Auschwitz prisoner and photographer dies at 95

WARSAW, Poland – Wilhelm Brasse, 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, has died. He was 95.

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 the spring of 1940. Because he had worked before World War II in a photography studio in Katowice, in southern Poland, he was put to work in the camp's photography and identification department.

A spokesman at the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum, Jaroslaw Mensfelt, says that Brasse died Tuesday in Zywiec, a town in southern Poland.

Brasse was born in 1917 to a Polish mother and Austrian father.