Source/Credit: Wikimedia

Slideshow authored by: John Grady, Wheaton College (MA)

A Russian survivor, liberated by the 3rd Armored Division of the U.S. First Army, identifies a former camp guard who brutally beat prisoners. Original caption reads: "Freed Soviet prisoners of war give testimony against a former fascist guard. 1945."

We have all seen the grim and ghastly evidence of the “dirty work” of the Holocaust, whether in pictures taken of stacks of bodies in newly liberated concentration camps, or as they have been reenacted in films like Schindler’s List. This image is rarer and captures a moment of truth as one of the perpetrators of the Holocaust’s horror is confronted by one of the victims of these crimes against humanity.

Source/Credit: Wikimedia

An American soldier stands guard while German civilians file past piles of corpses outside the crematorium at the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.

This image taken at the same concentration camp shows an even less common image: German civilians viewing bodies of those murdered by the Nazis. We don’t see the bodies of the dead, but the picture is all the more effective for that omission. The reaction of the two women at the center of the image is particularly telling. What are they making of the scene they are witnessing? They are definitely shocked, but are they surprised? How would they account for this moment in later conversations among themselves or with their children and grandchildren? Would they talk about it all? Would they see themselves as being in some way complicit? Did they come willingly to see what had happened or were they forced to come by the U.S. Army? Does it make a difference to know what motivated the various actors?

Source/Credit: Wikimedia

Prisoner connected to dummy electrical wires under the threat that stepping down from the box would cause his electrocution.

In 2004 this photograph and many others were leaked to the public. They document a pattern of systemic abuse at the Baghdad Correctional Facility (Abu Ghraib prison) by the 372nd Military Police Company of the United States Army. While activities of this sort ostensibly could be justified as a way of making suspects more amenable to interrogation, they were already under investigation by the U.S. military as abuses of the military code of conduct.

Source/Credit: Wikimedia

U.S. Military Policeman threatening naked prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

This candid snapshot taken by another military policeman takes us one step closer to the actual doing of “dirty work.”  Is this interrogation or terrorism? “Softening up” or humiliation?

Source/Credit: Wikimedia

A prisoner is intimidated, or threatened, by a dog.

This picture clearly documents that the treatment that prisoners received at Abu Ghraib was organized and orchestrated. While the experience documented in this picture would be a terrifying nightmare for anybody, the use of dogs to threaten naked prisoners was chosen because U.S. military interrogators believed dogs and nudity were particularly damaging emotional triggers in Arab culture. It has since been firmly established that practices of this support constitute torture under international law.

博主注解：这些文字和图片来自我的社会学教程。原始出处是Wikimedia。老师需要我们看图说话，还要用社会学理论解释这些现象。