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Photographing Sites of Nazi Violence, 1933–1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2024

David Crew
David Crew*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin
*
Email: dfcrew@austin.utexas.edu
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Extract

By far the greatest number of photographs of Nazi sites of violence were taken by the perpetrators. Some Jews did work as official photographers in the ghettoes, but during deportations, in the camps and extermination centers, and at the sites of mass shootings, only Gestapo officers, SS men and women, or other authorized personnel were officially permitted to use cameras. In the Mauthausen concentration camp, for example, as Lukas Meissel explains in his contribution to the excellent collection of essays, Fotografien aus den Lagern des NS-Regimes. Beweissicherung und ästhethische Praxis, “only members of the so-called Erkennungsdienst (identification department) were allowed to take photographs.”1 These photographs “do not reflect the reality of the camp” (45). They seldom confront us directly with Nazi violence. Instead, these pictures offer (false) images of frictionless operations, visual testimony to the efficiency of the perpetrators, usually meant to impress their superiors.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Central European History , First View , pp. 1 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Central European History Society of the American Historical Association

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References

1 Meissel, Lukas, ed. “Perpetrator Photography: The Pictures of the Erkennungsdienst at Mauthausen Concentration Camp,” in Fotografien aus den Lagern des NS-Regimes. Beweissicherung und ästhetische Praxis, edited by Hildegard Frübis, Clara Oberle, and Agnieska Pufelska (Vienna and Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2019), 25Google Scholar.

2 Andrea Genest, “Fotografien als Zeugen-Häftlingsfotografien aus dem Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück,” in Fotografien aus den Lagern des NS-Regimes. Beweissicherung und ästhetische Praxis, 92.

3 Sandra Starke, “‘… davon kann man sich kein Bild machen.’ Entstehen, Funktion und Bedeutung der Baumhängen-Fotos,” in Fotografien aus den Lagern des NS-Regimes. Beweissicherung und ästhetische Praxis, 49.

4 Elkins, James, What Photography Is (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2011), 94, 96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Flashes of Memory: Fotografie im Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Publications, 2023), 215.

6 Kinzel, Tanja, Im Fokus der Kamera. Fotografien aus dem Ghetto Lodz (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2021)Google Scholar.

7 Bruttmann, Tal, Hörder, Stefan, and Kreutzmüller, Christoph, Die fotografische Inszenierung des Verbrechens. Ein Album aus Auschwitz (Darmstadt: wbg Academic, 2019)Google Scholar.

8 Ute Wrocklage, in Fotografien aus den Lagern des NS-Regimes. Beweissicherung und ästhetische Praxis, 188.

9 Cüppers, Martin, Lepper, Anne, and Matthäus, Jürgen, ed., From “Euthanasia” to Sobibor: An SS Officer's Photo Collection (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Christoph Kreutzmüller, “Das Auschwitz-Album der SS,” Der Spiegel, January 26, 2020 (https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/das-auschwitz-album-der-ss-a-b0719bf9-a8ad-4758-af5f-a17b9526d6f5).

11 Sven Felix Kellerhof, “Was die Fotos der SS über das KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau verraten,” Die Welt, December 19, 2019 (https://www.welt.de/geschichte/zweiter-weltkrieg/article204445224/Holocaust-Album-Was-die-Fotos-der-SS-ueber-Auschwitz-verraten.html).

12 Franz Sz. Horváth, “Die Shoa neu sehen,” literaturkritik.de, June 23, 2020 (https://literaturkritik.de/ioanid-iasi-pogrom-juni-juli-1941-hoerdler-kreutzmueller-bruttmann-fotografische-inszenierung-verbrechens-shoa-neu-sehen,26860.html).

13 See, for example, Hébert, Valerie, ed., Framing the Holocaust: Photographs of a Mass Shooting in Latvia, 1941 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2023)Google Scholar.