Photography's diverse roles during the Nazi era

In times of rising antisemitism, and with the number of remaining Holocaust survivors rapidly dwindling, raising awareness about the horrors they went through remains one of humanity's essential responsibilities.

Museums equally face the task of finding new ways to keep the public interested in learning about the difficult facts.

"Flashes of Memory: Photography During the Holocaust" is an exhibition that manages to successfully tie in the past with the present. The Instagram generation, used to seeing well-curated self-optimization photos that are 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 the public opinion, but also served as essential documents of atrocities for later war crimes trials. 

Exposing the camera's 'manipulative power'

First shown at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, "Flashes of Memory: Photography During the Holocaust" has now left Israel for the first time and is currently presented at Berlin's Museum of Photography.

"The camera, with its manipulative power, has tremendous impact and far-reaching influence," Vivian Uria, director of the Yad Vashem Museums Division, pointed out in 2018, when the exhibition first opened. While "photography pretends to reflect reality as it is, it is in fact an interpretation of it," she said.

The three-part exhibition provides three different perspectives: through photographs taken by the Nazis, photos taken by Jewish photographers, and pictures taken by the soldiers of the forces that liberated Germany from the Nazis.

Children's portraits used for antisemitic attacks

The Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, which had been stirring up anti-Jewish resentment since the 1920s, printed for example pictures of Jewish men sitting together in a pub, and accused them of plotting. It even used portraits of children to claim that Jews supposedly had base instincts.

Beginning in 1932, the viciously anti-Jewish tabloid started using the subtitle, "German Weekly for the Fight for Truth."

During the war, the propaganda paper published photos sent in by Wehrmacht soldiers taken in the ghettos in occupied Poland, captioning them with antisemitic remarks.

Jewish photographers also took photos in the ghettos; they were commissioned by the so-called Judenräte (Jewish councils). These Jewish municipal administrations were appointed by the occupiers and were required to implement Nazi policy. Those photos aimed to document how "efficiently" the ghettos were run, while the councils were actually forced to hand over the Jewish locals for forced labor or deportation to the concentration camps. The extensive photographic documentation aimed to prove to the Nazis that Jewish labor was indispensable.

Although expressly forbidden by the Judenräte, some of the commissioned photographers used their cameras at the risk of their lives to document the suffering and horror in the ghettos.

Henryk Ross, who took photographs in the Lodz ghetto, is quoted as saying he was aware that his family members would be tortured and killed if he was caught taking pictures.

Meanwhile, the Nazis relied on antisemitic stereotypes to portray the ghettos as production facilities where "lazy Jews" were being taught to work.

The exhibition demonstrates the imbalance between the overpowering 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.

The Allies' photos served their own purposes

Another section of the exhibition is dedicated to the photos taken by Allied soldiers. As they liberated concentration camps, they documented the horrors of the Holocaust. Through their photos of piles of corpses, or of the extremely emaciated bodies of the survivors, the planned extermination of human lives could no longer be denied.

Harrowing and disturbing, the Allies' photos are naturally categorized as pictures taken by the "good guys." But it should still be noted that their photographs sometimes served their own purposes: Numerous images of people behind barbed wire fences at the Auschwitz concentration camp, waiting to be freed, 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 taint the documentary power of a historical photograph.

The Soviet Red Army photographer who took the shot, Yevgeny Khaldei, scratched off from the photo's negative one of the two wristwatches the soldier was wearing, as it was a sign of looting — and the liberators were not to be suspected of looting.

The Soviet news agency later added clouds of smoke to the shot, 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 view at the Museum of Photography through August 20, 2023.

This article was originally written in German.