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This week Dateline takes a chilling look at the lives of those who ran the most notorious death camps ever known – Auschwitz.

Video Journalist Michael Maher takes you back in history, as he reports on the discovery of a photo album – dating all the way back to 1944. The controversial pictures reveal key figures in the Nazi leadership relaxing at a resort, singing, reclining on deck chairs and posing for happy snaps – all at a time when the killings at nearby Auschwitz were on the rise.

From May till July 1944, around 350,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed to death.

The album is an extremely rare find as very few photos of Auschwitz are known to exist. It was picked up in Germany at the end of WWII by an American soldier. Now an old man, he anonymously donated it to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum last year. The album was the property of Karl Hoecker, the 2IC of Auschwitz. Also seen in the photographs is Rudolf Hoess, the founder of the concentration camp, and Dr Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death”.

About International Dateline
SBS Dateline, which began in 1984, is Australia's longest-running international current affairs program. It has a well-earned reputation for authoritative and incisive reporting. Dateline has taken the traditional way of producing TV current affairs and turned it on its head. Reporters who used to travel with a cameraperson and sound recordist now travel alone and have the responsibility of both filming and reporting their stories. The reporters became video-journalists, gaining access to people and places that the conventional camera crews cannot.