When the Höcker archive first made international headlines in 2007 after the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum released the images, it shocked the public because the photos had been hidden away for 60 years in a basement. Historically, the most widely seen visual records of the Holocaust have been either the horrifying snapshots taken by Allied liberators upon discovering the camps, or highly staged Nazi propaganda meant for public consumption. The Höcker album represents something entirely different: private, casual documentation.

“It’s like we’re stepping inside the selfies of an SS officer,” Gronich said, adding that the Nazis' photos "[tell] the story as they saw it” and show the postwar future they idealized. “They imagined they were going to win the war, and these pictures are the life they saw for themselves.”

Today, the whole archive is digitized, and various photos from the Höcker album are projected on stage at Here There Are Blueberries as the archivists and others examine them.

When handling artifacts like the Höcker album, museums confront a unique set of historical ethics. Institutions must navigate how to preserve and display incriminating evidence without inadvertently creating shrines for neo-Nazi sympathizers or normalizing the subjects’ actions. By thoroughly researching and releasing the materials, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum sought to strip those responsible of their anonymity and study the psychology of complicity.

Much of Here There Are Blueberries centers on museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding (played by Delia Cunningham), who first acquired the artifact and engaged in this complex historical preservation.

“At the heart, this is a detective story,” Kaufman explained. “It follows Rebecca Erbelding when she got the photographs, and how she decoded what they meant.”

Her meticulous research yielded historic firsts, including visual proof that Josef Mengele, the notorious SS physician known for conducting deadly human experiments on prisoners, was at the camp. “When Rebecca Erbelding first saw the photos, she was stunned by the fact that there’s an image of Mengele at Auschwitz,” Kaufman said.

The historical exploration in Here There Are Blueberries goes beyond the archivists. Among the play's secondary plot lines is another real-life detective story involving German businessman Tilman Taube (played by Tony nominee Conrad Ricamora), who recognized his own grandfather, Dr. Heinz Baumkötter, in the collection online. Baumkötter was the head physician at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This revelation set Taube on a journey through Germany to speak with other descendants of the people in the prints.

Taube’s experience reflects a larger postwar movement in Germany and around the world, where subsequent generations have actively sought to uncover their families’ hidden Nazi pasts. For decades, many descendants were met with familial silence, but the digitization of Nazi personnel archives has empowered a new wave of genealogical accountability.

“What they’re wrestling with is: What is their responsibility today to this history?” Gronich said.

By shifting the lens to the camp personnel and their families, the creators of Here There Are Blueberries are challenging audiences to reflect on current events. “These photos are not about the past only,” Kaufman stated. “They are about now, because at a time when so many countries around the world are turning toward authoritarianism, this is a moment where we need to look at what authoritarian regimes do.”

Ultimately, the play asks viewers to examine how ordinary people with families and jobs can become ensnared in such movements. “It’s so easy to demonize perpetrators, to turn them into monsters,” Gronich said. “And as long as we do that, we don’t have to look in the mirror.”

Here There Are Blueberries dramatizes a wide swath of people from the World War II era, such as SS officers, and the modern day, such as museum archivists and descendants of Nazis.

The archivists

• Rebecca Erbelding: The young U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist who first receives the album from an anonymous donor and sets out to decode its contents.
• Judy Cohen: The director of the museum’s photographic collection who partners with Erbelding to verify the historical significance of the Höcker images.
• Sara Bloomfield: The museum director who must navigate the ethical minefield of exhibiting the Höcker photographs.

The WWII-era figures

• Karl Höcker: The bank clerk-turned-SS adjutant whose curated personal photo album forms the centerpiece of the play.
• Melita Maschmann: A former high-ranking propagandist for the League of German Girls who offers a chilling postwar perspective on how ordinary youths were seduced by Nazi ideology.
• Charlotte Schünzel: A former SS radio operator whose postwar testimony proves that the young women seen in the album knew they were facilitating mass murder.
• Lili Jacob: A Holocaust survivor who, in a historical parallel, discovered a different photo album on the day of her liberation documenting the arrival of her own family at Auschwitz.
• Other Nazis aren't played by actors on stage, but depicted in the photographs and discussed at length. They include top-ranking officials like cruel experimental doctor Josef Mengele, whose presence at Auschwitz was documented for the first time in Höcker's photos, and Auschwitz commandant Richard Baer.

The descendants

• Tilman Taube: A German man who recognizes his grandfather in the Höcker photos and reaches out to the museum to confront his family’s complicity.
• Rainer Höss: The grandson of Rudolf Höss, the notorious architect of Auschwitz, who shares his struggle with inheriting a mass murderer’s legacy.
• Peter Wirths: The son of the chief SS doctor at Auschwitz. Wirths provides the museum with firsthand childhood memories of vacationing at the SS retreat on concentration camp grounds.

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