Voting Station

Wilhelm Brasse

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Photographer

The Resume

    (December 3, 1917-October 23, 2012)
    Born in Zywiec, Poland
    Pre-WWII portrait photographer
    Imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp
    Assigned to the photographic identification unit
    Took an estimated 40-50,000 identity pictures
    Subject of the Polish TV documentary 'The Portraitist' (2006)

Why he might be annoying:

    He also did portraits of the camp guards, for which 'I would often get something to eat or trade like cigarettes.'
    Joseph Mengele liked his work, so he ended up documenting Mengele's horrific 'medical experiments.'
    He frequently had to calm down people who would be killed shortly after he was done taking their photo.

Why he might not be annoying:

    After the invasion of Poland, he was pressured to join the German army and declare himself loyal to Hitler.
    He was caught trying to cross the Polish-Hungarian border with plans to join the Polish army in exile.
    He noted about his job at Auschwitz, 'It was an order, and prisoners didn’t have the right to disagree. I couldn't say, 'I won't do that.' '
    He helped forge documents for prisoners attempting to escape.
    When the Nazis abandoned Auschwitz, he was ordered to destroy the photo archives. Along with a darkroom worker, he placed the photos and negatives in a stove in such a way that they blocked the vents, so many of the photos survived when the fire went out due to a lack of air.
    He found himself unable to resume photography after the war, saying 'Those poor Jewish children were always before my eyes. There are things you can never forget.'
    A reviewer of 'The Portraitist' wrote, 'Brasse has left us with a powerful legacy in images. Because of them we can see the victims of the Holocaust as human and not statistics. ... The photographs are the work of a man who fought to keep his humanity alive in a place of unimaginable evil.'

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 2 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 2 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 18 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 9 Votes: 55.56% Annoying
    In 2014, Out of 12 Votes: 58.33% Annoying
    In 2013, Out of 6 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2012, Out of 92 Votes: 77.17% Annoying