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Gallery of Photographs of the ceremony unveiling a plaque to honour Anna Pointner.

Anna Pointner was an Austrian civilian, a resident of the town of Mauthausen, who had the courage to resist National Socialism and to help the Spanish Republicans who were prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

For that reason, the unveiling of this plaque has such special significance in the context of the history of the Spanish prisoners, and in particular for the young members of the group known as the Poschacher Kommando.

These youths managed to smuggle out of the camp a series of photographs thanks to the assistance of Anna Pointner. It was thus possible to preserve graphic evidence which was later used in the Nuremberg trials by United States and French prosecutors (Exhibits RF 322, RF 332 and RF 333 in the Nuremberg Tribunal).

On 30th March 2009, a series of these photographs was filed in the Spanish National Court in proceedings on behalf of the Spanish victims of the National Socialist camps brought against various SS Totenkopf camp guards.

The photographs submitted during the judicial proceedings were obtained from the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). In the NARA catalogue there are a series of photographs collected by the Spanish prisoner Francisco Boix and which now form part of the Archive known as the "Francois Boix Photographic Collection".

Francisco Boix was assigned to the "Identification Section" of the camp political department (Politische Abteilung), and, together with another Spaniard, Antonio GarcíMa, he worked in the "erkennungsdienst" (the photographic laboratory in the camp) as an assistant processing the photographs taken by the SS personnel. Boix managed to steal over 2,000 small Leica negatives which showed the conditions in the camp, official visits, executions and other atrocities being perpetrated in Mauthausen. The negatives were hidden in various locations within the camp until they could be smuggled out and recovered after the camp's Liberation in May 1945.

The young Spanish members of the Kommando Poschacher passed the garden of Anna Pointner each day on their route to their forced labour at the Poschacher works and would throw a copy of the negatives which they had brought out of the camp into her garden. She would hide the copies she received. These photographs were vital when the time came to document in images the atrocities committed in the camp during the main trial before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg.

The same photographs were used again as evidence soon after the Nuremberg trials in the Mauthausen trial held by the US military between March and May of 1946 in the case known as U.S. v. Hans Altfuldisch et al., in Dachau, Germany. Thirty of the photographs from the Boix cache of 2,000 were submitted as evidence for the prosecution (Prosecution Exhibit No. 153). This material is kept in NARA (box 11A, RG 153 location: 270/1/14/07). The original photographs are catalogued as RG 549 (Box 345).

The photographs were also exhibits in the case known as the "Medical case" or "Doctors' Trial", U.S. v. Karl Brandt et al., one of the 12 trials that took place subsequent to the main trial before the IMT at Nuremberg.

The unveiling of the plaque to commemorate Anna Pointner took place on 9th May 2015, at 14.00 hours at 61 Vormarktstraße, Mauthausen.

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