photography and the Holocaust

The campaign to annihilate the European Jews between 1933 and 1945 took place in stages. First, Jews were identified and subjected to discrimination; then concentrated in camps and ghettoes; then massacred. At each stage the camera was present, either as witness or instrument.

Identification and Discrimination

In the 1930s photography was extensively used in the racial science textbooks that aimed to differentiate between Jewish and Aryan physical types. Hitler's seizure of power in Germany in January 1933 was followed by a succession of anti-Semitic measures: vandalization of Jewish property, boycotts, discriminatory legislation, and the widespread destruction of synagogues during the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ (Kristallnacht) of 9-10 November 1938. These actions were extensively photographed, mostly by journalists of the regime-controlled press. The victims' viewpoint was, for obvious reasons, seldom represented. However, some Jewish professional photographers, such as Abraham Pisarek, continued to work clandestinely and record the persecution of their community. Pictures by foreigners are rare, although some undercover reportage took place, and was occasionally published. The Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC) in Paris, for example, has the album of a Dutch amateur who travelled through Germany by motorcycle from Bentheim to Berlin systematically photographing anti-Semitic posters.

Concentration

Parallel to these discriminatory measures there developed, from 1933, a policy of incarcerating opponents of the regime, then ordinary criminals, asocial elements, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews, and gypsies. Until the war, concentration camps were presented as a testing ground for new correctional methods. Far from being kept secret, they featured in the regime's propaganda. Thus between 1933 and 1938 Friedrich Bauer did several reportages on Dachau, extracts of which appeared in the Nazi press. This externally orientated iconography was matched by photographic activity inside the more important camps, each of which had a laboratory supplying its picture requirements: identity photographs, and documentation of works in progress, visits by Nazi dignitaries, and medical experiments. The outbreak of war hardly affected this, but brought external propaganda to an end. It was no longer a question of showing the ‘re-education’ of detainees, but of concealing their participation in the war economy. The very few reportages still produced inside the camps emphasized their productive potential and were mainly intended for the Nazi hierarchy, or industrialists interested in cheap labour. However, some rare clandestine photographs were taken by prisoners themselves to bear witness or incriminate their captors: for example, by Georg Angéli at Buchenwald, Rudolf Cisar at Dachau, and Polish victims of medical experiments at Ravensbrück.

War allowed another form of concentration, namely ghettoization. Decided upon during the invasion of Poland, the formation of ghettoes began in the winter of 1939-40. They received considerable photographic coverage by propaganda-company photographers such as Cusian and Grimm in Warsaw or Hensel and Vandrey in Lublin. Many of their pictures, which, like contemporary newsreels, depicted ghetto inhabitants as dirty, diseased, and work shy, eventually appeared in mass-circulation papers like the Berliner illustrierte Zeitung. By contrast, the photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto taken surreptitiously by Joe Heydecker, a propaganda-company darkroom assistant, showed the terrible conditions there. Equally revealing and harrowing images were made by Jewish photographers like Mendel Grossman, a Łódź inmate. Different again, finally, were the Agfa colour transparencies of Łódź and its ghetto taken 1940-4 by a Nazi administrator, Walter Genewein; and the 54 triumphantly captioned photographs included in SS General Stroop's report on the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.

Extermination

After the invasion of Russia in June 1941, the number of Jews under German control increased enormously. The policy of concentration, no longer feasible on such a scale, gave way to one of extermination. On its eastward advance the Wehrmacht committed or tolerated many atrocities. But four special SS units (Einsatzgruppen) were given the task of summarily shooting communist functionaries and Jews. Despite repeated bans, many amateur photographs were taken of these executions. Some soldiers and SS men, after committing their crimes, posed cheerfully beside the corpses. The ‘final solution of the Jewish question’—systematic extermination—was launched at the January 1942 Wannsee Conference. From March, Jews throughout Occupied Europe faced deportation to death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. As the ‘final solution’ was secret, these deportations were rarely photographed. However, there are some clandestine images, such as those taken by Hubert Pfoch, an Austrian soldier, of a transport destined for Treblinka; and official pictures by the Würzburg police. The prohibition of photography was even stricter in the camps themselves, although there is a surviving series from Auschwitz in 1944 on a transport of Hungarian Jews. The photographs, probably taken by SS photographers, show the arrival of the trains, the selection of prisoners for work or death, and the disinfection and sorting of baggage. In fact everything is shown except actual killing. Evidently other official pictures were taken (and witnesses from both Auschwitz and Mauthausen spoke of gassings being photographed), but destroyed before the camps were liberated. The only surviving images that relate directly to extermination were taken secretly by Polish resisters at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. They show a group of women who have been forced to undress before entering the gas chamber, and the work of the incineration squad.

The liberation of the camps

At the end of 1944 several American aerial reconnaissance missions photographed Auschwitz. In the photographs accommodation huts, rolling stock, and even gas chambers are precisely discernible. But picture interpreters were hardly interested in these details, compared with the target value of the camp's industrial plants. For the Allies, photographic coverage of the concentration- and extermination-camp system did not begin until the camps' liberation in January (Auschwitz), then April, 1945. While the Russians were uncommunicative about the horrors they found, the British and American authorities decided to give them blanket publicity. Three categories of photographers were involved: photojournalists like Margaret Bourke-White, Lee Miller, and George Rodger, military photographers, and ordinary soldiers with their cameras. The terrible images they captured were widely disseminated by the press in the months that followed. In facilitating this, British and American planners hoped both to show civilians what they had been fighting against, and to prepare future communication strategies. For, on the threshold of the Cold War, liberation of the oppressed was already looming large as a political issue.

These photographs are unquestionably a milestone in the visual history of the 20th century. In 1945 the picture industry came face to face with the industry of death. Even if the images mostly show concentration camps, they have today become icons of the extermination of the Jews. As such, they vividly colour our perception and memory of the past.

— Clément Chéroux

Featured article: Not Waving but Drowning.

— Edward Serotta

Bibliography

• Reifarth, D., and Schmidt-Linsenhoff, V., ‘Die Kamera der Henker: Fotografische Selbstzeugnisse des Naziterrors in Osteuropa’, Fotogeschichte, 3 (1983).
• Loewy, H., “‘ “…without Masks”: Jews through the Lens of “German Photography” 1933-1945’”, in K. Honnef, R. Sachsse, and K. Thomas (eds.), German Photography 1870-1970: Power of a Medium (1997).
• Brink, C., Ikonen der Vernichtung (1998).
• Zelizer, B., Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye (1998).
• Milton, S., and Markon, G. (eds.), ‘Photography and the Holocaust’, History of Photography, 23 (1999).
• Chéroux, C., Mémoire des camps (2001)