Highlights Archives
The Angora Project
In 1965 former Chicago Tribune Berlin correspondent Sigrid Schultz presented her papers to the Wisconsin Historical Society. Among them was a heavy photo album, 15 by 13 inches, with a single word on its gray cover: Angora. More tellingly, the cover also included the runic lightning flashes of the Nazi SS, the large security and military organization of the Nazi Party. The chilling images inside, documenting the raising of Angora rabbits at Nazi concentration camps, are the featured gallery this month from Wisconsin Historical Images, the Society's online image database.
The Angora Project was an SS-administered program to breed rabbits for their soft, warm fur to line the jackets of Luftwaffe pilots. The rabbits were raised in luxury alongside prisoners in all the Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau, and are believed to have served as a constant reminder to prisoners of how little their lives were valued.
The album belonged to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and head of its concentration camps. He hid the album in a farmhouse with his other papers near the end of the war. Schultz uncovered the album in the winter of 1944-1945 while helping the American Counter Intelligence Corps search for missing documents. In describing the album, Schultz wrote: "In the same compound where 800 human beings would be packed into barracks that were barely adequate for 200, the rabbits lived in luxury in their own elegant hutches. In Buchenwald, where tens of thousands of human beings were starved to death, rabbits enjoyed scientifically prepared meals. The SS men who whipped, tortured, and killed prisoners saw to it that the rabbits enjoyed loving care."
Few accounts of the Angora Project have survived, but this album and its approximately 150 photos, maps, charts, and text — 55 of which are presented here — serve as a stark reminder of a brutal regime that cared more about the humane treatment of rabbits than of people.
:: Posted March 28, 2007
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