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In 1944, a German SS officer named Karl Höcker was stationed at Auschwitz as an adjutant to the camp's commandant. During the time he was there, the Nazi official kept a scrapbook. But this isn't like any Auschwitz documentation you've seen before. In these images, Höcker and other camp leadership and staff relax at a wooded retreat, hold sing-alongs, and smoke cigars. Josef Mengele, the camp's monstrous doctor, smiles and socializes. SS auxiliary women lounge on deck chairs, snack on berries, and get caught in a rain storm. Höcker lights a Christmas tree.

In January of this year, these rare, unnerving photographs were donated to the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Now, the museum has made them available online, along with background on Höcker and a moving comparison with the "Auschwitz album," the one other known photographic collection from the camp. The contrast between the two is terrifying, and unforgettable.

Pool the photographic resources of nearly 20 galleries, museums, observatories, and research centers. Craft a stylish browser that viewers can use to hop from image to image, tagging those they like, zooming in on details, and accessing background information with the click of a mouse. Do all that, and you get the Smithsonian Photography Initiative. Designed to "open new doors" to the museum's vast collections of photos, this online venture encourages you to feel at home with pictures from the earliest days of camera portraiture to today's unposed shots. In one visit, we skipped from a dignified 1898 platinum print of a Sioux Indian to a 2001 smudgy snap of a black widow pulsar from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. We took in photos of blues musicians, documentary images from South Africa in the mid-1940s, and a sun-shot reflection of soldiers writing home in 1918. And that was just the beginning.

Photojournalist Ron Haviv cemented his reputation with these photographs from the Balkan wars of the early '90s. This online exhibit, courtesy of Photo Arts, features text and pictures from Haviv's book Blood and Honey. Several of the images may be familiar -- his most famous photograph is of a Serbian soldier kicking a dead Muslim woman. The chapters run in roughly chronological order, from "Loyalty" and "War" to "Displacement/Replacement" and "Response and Failure," and the photos speak for themselves. You can also find an excellent New York Times profile of Ron Haviv, and listen to an NPR interview.