The Catalan who captured the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp

Francesc Boix was the only Spaniard to take part in the Nuremberg trials, the military tribunals conducted by the Allied forces to try representatives of the defeated Nazis after the end of World War Two.

Boix’s testimony was crucial in convicting Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister for Armaments and War Production. The Catalan recognized him from photographs that Boix himself had handled at the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was interned for years during the war.

But how did this Catalan end up imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp?

Born on August 31, 1920, Boix was still a teenager when the Spanish Civil War broke out. He joined the Communist ranks and began experimenting with war photography while serving in the Republican army.

After the Spanish Civil War, Boix was among the hundreds of thousands who fled Catalonia into France. Like many other Spanish Republicans, he was later deported to a Nazi concentration camp.

As the Nazis were obsessed with documenting their work, Boix was assigned to the Identification Department, where he handled negatives and sometimes acted as a camp photographer during visits by Nazi officials.

Most Spanish prisoners in the camp were worked nearly to death under slave-labour conditions, but Boix was fortunate to be given administrative tasks because he spoke some German and could serve as a translator. His photographic skills were eventually put to use.

Boix, despite being a prisoner himself, ended up photographing the horrors of Mauthausen. The surviving images show graphic details of immense suffering and stand as evidence of one of the darkest periods of human history.

Working alongside another Catalan, Antoni Garcia Alonso, Boix began hiding negatives of photographs taken in the camp and disobeyed orders to destroy all photographic evidence of German atrocities after the Battle of Stalingrad, a turning point in the war in 1943.

A group of deportees, including Boix, was later sent to work in a nearby quarry. On journeys to and from the camp, they befriended a local villager, Anna Pointner, to whom they handed over thousands of negatives. These photographs would later serve as evidence in the Nuremberg trials.

Boix also photographed the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp when American soldiers arrived in 1945, shortly after the Nazis had fled.

After the war, the Catalan worked as a photographer for the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, but sadly died in 1951 at the age of just 30 from kidney failure, a consequence of his years in Mauthausen.

The Barcelona neighbourhood of Poble Sec, where Boix was born, now has a library named after him, as well as a commemorative plaque honouring his life and work outside his birthplace.