FRANCISCO BOIX
PHOTOGRAPHERS TO BE HIGHLIGHTED
MORE ABOUT FRANCISCO BOIX
Francesco Boix Campo, a Republican veteran and photographer of the Spanish Civil War, was imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp where he worked in camp’s photo laboratory. When the Americans liberated Mauthausen in 1945, Boix and his fellow prisoners had secretly preserved more than 3,000 images of Nazi depravity. This was a vital act of resistance as few incriminating camp photographs survived the retreating Nazis’ who destroyed such proof. These photographs were used as evidence in the 1946 Nuremberg war crimes trials.
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Francisco Boix Campo: Prisoner Resistance
In 1940, at age 20, Francesco Boix Campo,[i] a Republican veteran and photographer of the Spanish Civil War, was imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp. The Germans sent an estimated 7,000 Spaniards to Mauthausen, where about 5,000 Spanish captives were worked to death under slave-labor conditions in quarries nicknamed Knochenmühle (the bone grinder). It was also the location of the Schutzstaffel’s (SS) official photographic identification service. Here they photographed all new prisoners and made ethnographic photographs supporting sham Nazi racial theories. Additionally, SS photographers documented visits by high-ranking Nazis, public executions, and “souvenirs” of their depravity. Copies were distributed to the high-ranking SS officer Karl Schutz as well as to the SS headquarters in Berlin, Linz, Oranienburg, and Vienna. Many of the surviving photographs were likely made by SS Hauptscharfuehrer Paul Ricken, a trained photographer who worked with a 35mm Leica.
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[i] In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Boix and the second or maternal family name is Campo.
Francesco Boix Campo, photographer, fighter against fascism, prisoner of Mauthausen and the only Spaniard called to give evidence at the Nuremberg Trials against the military leaders of the Third Reich.
