Solahütte

Solahütte (AKA Solehütte, Soletal, SS-Hütte Soletal, SS Hütte Porabka) was a little-known resort for the Nazi German guards, administrators, and auxiliary personnel of the Auschwitz/Birkenau/Buna facilities. Because Auschwitz detainees overseen by Franz Hössler constructed the rustic getaway facility and a crew of detainees did ongoing grounds-keeping and cleanup work, Solahütte can be considered a tiny subcamp of Auschwitz. Postcards of the era sent by German staff sometimes bore the resort hamlet's mysterious pre-printed return address "SS Hütte Soletal" but otherwise the place remained largely unknown until 2007 when the Höcker Album of vintage Auschwitz photographs was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum which then released images online for study.

Wartime snapshots made at Solahütte are somewhat jarring because of the lightheartedness of the people pictured: some of history's most infamous war criminals are shown cheerily singing along to accordion music, loafing on deckchairs, or giggling over desserts with female Nazi staff of the Helferinnen or Aufseherinnen. Among the Nazi killers photographed making merry at Solahütte were Oswald Pohl (executed through the Nuremberg Tribunal), Rudolf Höss (executed through the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland), and Josef Mengele (nicknamed the "Angel of Death"). The latter was almost never seen photographed in his SS uniform with Auschwitz colleagues until the Solahütte snapshots and a select few other images became known.

Solahütte is around 18 miles by car from Auschwitz and the main lodge still stands—though renamed and in use as a tavern. It is located near the bends in the Soła river where engineers in 1935 finished a heavy dam which created the scenic Międzybrodzkie reservoir lake. Sola and Sole were Germanic approximations of the Polish Soła. Hütte is German for hut. Hence the German name "Sola hut"—even though the "hut" was actually a motel-sized building with a full-length sun-deck porch along with numerous smaller campus buildings. Activities included hunting, hiking, sunbathing, and excursions to the nearby lake and peaks. Villages of Porąbka and Międzybrodzie Żywieckie are close by—along with the Żar glide-airstrip and the Żar peak with its funicular incline-tram. The region was already popular with tourists. Far from Germany and deep in the potentially-hostile occupied Polish territory, the guards and the Nazi female typists and clerks of the extermination camp had few nearby safe vacation options other than going (usually by the charter-busload) "off to the Sola Hut".

In the late 1960's, the Polish Communist party expanded some existing facilities into a major elite resort called HPR-Kozubnik Porąbka with dance halls and bars plus a restaurant, indoor pool, cinema, sauna, and a multistory hotel for key officials. Top mining and metals-industry planners and high-ranking official visitors including the son of Leonid Brezhnev stayed there. However, after the fall of Communism in Poland, the resort became a rusty ghost town visited mostly by looters, paintballers, and urban explorers poking around.