USDANEWS                                                           VOLUME 58 NO. 8 — October-November 1999

Editor's Roundup
USDA people in the news

“I knew immediately what it was about. I knew this was a piece of history.”

Albert Baker was referring to the contents of an unlocked, old, green suitcase he had found in a railroad yard. It began a mystery that, several years later, is still causing speculation.

Baker, currently a peripheral equipment operator, involved in printing various accounting reports, with the National Finance Center in New Orleans, had spotted the suitcase while working at a previous job. So he opened it up and, under some clothes in the suitcase, he noticed a pile of black & white photographs. “The edges were discolored with age,” he said. “But otherwise, they looked to be in such good condition that they could have been taken yesterday.”

That was significant--since they were World War II-era photographs. What Baker saw initially were pictures of American GIs posing next to trucks, tents, and artillery pieces. “I think that the setting may have been North Africa for those photos,” he speculated, “because of the desert in the background.”

But then the pictures got much grimmer. Some photos depicted corpses stacked on top of each other. Other photos showed what appeared to be civilians digging trenches, presumably for mass burials of the corpses, while American soldiers watched them.

“I concluded that these were photographs of the Holocaust,” he said, “and that they were taken by a GI at a concentration camp that he had just helped to liberate.”

The suitcase contained 29 of the World War II photos.

“I just wasn’t sure what to do with them,” he recalled. “I figured they were an historic piece of treasure--but I didn’t know who might want them. So I held onto them--and stored them in a dresser drawer in my bedroom.”

Several years passed. Baker subsequently took a position with NFC. Then one evening he watched a TV broadcast of the Oscar- winning movie “Schindler’s List” with its many depictions of life in a Nazi concentration camp.

According to Jeannine Rauch, an NFC program administrator specialist, Baker noticed that, following the broadcast, the local TV station airing the movie displayed the telephone number of the Southern Institute for Education and Research, which is affiliated with Tulane University in New Orleans. “I called that number, told them that I had some historic photos that may be of interest to them, and then later was encouraged to find out that that organization puts on workshops dealing with such issues as how to counter racial and religious prejudice,” Baker said.

So he decided to donate the 29 photographs to that organization.

The Times-Picayune newspaper of New Orleans subsequently ran a story about Baker and the photos. The story noted that the railroad yard where Baker had found the photos had been a departure point for many soldiers, as they headed off to battle in World War II, and then a return point as they completed their tour of duty. Accordingly, some speculated that a veteran may have lost the suitcase while returning to that rail yard.

The story also noted that historians and others were studying the images for clues to the location of the death camp and the identity of the photographer and other GIs in the pictures.

“The experts have subsequently identified the location of the camp as being near Berlin,” Baker related. “But there are still many unanswered questions in those photos.”

“However, I’m glad I was able to help preserve the documentation of the horrors of war.” 

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