Wilhelm Brasse | Auschwitz photog, 95

Wilhelm Brasse, 95, a former Auschwitz prisoner who survived the camp after the Nazis discovered he was a professional photographer and put him to work taking pictures of other prisoners, died Tuesday in Zywiec, a town in southern Poland.

Mr. Brasse, who was not Jewish, was sent to Auschwitz at 22 as a political prisoner for trying to sneak out of German-occupied Poland in spring of 1940.

In an AP interview in 2006, Mr. Brasse said believed he took up to 50,000 of the identity photographs that the Nazis used to register their prisoners - part of the Nazi obsession with documenting their work. The pictures are among some of the notorious images associated with the camp.

After the war, Mr. Brasse had nightmares for years of the Nazi victims he was forced to photograph. Among them were emaciated Jewish girls who were about to undergo cruel medical experiments under the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele.

"I didn't return to my profession, because those Jewish kids, and the naked Jewish girls, constantly flashed before my eyes," he said. "Even more so because I knew that later, after taking their pictures, they would just go to the gas." - AP