ABSTRACT
In the Erkennungsdienst, on the day that Hitler died, Schinlauer, his shoulders drooping with dejection, came in whimpering like a child: 'Our Führer is dead!' Antonio García, to whom he said it, maintained the necessary blank look. Meanwhile, Ziereis had received the order to destroy all the negatives, and passed the order on to Rieken. The work took three days, at the end of which Ricken reported to Ziereis that the entire collection had been destroyed. 1 But however closely Ricken supervised the destruction, the opportunity came, when he left for lunch and Schinlauer was absent, to slip photos or negatives out of the lab. The photographic equipment was dismantled, and the darkroom was turned into a bathroom, which it originally had been. On the last day, Ricken spent the entire morning walking around the bare front room, saying nothing. Then he held out his hand to García, who took it. He then did the same to the other prisoners in the photo lab. 'You are free men,' he said, and left, in the middle of the day. García and Boix looked at one another in silence, sharing the same single thought: the survival of the photographs. García had been able to retrieve, from various hiding places, some forty prints of 36 × 24 mm, but the bulk of his collection had disappeared.
