Photographing the Holocaust

Interpretations of the Evidence

Janina Struk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000323771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust were photographed more intensely that any before. In the time since the images were taken they have been subjected to a perplexing variety of treatments: variously ignored, suppressed, distorted and above all exploited for propaganda purposes. With the use of many photographs, including some never before seen, this book traces the history of this process and asks whether the images can be true representations of the events they were depicting. Yet their provenance, Janina Struk argues, has been less important that the uses to which a wide range of political interests has put them, from the desperate attempts of the war-time underground to provide hard evidence of the death camps to the memorial museums of Europe, the US and Israel today.

ONE
Photography and National Socialism 1933–39

The authority of the photograph

When the National Socialists came to power in Germany in January 1933 they inherited the artistic legacy of the Weimar Republic (1919–33) and an unprecedented mass communications system that they refined for their own propaganda purposes. They were quick to recognize the role that photography could play as a medium through which to promote their propaganda.

The Weimar Republic was one of the most intense and innovative periods of artistic expression of the twentieth century. There were links between the German modernist movement and the revolutionary artistic movements in Soviet Russia, both of which shared a commitment to engage with the rebuilding of societies following the First World War.¹ Photography was seen as an ideal form of expression for these innovative and radical ideas. Hungarian-born László Moholy-Nagy, a lecturer at the Bauhaus, said: ‘The limits of photography cannot yet be predicted. Everything to do with it is still so new that even initial exploration may yield strikingly creative results.’²

Technological advances in mass communications such as the 35mm camera made photography accessible and gave it a reputation as a democratic medium. Painters, poets, sculptors, political activists and workers’ organizations turned to photography as a means of expression.³ ‘The illiterates of the future’, wrote German-Jewish Marxist writer and critic Walter Benjamin, in 1928, ‘will be the people who know nothing of photography rather than those who are ignorant of the art of writing.’⁴ The National Socialists seized upon the new status of the photographic image. Three principal developments in photography made the medium appealing to them: first, the widespread belief in its ability to be objective, to reflect the truth and be tantamount to scientific evidence; second, the ability to mass produce images; and third, the development of documentary photography during the 1930s which consolidated these principles.

The belief in the photograph as scientific evidence had been established in the nineteenth century, when photography was utilized by the disciplinary institutions of the state and the new social sciences: anthropology, criminology, physiognomy and psychology. These disciplines embraced the idea that human physiognomy, accurately recorded in a photograph, could reveal the inner truth about an individual’s character. The relationship between photography and the state gave the photograph a new authority. Those who came under the scrutiny of the camera were placed passively in a full frontal pose, emphasizing features, facial expressions and gestures. The poor and the colonized were frequently photographed rooted in their environments, synonymous respectively with dingy streets and exotic landscapes. These photographic records were used with physiological data for a series of discursive operations levelled at the body. They were used in association with written data or statistics as ‘proof’ or ‘evidence’. This viewpoint, though essentially authoritarian, was interpreted as ‘neutrality’.⁵

By the 1920s, the belief that a photograph alone could reflect the true character of an individual had become pivotal to an understanding of photography. ‘Criminal photos’ were included in the radical exhibition, ‘Film und Foto’, held in Stuttgart in 1929. In an exhibition review, A. Kraszna-Krausz categorized them as images that give ‘an unfaked reproduction of situations’ and ‘vitally catch physiognomies’.⁶ The influential and distinguished German photographer August Sander was an advocate of the scientific physiognomic image.⁷ In a lecture given on German radio in 1931, he postulated the creation of a physiognomic image of a whole generation or a whole nation, suggesting that it would be possible to detect ‘group-sentiments’ in ‘certain individuals’ which, he said, ‘we can designate by the term, the Type’.⁸

In the same year Walter Benjamin, in his essay ‘A Short History of Photography’, praised Sander’s major photographic study of German society for which he had taken portraits of all classes and social groupings: workers, peasants, the middle classes, Jews, National Socialists, soldiers, students, the disabled and artists. He wrote: ‘Sudden shifts of power such as are now overdue in our society can make the ability to read facial types a matter of vital importance. Whether one is of the left or right, one will have to get used to being looked at in terms of one’s provenance. And one will have to look at others the same way. Sander’s work is more than a picture book. It is a training manual.’⁹

Photographing ‘types’ was a popular concept throughout Europe. In Poland in 1937 the Warsaw Jewish monthly newspaper Glos Gminy Zydowskiej (Voice of the Jewish Community) published a page of photographs in four separate issues headlined: ‘Small town typical Jews.’ These pictures, almost entirely of men, showed individuals and vendors in the streets, placed squarely in front of the camera.¹⁰

The representation of ‘types’ and the theory on which Sander based his practice were fundamental to National Socialist propaganda, but the distinctions he portrayed in German society were not acceptable to their ideology. Whereas Sander’s photographs had given his subjects a degree of dignity and had celebrated difference, the theory was appropriated by the Nazis to condemn difference. In 1934, while the plates of the first edition of Sander’s book, The Face of the Time, were being seized and destroyed by the Nazis, Hans F. K. Günther’s book, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volks (Racial Elements of the German People), first published in 1922, had become a best-seller in Germany. It contained photographic portraits to establish the physiognomic superiority of the Nordic ‘race’ over those considered ‘inferior’, including the Jews. By 1933 sixteen editions had been published, and by 1944, 420,000 copies had sold in Germany. The fact that some of the ‘same faces’ appeared in both Sander’s and Günther’s collections emphasized the point that, even though Sander’s liberal project centred on social rather than racial distinctions, both collections traded on the principle of physiognomic truth.¹¹

In the late 1920s this scientific approach to photography was further developed to meet the demands of the changing economic and political climate. In 192Ġ Scottish film-maker John Grierson coined the term ‘documentary’. The destabilized economies of the USA and Europe, following the Wall Street crash, had prompted artists and photographers to look for a visual language to convey the social consequences of economic hardship. Author and critic John Tagg argues that documentary was not only ‘a complex strategic response’ to this economic and social crisis, but also to a crisis ‘of representation itself’. It transformed the earlier scientific photography from what Tagg describes as ‘the flat rhetoric of evidence’, into ‘an emotionalised drama of experience’. The scientific approach was no longer sufficient. This emotive element, Tagg argues, helped to seal the relationship between the photographer and the photographed, the viewer and the viewed, into the paternalistic relations of domination and subordination on which documentary truth depended.¹²

This development coincided with what Walter Benjamin called the age of photo-mechanical reproduction. Photojournalism and illustrated magazines flourished. The most successful German illustrated magazine was Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung which in 1929 had a circulation of approximately 1.5 million copies a week.¹³ Other countries followed Germany’s lead. In 1936 the USA’s first mass circulation illustrated magazine, Life, was launched, followed in 1938 by Picture Post in Britain. According to Benjamin, the technological possibilities of reproducing and publishing photographs for mass consumption changed the role of photography and freed the work of art ‘from its parasitical dependence on ritual’. Benjamin wrote that once ‘authenticity’ has ceased to be applicable to artistic production, then the function of art is reversed and it becomes not about ritual but ‘it begins to be based on another practice - politics’.¹⁴ The politicization of the image, as Benjamin saw it, was not only applicable to those on the left, but also to the National Socialists. In 1926, an article in the pro-Nazi illustrated journal Illustrierter Beobachter expressed the idea that the ‘vivid suggestiveness of photographs’ could be ‘more convincing than any text … The majority of readers would regard them as an authentic depiction of reality.’ The article went further and suggested that the truth of the photograph could be improved on by ‘shrewdly manipulating’ the relationship between the image and text.¹⁵

The propaganda value of image and text was something the National Socialists exploited well. Documentary images and those which drew directly on human physiognomy were used widely. For example, in a four-page photo-essay by Friedrich Franz Bauer, entitled ‘Concentration Camp Dachau’, published in lllustrierter Beobachter on 3 December 1936, the majority of images show neat and orderly lines of marching prisoners and camp guards. On one page are eight photographs including ‘prisoners at leisure by the pond in front of a barrack’, workers in the ‘interior of workshops’ and four mug-shots of ‘various types of criminals’ (see Figure 2). In the latter the stark lighting, emphasizing the facial features, gives credence to the idea of the ‘criminal type’. The contrast between the supposed tranquil and ordered environment of the camp and the harsh appearance of the men suggests betterment and rehabilitation. This typifies the way that concentration camps were represented by the National Socialists during the 1930s, as places of tranquillity and reform. Other examples will be discussed later in this chapter.

2. ‘Page from a photo-essay by Friedrich Franz Bauer entitled “Concentration Camp Dachau” in the German anti-Semitic journal, Illustrierter Beobachter.’

(Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz)

The Discredited Jew

Although all opponents of the Nazi regime were represented as ‘undesirable’, the primary target was the Jew, systematically portrayed as a parasite on the Aryan race, either as a communist conspirator or a capitalist rogue, an agent of either the Russian Revolution or British plutocracy. The Jew, according to Nazi doctrine, had many disguises and must be exposed for what he was: a carrier of disease, lacking in morality, and infecting all that was pure and good, that is, the Aryan sensibility. Visual ‘evidence’ of characterizations of the Jew was prolific throughout the Reich.¹⁶

These images were widely distributed on posters, in the Nazi press and in photographic exhibitions organized to mobilize photography for the National Socialist cause. The first of these was ‘Die Kamera’ which opened in 1933. On 8 November 1937 the most successful of all Reich exhibitions, ‘Der ewige Jude’ (The Eternal Jew), opened in Munich.¹⁷ In August 1938 it opened in Vienna, and toured major cities in the occupied territories, including Paris in 1941. The exhibition drew together the diverse and often contradictory characterizations of the Jew, giving leverage to the idea that the Jew was inextricably linked to both capitalism and communism. This is exemplified in the exhibition poster (see Figure 3) in which the hunched bearded Jew is holding coins in his right hand, representing the capitalist, and in the other a knotted whip and map of Germany on which is drawn the hammer and sickle, denoting the Soviet threat. An anti-Soviet exhibition ‘Bolschewismus ohne Maske’ (Bolshevism Unmasked), shown throughout Germany in 1936–37 declared Bolshevism ‘global enemy number one’.¹⁸

3. Exhibition poster for ‘Der ewige Jude’ (The Eternal Jew), Deutsches Museum, Munich, 1937. (Wiener Library, London)

The image of the Jew in the National Socialist imagination was almost invariably a male one. Women presu...