One photo shows an accordion player leading a Solahütte sing-along.  The enthusiastic singers include Hoecker, Baer, Otto Moll who supervised the gas chambers, and Dr. Josef Mengele who performed his infamous medical experiments on human “specimens” at Auschwitz.

Another series of photos shows Hoecker at Solahütte along with a group of cheerful young women—Nazi officers and female auxiliaries.  According to the Holocaust Memorial website:

A full-page spread of six photographs… shows Hoecker passing out bowls of fresh blueberries to the young women sitting on a fence. When the girls finish theatrically eating their blueberries for the camera, one girl poses with fake tears and an inverted bowl. Only miles away on the very same day, 150 prisoners (Jews and non-Jews) arrived on a transport to Auschwitz. The SS selected 21 men and 12 women for work, and killed the remaining members of the transport in the gas chambers.

“What are we to make of these photos?” asks Geddes.  She goes on to cite journalist Hannah Arendt who covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1963.  Eichmann coordinated the transportation of Jews from all over Europe to concentration camps.  Geddes comments that when Arendt arrived at his trial she, “expected Eichmann to be a calculating monster, but encountered a fool.”  Geddes goes on:

According to Arendt, Eichmann was responsible for organizing the transportation of millions of Jewish men, women, and children to their deaths not because he hated Jews or had an evil essence. Rather, he was responsible for these evils because he never reflected on the moral character of his actions.

Failure to reflect on the moral character of his actions led directly to Eichmann’s unspeakable crimes.  The same is true of the young women enjoying blueberries who were complicit in the horror.  And the same is true of Hoecker who was married with two children, enjoyed gardening, worked in a bank after the war, and in all the photos seems to be friendly, positive, and hardworking.  His moral failure went beyond working at a death camp.  His great sin was thoughtlessness—the lack of moral reflection on his life and actions—that allowed him to work at a death camp in the first place.

In Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver wrote in 1948: