While cleaning out his home in preparation to move, a
retired truck driver found 13 photographs in the back of a cupboard. The
photographs were taken by his late father-in-law, Ken Parker, who was an U.S.
army photographer in World War II. The photographs were found along with an
Army uniform and confiscated German pistol. The photographs depict the
liberation of Mauthausen, one of the Nazi concentration camps. Mauthausen
in Austria, had a gas chamber, torture instruments and medical
experimentation. The U.S. Army arrived in the camp on May 5, 1945 and
found 18,000 prisoners. Parker used his camera in the documentation by the
Allies for the purpose of prosecuting the Germans for war crimes and alerting
the public to the atrocities.
Rather than discard them his wife, daughter of Ken Parker,
donated them. She sent the photographs to the Jewish Journal which
published them in the article about the "find". Some of the
photographs also made it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo
Archive.
To read the Jewish Journal article and see the
photographs go to: http://tinyurl.com/ybl3tgp6
Original url:
Jan Meisels Allen
Chairperson, IAJGS Public
Records Access Monitoring Committee
