Photography of the Holocaust is a topic of interest to scholars of the Holocaust. Such studies are often situated in the academic fields related to visual culture and visual sociology studies. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] Photographs created during the Holocaust also raise questions in terms of ethics related to their creation and later reuse. [3] : abstract
Much of the photography of the Holocaust is the work of Nazi German photographers. [7] Some originated as routine administrative procedure, such as identification photographs (mug shots); others were intended to illustrate the construction and functioning of the camps or prisoner transport. [5] There were also photographs of concentration camps authorized for use by German media, those appeared in print around 1933–1936 in German newspapers and magazines such as Deutsche Illustrirte Zeitung or Münchner Illustrierte Presse . [5] A small number of pictures appeared in later years, vetted by propaganda and censorship officials before publication. [5]
Many photographs of the Holocaust are taken by unidentified authors, but others are known. Nazi German photographers of the Holocaust who acted in their official capacity include Bernhard Walter , Friedrich Franz Bauer, Franz Wolf, Albert Rum and Franz Suchomel. [5] The destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto was methodically documented in the well-illustrated Stroop Report. [10] Some photographs were taken by the camp prisoners themselves, for example by Wilhelm Brasse [11] or Francisco Boix, working as aides for their Nazi overseers. [5] There were also photographs taken in the ghettos by their Jewish inhabitants, some with official permission, some in secrecy as an act of defiance and for evidence purposes. [12] Jewish photographers of the ghetto life included Henryk Ross and Mendel Grossman, both of whom documented the Łódź Ghetto. [12] A number of other photographs of the Jewish ghetto life come from Nazi personnel and soldiers, many of whom treated those locales as tourist attractions. [12] Unofficial photographs of the Holocaust were taken by, among others, Hubert Pfoch , [5] Joe Heydecker , [13] Willy Georg [14] and Walter Genewein . [15]
Other photographs were taken during the liberation of the camps by photographers attached to Allied units which arrived to secure them. [5] Such photographs started appearing from mid-1944, and gained wider notoriety in the spring 1945. [5] Most Allied military photographers remain anonymous as they were seldom credited, unlike the press correspondents who published some of the first photo exposés of the camps; the latter included Lee Miller, Margaret Bourke-White, David Scherman, George Rodger, John Florea and William Vandivert. [5] Because of the Cold War, many photographs made by the Soviets were treated with suspicion in the West, and received little coverage until decades later. [12] Holocaust photography also includes aerial reconnaissance photos made by Allied aircraft. [6]
Many photographs were destroyed, some accidentally, as collateral damage during the war, others on purpose, in attempts by perpetrators of the atrocities to suppress the evidence. [5] Conversely, some Nazi photographs were stolen, hidden and preserved as evidence of atrocities by individuals such as Francisco Boix or Joe Heydecker. [5] [13]
The total number of surviving Holocaust-related photos has been estimated at over two million. [7]
A number of surviving photographs documenting Holocaust atrocities were used as evidence during post war trials of Nazi war crimes, such as the Nuremberg trials. [5] They have been used as symbolic, impactful evidence to educate the world about the true nature of Nazi atrocities. [6] [8]
Historical photographs are considered valuable artifacts for historical studies and memorial institutions such as museums and galleries. [5] [6] There have been a number of gallery exhibits dedicated to this topic. [6] They are used by scholars to refine understanding of historical events, in a form of visual archaeology. [2] [6] In addition to the photos themselves, caption of the photos have been analyzed as well, as they can be helpful in understanding framing biases; for example the same photo captioned in Russian might describe the victims as Soviet citizens, in Polish, as Polish citizens, and in Yiddish, as Jews. [6] [12]
At the same time, some have criticized whether unconditional public access to photographs of atrocities is ethical (as they were not taken with the subjects' consent, and have been known to cause distress to the subjects) and educational (as they have been accused of being trivialized in some contexts, or used out of context or with improper attribution). [3] [12] Demand for Holocaust atrocity photographs has resulted in a number of fake images turning up at auctions. [12]
Inmate photographs were analyzed in a 2021 French documentary, From Where They Stood. [16]
The Auschwitz Album is a photographic record of the Holocaust during the Second World War. It and the Sonderkommando photographs are among the small number of visual documents that show the operations of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the German extermination camp in occupied Poland.
The Łódź Ghetto or Litzmannstadt Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto established by the German authorities for Polish Jews and Roma following the Invasion of Poland. It was the second-largest ghetto in all of German-occupied Europe after the Warsaw Ghetto. Situated in the city of Łódź, and originally intended as a preliminary step upon a more extensive plan of creating the Judenfrei province of Warthegau, the ghetto was transformed into a major industrial centre, manufacturing war supplies for Nazi Germany and especially for the Wehrmacht. The number of people incarcerated in it was increased further by the Jews deported from Nazi-controlled territories.
The Kraków Ghetto was one of five major metropolitan Nazi ghettos created by Germany in the new General Government territory during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It was established for the purpose of exploitation, terror, and persecution of local Polish Jews. The ghetto was later used as a staging area for separating the "able workers" from those to be deported to extermination camps in Operation Reinhard. The ghetto was liquidated between June 1942 and March 1943, with most of its inhabitants deported to the Belzec extermination camp as well as to Płaszów slave-labor camp, and Auschwitz concentration camp, 60 kilometres (37 mi) rail distance.
The Holocaust has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.
Czesława Kwoka was a Polish Catholic girl who was murdered at the age of 14 in Auschwitz. One of the thousands of minor child and teen victims of German World War II war crimes against ethnic Poles in German-occupied Poland, she is among those memorialized in an Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum exhibit, "Block no. 6: Exhibition: The Life of the Prisoners".
Holocaust trains were railway transports run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn national railway system under the control of Nazi Germany and its allies, for the purpose of forcible deportation of the Jews, as well as other victims of the Holocaust, to the Nazi concentration, forced labour, and extermination camps.
Henryk Ross was a Polish Jewish photographer who was employed by the Department of Statistics for the Jewish Council within the Łódź Ghetto during the Holocaust in occupied Poland.
Wilhelm Brasse was a Polish professional photographer and a prisoner in Auschwitz during World War II. He became known as the "famous photographer of Auschwitz concentration camp." His life and work were the subject of the 2005 Polish television documentary film The Portraitist (Portrecista), which first aired in the Proud to Present series on the Polish TVP1 on 1 January 2006.
The Portraitist is a 2005 Polish television documentary film about the life and work of Wilhelm Brasse, the famous "photographer of Auschwitz", made for TVP1, Poland, which first aired in its "Proud to Present" series on January 1, 2006. It also premiered at the Polish Film Festival, at the West London Synagogue, in London, on March 19, 2007.
The Mizoch (Mizocz) Ghetto was a World War II ghetto set up in the town of Mizoch, Western Ukraine by Nazi Germany for the forcible segregation and mistreatment of Jews.
The Sonderkommando photographs are four blurred photographs taken secretly in August 1944 inside the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. Along with a few photographs in the Auschwitz Album, they are the only ones known to exist of events around the gas chambers.
The Last Jew in Vinnitsa is a photograph taken during the Holocaust in Ukraine showing an unknown Jewish man probably near the town of Vinnitsa (Vinnytsia) about to be shot dead by a member of Einsatzgruppe D, a mobile death squad of the Nazi SS. The victim is kneeling beside a mass grave already containing bodies; behind, a group of SS and Reich Labour Service men watch.
Maurice Rossel was a Swiss doctor and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) official during the Holocaust. He is best known for visiting Theresienstadt concentration camp on 23 June 1944; he erroneously reported that Theresienstadt was the final destination for Jewish deportees and that their lives were "almost normal". His report, which is considered "emblematic of the failure of the ICRC" during the Holocaust, undermined the credibility of the more accurate Vrba-Wetzler Report and misled the ICRC about the Final Solution. Rossel later visited Auschwitz concentration camp. In 1979, he was interviewed by Claude Lanzmann; based on this footage, the 1997 film A Visitor from the Living(fr) was produced.
In the best-known photograph taken during the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a boy holds his hands over his head while SS-Rottenführer Josef Blösche points a submachine gun in his direction. The boy and others hid in a bunker during the final liquidation of the ghetto, but they were caught and forced out by German troops. After the photograph was taken, all of the Jews in the photograph were marched to the Umschlagplatz and deported to Majdanek extermination camp or Treblinka. The exact location and the photographer are not known, and Blösche is the only person in the photograph who can be identified with certainty. The image is one of the most famous photographs of the Holocaust, and the boy came to represent children in the Holocaust, as well as all Jewish victims.
The Ivanhorod Einsatzgruppen photograph is a prominent depiction of the Holocaust in Ukraine, on the Eastern Front of World War II. Dated to 1942, it shows a soldier aiming his rifle at a woman who is trying to shield a child with her body, portraying one of numerous genocidal killings carried out against Jews by the Einsatzgruppen within German-occupied Europe. It was taken in Ivanhorod, a village in German-occupied Ukraine, before being mailed to Nazi Germany. However, the Polish resistance intercepted the photograph in Warsaw, and it was subsequently kept as Holocaust imagery by Polish photographer Jerzy Tomaszewski. In the 1960s, it was alleged that the photograph was a communist forgery, but that claim was eventually proven false. Since then, it has been frequently used in books, museums, and exhibitions focused on the Holocaust. British photographic historian Janina Struk describes it as "a symbol of the barbarity of the Nazi regime and their industrial-scale murder of six million European Jews."
During World War II, the Theresienstadt concentration camp was used by the Nazi SS as a "model ghetto" for deceiving Red Cross representatives about the ongoing Holocaust and the Nazi plan to murder all Jews. The Nazified German Red Cross visited the ghetto in 1943 and filed the only accurate report on the ghetto, describing overcrowding and undernourishment. In 1944, the ghetto was "beautified" in preparation for a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Danish government. The delegation visited on 23 June; ICRC delegate Maurice Rossel wrote a favorable report on the ghetto and claimed that no one was deported from Theresienstadt. In April 1945, another ICRC delegation was allowed to visit the ghetto; despite the contemporaneous liberation of other concentration camps, it continued to repeat Rossel's erroneous findings. The SS turned over the ghetto to the ICRC on 2 May, several days before the end of the war.
The question of how much Germans knew about the Holocaust while it was ongoing continues to be debated by historians. With regard to Nazi Germany, some historians argue that it was an open secret amongst the population, whilst others highlight a possibility that the German population were genuinely unaware of the Final Solution. Peter Longerich argues that the Holocaust was an open secret by early 1943, but some authors place it even earlier. However, after the war, many Germans claimed that they were ignorant of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime, a claim associated with the stereotypical phrase "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst".
In German-occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust, the Politische Abteilung Erkennungsdienst in the Auschwitz concentration camp was a kommando of SS officers and prisoners who photographed camp events, visiting dignitaries, and building works on behalf of the camp's commandant, Rudolf Höss.
From Where They Stood, also known as À pas aveugles, is a 2021 Holocaust documentary by French documentarian Christophe Cognet that scrutinizes photographs taken clandestinely by prisoners at the Dachau, Auschwitz, Mittlelbau-Dora and Buchenwald Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The photographs were smuggled out of the camps and developed during the war or afterwards.
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