi bureaucracy in an archive of 50 million documents at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany.
“When I was at the ITS office in Germany, I concentrated on taking and organizing my photographs,” Ehrlich said. “It wasn’t until I was home that the emotion of it hit me. The numbers are staggering.”
Sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and the Los Angeles German Consulate, Ehrlich’s exhibit will be showing at the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica this month.
“I had read about the ITS collection and it piqued my interest,” Ehrlich said. “I applied to photograph the archive and finally received permission. Ironically, the International Tracing Service offices are in some old Waffen-SS (the Nazi army combat unit commanded by Heinrich Himmler) headquarters about 200 miles outside of Berlin.”
In the ITS archive, housed in six different buildings, Ehrlich found the 50 million documents relating to 17.5 million people snared in the Nazi killing machine. Ehrlich spent seven days last year photographing the archive in Bad Arolsen.
Allied countries have sent the documents to the ITS during the past 60 years, comprising lists of prisoners, directives for trains full of people destined for death camps and Gestapo documents all catalogued in dry, numeric detail.
“This was the German mindset of record keeping,” Ehrlich said. “It was all organized by year, location, cross references. It was overwhelming.
“When the Allies starting winning the war, the Germans started burning all their papers,” Ehrlich explained. “The 50 million documents at the ITS was what they couldn’t get rid of. Imagine what was destroyed.”
Ehrlich’s photographs bear witness to the Nazi obsession for order and meticulous record keeping. Endless aisles of catalogue drawers, towering stacks of paperwork and rows of thick file ledgers document the crimes against humanity that spawned the dictum “Never forget.” As Ehrlich said, “The sheer numbers created a banality of evil.”
Included in Ehrlich’s portfolio are testaments to the Nazi dehumanization of their task (elaborate systems for coding prisoners in charts and maps), as well as documents now made notorious: the original Schindler’s List, a transport order to Bergen-Belsen for Anne Frank (where she died), and an invitation from Gestapo Chief Reinhard Heydrich to a brunch meeting to discuss “a total solution to the Jewish question in Europe.”
“The most chilling document I found was dated April 20, 1944 and had a list of numbers ticked off every two minutes, with names next to the times,” Ehrlich said. “12:45, 12:47, 12:49. It was Hitler’s birthday and, in his honor, they shot a prisoner at one of the camps every two minutes.”
Ehrlich’s portfolio is now part of the public collections at a number of Holocaust memorials, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Musée d’Art et de d’Histoire du Judaisme in Paris and the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.
Craig Krull, in whose gallery the show takes place, was so moved when he saw the portfolio that he rearranged a years-in-the-making schedule to include Ehrlich’s show.
“When Rick invited me to see this portfolio, I wasn’t sure what to expect,” Krull, who is also Ehrlich’s agent, said. “I got chills. It was amazing that the photo of a simple notebook could evoke such emotion. It is the irony and absurdity of the work that the Nazis would be so meticulous about recording the lives of these people and then kill them.”
Krull was first attracted to Ehrlich’s work several years ago with his series of photographs of locations given a new definition simply from the photographic perspective.
“Rick had some photos of abandoned diamond mines in Namibia,” Krull said. “Sand half filled the rooms and made it look like an extraterrestrial landscape.
“He also did these photos of a tunnel near downtown called Belmont Park,” Krull continued. “Rick went in and the shots come out looking like the caves of Lascaux (an area in France where prehistoric cave drawings reveal much about the people who lived there 30,000 years ago).”
While always interested in photography, Ehrlich regarded it as a hobby while he earned a medical degree and built a urology practice at UCLA Medical Center. He has lived in Malibu for more than 30 years with his wife, Irit, and children, Richard and Cristina.
“I would take photos in the surgery rooms for archiving,” he said. “It hit me that I should pursue this.”
His next portfolio, “The Body as Art: The Art of the Body” will be published in 2009.
His portfolio of 54 images (winnowed down from thousands) will be on view for five days before it moves on to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the University at Buffalo Art Gallery.
Richard Ehrlich’s exhibit at Craig Krull Gallery at the Bergamot Station in Santa Monica takes place Aug. 26-30, with an opening reception Aug. 26 at 5:30 p.m. More information can be obtained by calling 310.828.6410 or visiting the Web site, www.ehrlichphotography.com