Gestapo Informer Recognized by a Woman She Had Denounced, full title Gestapo Informer Recognized by a Woman She Had Denounced, Deportation Camp, Dessau, Germany, is a black and white photograph taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1945. It is one of the most famous post-World War II pictures. [1]
While working for the French Army's film and photography unit, Cartier-Bresson was caught by the Germans and became a prisoner of war in June 1940. In 1943, his third escape attempt was successful, and with the help of forged papers, he managed to flee to France.
After the end of World War II in Europe, in May 1945, he was assigned by the American Office of War Information to do a documentary about French prisoners of war and refugees, which would be Le Retour. [2] This picture was taken at the Dessau deportation camp, in East Germany, recently liberated by the Soviet and American armies, and which was being used as a shelter for displaced people, forced workers, political and war prisoners, and refugees.
The dramatic picture documents the moment when a Belgian woman who had been a Nazi collaborator as a Gestapo informer, and was identified before she could hide in the crowd, is publicly identified by another woman as the one who denounced her. She rushes from the crowd to do that and stands angry and defiant to her left, while the alleged informer lowers her head in shame. The camp commandant and interrogator sits calmy at a writing desk as he witnesses the scene. A crowd at the background witnesses the dramatic event, including a man in "stryped pyjamas" who looks defiantly at the left. [3] The identity of the two women is unknown but the man seated at the desk was Wilhelm Heinrich van der Velden, a young Dutchman nominated by the Americans to that position, who had been recently liberated from the Westerbork Camp, in the Netherlands. This particular scene is absent from the documentary.
There are prints of this photograph at the International Center of Photography, in New York, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, in Minneapolis, and the Art Gallery of South Australia, in Adelaide. [4] [5] [6]
Ingeborg Hermine Morath was an Austrian photographer. In 1953, she joined the Magnum Photos Agency, founded by top photographers in Paris, and became a full photographer with the agency in 1955. Morath was the third wife of playwright Arthur Miller; their daughter is screenwriter/director Rebecca Miller.
Terezín is a town in Litoměřice District in the Ústí nad Labem Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 2,800 inhabitants. It is a former military fortress composed of the citadel and adjacent walled garrison town. The town centre is well preserved and is protected by law as an urban monument reservation. Terezin is most infamously the location of the Nazi’s notorious Theresienstadt Ghetto.
Fresnes Prison is the second largest prison in France, located in the town of Fresnes, Val-de-Marne, south of Paris. It comprises a large men's prison of about 1200 cells, a smaller one for women and a penitentiary hospital.
Suzanne Spaak, néeAugustine Lorge known as Suzette Spaak was a World War II French Resistance operative. On 21 April 1985, Yad Vashem recognized Spaak as Righteous Among the Nations, for helping to smuggle several Jewish children to safety, by providing them with ration cards and clothing.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35 mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.
Élisabeth, Baroness de Rothschild was a member by marriage of the wine-making branch of the Rothschild family.
Pawiak was a prison built in 1835 in Warsaw, Congress Poland.
Martine Franck was a British-Belgian documentary and portrait photographer. She was a member of Magnum Photos for over 32 years. Franck was the second wife of Henri Cartier-Bresson and co-founder and president of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.
Jean-Philippe Charbonnier was a French photographer whose works typify the humanist impulse in that medium in his homeland of the period after World War II.
The Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup was a mass arrest of foreign Jewish families by French police and gendarmes at the behest of the German authorities, that took place in Paris on 16 and 17 July 1942. According to records of the Préfecture de Police, 13,152 Jews were arrested, including more than 4,000 children.
Hinzert was a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, in what is now Rhineland-Palatinate, 30 kilometres (19 mi) from the border with Luxembourg.
Géza Kertész, also known as Kertész IV, was a Hungarian footballer and manager from Budapest. He is most noted for his career as a football manager in Italy at clubs such as Lazio, Roma and Atalanta.
Helmut Bischoff was a German SS-Obersturmbannführer and Nazi official. During World War II he was the leader of Einsatzkommando 1/IV in Poland and later headed the Gestapo offices in Poznań (Posen) and Magdeburg.
Humanist Photography, also known as the School of Humanist Photography, manifests the Enlightenment philosophical system in social documentary practice based on a perception of social change. It emerged in the mid-twentieth-century and is associated most strongly with Europe, particularly France, where the upheavals of the two world wars originated, though it was a worldwide movement. It can be distinguished from photojournalism, with which it forms a sub-class of reportage, as it is concerned more broadly with everyday human experience, to witness mannerisms and customs, than with newsworthy events, though practitioners are conscious of conveying particular conditions and social trends, often, but not exclusively, concentrating on the underclasses or those disadvantaged by conflict, economic hardship or prejudice. Humanist photography "affirms the idea of a universal underlying human nature". Jean Claude Gautrand describes humanist photography as:
a lyrical trend, warm, fervent, and responsive to the sufferings of humanity [which] began to assert itself during the 1950s in Europe, particularly in France ... photographers dreamed of a world of mutual succour and compassion, encapsulated ideally in a solicitous vision.
Yvonne Chollet was a teacher in Vendôme, France, who surveilled the movement of German equipment on behalf of the French Resistance and reported her findings to Allied forces during World War II. Arrested by the Gestapo in May 1943, she was imprisoned at Blois, Orléans, Romainville, and Compiègne before being deported to the Nazi concentration camp near the village of Ravensbrück in northern Germany, where she died the following year.
Robert Lannoy was a French composer, second Prize of the Prix de Rome in 1946. He was then director of the Conservatoire de Lille for 33 years, until his death.
Karl Brunner was a German lawyer, SS-Brigadeführer and Generalmajor of the police and the SS and police leader in Salzburg and Bolzano. Brunner served as head of the Einsatzkommando 4/I during the invasion of Poland and the early stages of the German occupation in 1939, tasked with the killing of Polish civilians. During his time in Northern Italy he was also responsible for the arrest, and ultimately, the deportation of the Jews in his area of jurisdiction, as well as reprisals against Italian civilians.
Yaritji Young is a Pitjantjatjara woman from Pukatja, a community within the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands and she now lives at Rocket Bore; a homeland north of Amata. Young is a significant Australian Aboriginal artist and senior law women who is to committed to fostering law and culture and this forms a core part of her artistic practice. Most of Young's paintings are drawn from the Tjala Dreaming.
Marie Rachel Eudoxie Bouffa was a member of the Belgian resistance during World War II and recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.
Jewish people have a long history of persecution in Northern Germany that culminated in The Holocaust.