The diverse roles of photography during the Nazi era
In times of rising anti-Semitism and with the number of Holocaust survivors rapidly decreasing, raising awareness of the horrors they endured remains one of humanity’s essential responsibilities.
Museums also face the task of finding new ways to keep the public interested in learning about the hard facts.
“Flashes of Memory: Photography During the Holocaust” is an exhibition that manages to successfully tie the past with the present. The Instagram generation, used to seeing well curated photos with self-optimization, perfectly staged and digitally enhanced through filters, will discover through this exhibition that photography during the Nazi era was already used as a tool to manipulate public opinion, but it also served as essential atrocity documents for later war crimes trials.
Exposing the ‘manipulative power’ of the camera
First shown at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, “Flashes of Memory: Photography During the Holocaust” already left Israel for the first time and is currently displayed at the Museum of Photography in Berlin.
“The camera, with its power of manipulation, has tremendous impact and far-reaching influence,” said Vivian Uria, director of Yad Vashem’s Museums Division, in 2018 when the exhibition opened. Although “the photograph pretends to reflect reality as it is, it is actually an interpretation of it,” she said.
The three-part exhibition offers three different perspectives: through photographs taken by the Nazis, photos taken by Jewish photographers, and photos taken by soldiers of the forces that liberated Germany from the Nazis.
Portraits of children used for anti-Semitic attacks
the nazi newspaper Der Sturmer, which had been arousing anti-Jewish resentment since the 1920s, published, for example, photos of Jewish men sitting together in a pub and accused them of conspiracy. He even used portraits of children to assert that Jews supposedly had basic instincts.
Beginning in 1932, the viciously anti-Jewish tabloid began using the subtitle “German Weekly for the Struggle for the Truth.”
During the war, the propaganda newspaper published photos sent in by Wehrmacht soldiers taken in the ghettos of occupied Poland, captioning them with anti-Semitic comments.
Jewish photographers also took pictures in the ghettos; they were commissioned by so-called Judenräte (Jewish councils). These Jewish city administrations were appointed by the occupiers and required to implement Nazi policy. These photos were intended to document the “efficiency” of the ghettos, as councils were actually forced to hand over local Jews for hard labor or deportation to concentration camps. The extensive photographic documentation was intended to prove to the Nazis that Jewish labor was indispensable.
Although expressly prohibited by the Judenräte, some of the hired photographers used their life-threatening cameras to document the suffering and horror in the ghettos.
Henryk Ross, who took pictures in the Lodz ghetto, reportedly said he knew his family members would be tortured and killed if he was caught taking pictures.
Meanwhile, the Nazis relied on anti-Semitic stereotypes to portray the ghettos as production facilities where “lazy Jews” were taught to work.
The exhibition demonstrates the imbalance between the powerful mass media Nazi propaganda industry, including elaborately staged films by Leni Riefenstahl, and the efforts of a handful of people who risked their lives trying to provide a corrective. “This is an exceptional example of human will,” said Vivian Uria.
Some of these photos avoided destruction by being buried or hidden, and would later serve as evidence in Nazi war crimes trials.
Allied photos served their own purposes
Another section of the exhibition is devoted to photos taken by Allied soldiers. As they liberated concentration camps, they documented the horrors of the Holocaust. Through his pictures of piles of dead bodies, or the extremely emaciated bodies of survivors, the planned extermination of human lives could no longer be denied.
Harrowing and disturbing, the photos of the Allies are naturally categorized as photos taken by the “good guys”. But it should still be noted that his photographs sometimes served their own purposes: countless images of people behind barbed wire fences in the Auschwitz concentration camp, waiting to be released, were staged for the cameras.
The iconic image of a Red Army soldier waving the Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag building on May 2, 1945, the day of Berlin’s military surrender, serves as a famous example of how post-processing can tarnish documentary power. of a historic photograph.
The Soviet Red Army photographer who took the photo, Yevgeny Khaldei, scraped one of the two wristwatches the soldier wore from the photo negative, as it was a sign of looting – and the liberators should not be suspected of looting.
The Soviet news agency later added clouds of smoke to the photo, darkening it and enlarging the flag to give the image more drama.
The show illuminates the manipulative power of images from all sides. “Flashes of Memory” is on display at the Museum of Photography until August 20, 2023.
This article was originally written in German.
Source: DW
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