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09.22.07 - 1:01 am One of the H�cker pictures, shot on July 22, 1944, shows a group of cheerful young women who worked as SS communications specialists eating bowls of fresh blueberries. One turns her bowl upside down and makes a mock frown because she has finished her portion. On that day, said Judith Cohen, a historian at the Holocaust museum in Washington, 150 new prisoners arrived at the Birkenau site. Of that group, 21 men and 12 women were selected for work, the rest transported immediately to the gas chambers. Karl H�cker fled Auschwitz before the camp�s liberation. When he was captured by the British he was carrying false documents identifying him as a combat soldier. After the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, West German authorities tracked down H�cker in Engershausen, his hometown, where he was working as a bank official. He was convicted of war crimes and served seven years before his release in 1970, after which he was rehired by the bank. H�cker died in 2000 at 89. http://www.ushmm.org/research/ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/
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