The photos show uniformed men and women having an uproariously good time, certainly a better time than I’ve ever had at an office party. Looking at them, it’s hard to know whether to be sarcastic or deadpan or despairing.

I am scrolling through 116 photos on my computer. The photos, released to a horrified world audience this month, appear to be only the second set of Auschwitz photos in existence — or yet discovered.

In 1946, an American intelligence officer hauled the album out of an attic in Frankfurt and inexplicably kept it to himself until now. Thanks to his belated gift to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, we can watch the worst at play.

The photos belonged to Karl Hoecker, an adjutant to the camp commander. They show SS auxiliaries, both women and men, relaxing at an SS resort called Solahuette, a short distance from Auschwitz-Birkenau. The resort was a place where camp guards were given breaks as a reward after long months of tiring slaughter — not routine, but slaughter in infinite variations.

How does one characterize Nazi holiday snapshots? If there’s anything more repellent than an SS officer, it’s an SS officer lounging on a deckchair. And who knew they had staff appreciation days at Auschwitz?

Eerie photos

My brain shivers; I’m at a loss for words. But what goes unsaid is more terrifying than anything said aloud. For some reason, an old Stephen Colbert line keeps running through my head. He was defending a White House report with all the incriminating bits left out. “It’s like jazz,” Colbert told Jon Stewart, swooning with praise. “It’s the notes they don’t play.”

What don’t we see in these pictures?

It was July 1944. Here we see a crowd of men at a singalong on a country road, roaring along with their ubiquitous SS accordionist. In the front row, from left, are the executive types: Hoecker, gas chamber supervisor Otto Moll, camp commandant Rudolf Hoess, Birkenau commandant Josef Kramer and Dr. Josef Mengele.

The album contains the only known photos of Mengele; some are of clear mug-shot quality. If the American soldier who found the photo collection had handed over the photos at the time, Interpol might have had better luck finding Mengele. Instead, he escaped to Argentina, Paraguay and then Brazil and was never brought to justice.

The picture was taken a week after the Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler and the German defeat was known to be inevitable. But this particular July was the happiest month of Mengele’s life. Hundreds of twins had been guarded and nursed and were finally in Auschwitz’s hospital for the experiments to begin on a grand scale. The experiments have never been fully described, for humanitarian reasons.

Mengele drowned while suffering a stroke in the Brazilian surf in 1977. I rejoice in how he must have heard the shrieks and laughter of little children as his lungs filled with water and he realized he was dying. How not even close to sufficient. He had hidden out for 31 years, supported by the Mengele family firm, which sells farm machinery and prospers to this day.

Snapshots of history

Here’s another photo of a group of SS women guards perched on the railing of a bridge. They are arm in arm, shrieking with laughter, sometimes singing along with the accordionist, sometimes eating dishes of blueberries, some women turning their empty bowls upside down and miming mourning.

Ah, berries and the German love of the forests. “Someone has probably made a study of berries in the German imagination, but if not, it is a worthy subject,” the historian Thomas Lacqueur has written. “I can think of no culture where they have so deep a resonance and are more closely associated with place, memory and longing.”

And what a place and time to desecrate the essence of the German people, upwind of a crematorium. For on the day of this photo, 150 prisoners arrived at the camp, 21 men and 12 women were selected for survival and the rest were gassed ASAP.

You can see the “types” in the pictures, the big-boned woman with the disastrous hair who mugs for the camera, the pretty flirt, the shy blonde at the rear. Every office has them. In 1994, they’re as chirpy and thumbs-up as Lynndie England in the 2004 Abu Ghraib photos.

But I refuse to offer the standard interpretation, the “banality of evil,” which was the historian Hannah Arendt’s cutting phrase from the Eichmann trial. There was nothing banal about an Auschwitz workday; custom did not stale its infinite variety. The women pictured here discovered so many ways to torment and kill the helpless; the bloodstains on their uniforms from the day before are just unplayed notes.

Meanwhile on the porchâe¦

And then there are the deckchair photos, where the guards, senior and junior, lounge with a woman guard and her baby on the lodge’s wooden terrace. Tartan blankets drape their outstretched booted legs. There are echoes of Hitler slumped on the terrace at his mountaintop Berchtesgaden retreat with his dog Blondi. Ah, when Nazis loll.

You can see all the photos at www.ushmm.org, with a fine commentary from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding.

As for the album’s owner, Hoecker, the BBC reports that he went on trial in 1963, post-Eichmann, but was only sentenced to seven years, for prosecutors could find no witnesses to his crimes. Yes, these photos would have kept him in jail for life. He was paroled in 1970, welcomed back to his cozy banking job and died in 2000, aged 88.

I’d like to pretend it’s different that William Calley, the mass murderer at My Lai became a jeweller in Columbus, Ga., now retired, but it isn’t really. He will have a circle of friends who insist on his normality. It was long ago. He meant well.

You can buy a Mengele forage harvester online today if you wish.

This Week

Today, in the era of spin and technology like Photoshop, we are offered up servings of irony. British police are in court on a “health and safety” charge, as I write this, trying to explain to a jury why they shot an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes, seven times in the face in a London Tube station in 2005. Online, you can watch an unmediated video of the victim headed down an escalator, followed by the officers who, only seconds later, would shoot him to death.

The closed-circuit video is like a Nazi snapshot, taken automatically, without humanity.

But police offered the court another image, intended to prove that de Menezes looked very much like another terrorist suspect. The image in Britain’s Guardian, matches half of de Menezes’ face to half of the other man’s, and they look eerily similar.

What don’t we see in this photograph? It turns out that the police computer-engineered the two photos to match. This is the note they didn’t play, the concealed lie that was caught by a smart prosecutor. The image-altering was an act intended to mislead the jury, and everyone else, into thinking the two men look more similar than they do. Did.

Ironically, half is probably all that was left of the young Brazilian’s head. The police shot him with special bullets, designed to mash rather than pierce. In both photos, altered and un-altered, de Menezes is unaware of his approaching fate. It wrings the heart.