The camera never lies: Spanish concentration camp inmate whose photos helped convict Nazis

Francesc Boix defied orders to destroy thousands of photos and instead smuggled them out of the Mauthausen camp, reports Graham Keeley in Barcelona

Portrait of Francesc Boix wearing a beret and a Leica camera (History Museum of Catalonia/Mauthausen-Francesc Boix Campo Friendly Fund (courtesy of the Boix family))

A Spanish photographer who helped smuggle negatives showing the atrocities that had taken place in a Nazi concentration camp has been honoured in his own country.

Francesc Boix bravely ignored the orders of SS guards at the Mauthausen camp, in Austria, to destroy thousands of incriminating photographs, and instead kept the negatives, allowing him to reveal the depravity of the Hitler regime to the wider world.

Working with other inmates, he risked his life to get the negatives smuggled out of the SS labour camp, whence they were passed to the conquering Allied armies at the end of the Second World War.