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Photography as evidence of the HolocaustSybil MiltonPublished online: 19 Jan 2015.

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Photography as Evidence of the Holocaust Sybil Milton

The subject of photography as evidence of the Holocaust has a small but growing analytical literature. The following essay examines the routine administrative use of photographs by the German bureaucracy to register and identity ethnic minorities and prisoners, to document the construction of concentration camps, and to record the deportations of Jews and Gypsies. It will also discuss the selective usc of photographs in the censored German illustrated press about the creation of the early concentration camps, and also compare the work of exiled German and of non-German photographers with the German official photographic record.

Photography was a routine part of the extermination process in Nazi Germany. Mug shots of the soon-to-be dead were integrated into the process of killing at Hadarnar, Bernburg, Hartheim, and other German killing centres where the handicapped were gassed. Staff photographers hired by the offices ofT4, the headquarters of the so-called euthanasia operation located at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin, including Franz Rum, Franz Wolff, and Franz Suchomel, were assigned to take photographs of the patients 'for scientific reasons' and 'as diversion' before they were killed. 1

The German police similarly commissioned photo­graphs meticulously documenting the deportations of German Jews from Wurzburg, Bielefeld, Hanau, and many other German towns in late 1941 and mid-1 942, despite a general ban against photographing deportations. The Nuremberg Police President and Gestapo Chief, SS­Brigadier General Dr Benno Martin, ordered the Gestapo substation in Wurzburg to photograph the deportation of Jews from central Franconia to Riga on 26-27 November 1941 (figure 1). Two police sergeants, Balthasar Lutz and Hermann Otto, were ordered to report to their superior with camera equipment at 2:00p.m. on 26 November, and to be prepared to photograph 'the loading of ghetto baggage, the march to city hall [which served as the assembly centre for the deportation], in the hall itself, and if possible the procession to the train station'. 2

The same policemen also photographed the second deportation of Jews from central Franconia on 24 March 1942; this convoy went to Trawniki near Lublin. The third transport from central Franconia was filmed on 25 April 1942 by a Nuremberg cameraman, Richard Nickel. On police orders, the Wurzburg electricity company had

HISTORY Of PHOTOGRAPI-N, VolUME 2.."\, NUMBER 4, WINTER ]999

installed in advance a special 20 000-watt lighting system at the assembly centre to facilitate this filming. Enlarged photographic stills from the film were later exhibited in the windows of the Mainftiinkische Zeitung; afterwards the photos were returned to the Nazi party district office. The film was subsequendy lost, but texrual records about the fum and photographs surfaced early in 1949 in conjunction with the first large trial of the Nuremberg Gestapo before the District Court ofNuremberg-Furth.

We also have a fragmentary photographic record of the deportation transports in mid-May 1940 of 2800 German Gypsies to the General Government. Official photographs chronicle one of these transports: the departure of 500 Sinti Gypsies from the assembly centre at the Wurttemberg state prison Hohenasperg near Stuttgart. These elusive colour images present a deceptive veneer of normality, providing visual evidence of Raul Hilberg's thesis of 'survival by acquiescence', and are parallel to the orderly scenes of the WurzburgJcwish deportations.3

The sixteen colour slides, probably made by the German anthropolgist Adolf Wurth, are official photographs filed with the records of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit of the Reich Department of Health. Under the direction of Robert Ritter, the anthropologist in charge of all research on Gypsies, Wurth worked from 1936 to 1940 on the mandatory registration of German Gypsies implemented by this research unit. The professional staff of physicians, anthropologists, and genealogists, as well as contract photographers, prepared thousands of photos and slides in colour as well as in black and white of the German and Austrian Roma and Sinti. The photos were an important part of the project designed to register all Gypsies in the name of a 'criminal anthropology' based on racial prejudice. These anthropological registration photographs included mug shots, family and individual portraits, pictorial records of field research (taking cranial measurements or establishing eye colour), and scenes from overcrowded municipal Gypsy camps (Zigeunerlager). 4 The photographs were also used as illustrations in popular and academic publications. 5

Adolf Wurth, who received his doctorate in Berlin in 1936, was trained as an anthropologist and served as assistant to Professor Eugen Fischer, Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics.

ISSN 0308-7298/99 Cl 1999 Taylm & F=c;, Ltd. 303

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Figure 1. Police Sergeant Balthasar Lutz or Hennann Otto. Official police photos of the deportation of Wtirzburg Jews on 26 November 1941. The handwritten caption states: 'Exodus of the Children of Israel from beautiful Wiirzburg!' National Archives and Records Administration •. RG 238, NG 2421 .

He was hired by Ritter's research unit and his earliest publications stressed the parallel nature of the 'Gypsy and Jewish problems'.6 Wiirth had ready access to colour film and many of the more than 1500 surviving slides, glass plates, and photographs of Ritter's unit are in colour.7 In an interview with the geneticist and historian Benno Muller­Hill in the 1980s, Wiirth gave this account:

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I was asked to come to Sruttgart in May 1940. Five hundred Gypsies were in the Hohenasperg prison. I asked when I arrived: 'Where are they?' The answer came: 'In the cells.' I responded: 'Why not in the courtyard? Let them out; they won't jump over the walls.' They were then loaded onto a train for an unknown destination. At first they were told to get on in alphabetical order. I asked why they were doing it that way. I said that those who wanted to travel with each other should get into the next carriage, and so on. The official from the criminal police who accompanied the train told me later, when !looked him up in Sruttgart after the war, that the

train stopped in the middle of the countryside in the General Government .. .. 8

The deportation photographs of the transport described by Wurth show Sinti with their possessions, dressed in traditional clothing and standing close to each other surrounded by prison walls (figure 2). As they march from the prison past vineyards to the town and its train station, they are always guarded by uniformed armed police. The sequence of photographs also shows town residents, visible in doorways and on the main street, watching the column of deportees (figure 3).

Unofficial photographs made by amateur cameramen also contribute to our understanding of the violence of deportations. These photographs are different in style and content from the orderly deportations shown in the relatively large series ofWiirzburg Gestapo photographs. On 21-22 August 1942, Hubert Pfoch took four clandestine

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Photography as Holocaust Evidence

Figure 2. Possibly Adolf Wilrth, Deportation of German Sinti (Gypsies) from Hohenasperg prison near Stuttgart, mid-May 1940. Bundesarchiv, R 165.

Figure 3. Possibly Adolf Wilrth, Deported Sinti marching through the town of Hohenasperg; note residents of the town on right, mid-May 1940. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R 165.

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Image cannot be displayed for copyright reasons.Please note source of the image in the caption below.

Image cannot be displayed for copyright reasons.Please note source of the image in the caption below.

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Sybil Milton

Figure 4. Hubert Pfoch, Clandestine photo of deportation of Jews from Siedlce to Treblinka, 23 August 1942. Hubert Pfoch, Vienna.

photographs of the deportation of Polish Jews from Siedlce (located about 55 miles south of Warsaw), a station on the rail line to Treblinka. Pfoch's diary and four unique photographs became part of the evidence used in the 1965 Dusseldorf trial against Franz Stangl, the last commandant of Treblinka.9

Pfoch had been active in the Austrian socialist movement and had collected contributions for illegal charities such as 'Rote Hilfe'. In the summer of 1938, he had bicycled with two friends to take a look at the Dachau concentration camp. On his twenty-first birthday in late June 1941, he was drafted for service in Russia. In late August 1941, Pfoch returned home to recuperate from malaria; in August 1942, he was reassigned to his infantry company. Pfoch kept a secret diary and also had hidden a camera in his duffel bag. As the train transported his company to the front, Pfoch recorded the progress of their journey in his diary: 'Travelled via Moravska-Ostrava ... Katowice, through the entire Upper Silesian industrial region, on to Radom, Lukow, and Siedlce.' As his train stopped at the Polish train station Siedlce on the evening of 21 August 1942, Pfoch heard screams and shooting. He recorded his observation of events outside: 'It is late evening.... From time to time shots are fired. There is a freight train and a mass of people cowering on the railway embankment; 7000 Jews as I learn later. As one or another of them stands up, they are shot in the head, collapse, die.'

On the following day, 22 August, Pfoch's diary entry reads as follows:

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We pass close to the Jews. Then we stop. The freight train is on an adjacent track, a long platform, masses of people, eastern Jews, starved, ragged. They haven't received food or water for two days. Trucks with Jewish police arrive frequendy to cart the dead away. Gruesome and brutal scenes as Jews are loaded on catde wagons. One hundred and eighty Jews per car. Parents and children are separated in different cars; the Ukrainian guards are shooting constandy. After their train is loaded, there are cries for water from every train car .... On the trip to Treblinka, ... we catch up with the Jewish train. The stench of corpses is in the air, so that we find it hard not to throw up. Our train is adjacent to the Jewish transport at the next station. There are screams for water and guards shoot randomly at the Jews. I demand that our lieutenant intervene against the slaughter. He replies that he sees no chance to intercede successfully. We agree that three of us - the lieutenant, I, and a third soldier that I never saw again - will go to the officer in charge of the Jewish transport and protest against the massacre. Our reasons: we are travelling to the front and are demoralized by this inhuman behavior; since German soldiers cannot be expected to witness this spectacle, we demand that the executions cease. Our lieutenant has barely presented our protest before the SS officer screams that 'we Ostmark pigs should disappear as soon as possible, or he would add another train car, so that we could easily also travel to Treblinka' [Ostmarlt (Eastern March) was the official name for incorporated Austria]. Upset and with appropriate caution, I photographed the scene in front of us with my concealed camera. Four photos [figure 4], it was not possible to make more.10

The concentration camps were one of the central pillars of the Nazi system of terror. It is therefore important to understand the photographic record of these institutions. Although unauthorized photography was stricdy prohibited in the concentration camps, prisoners were sometimes able to take photographs and members of the SS took all manner of tolerated, but technically illegal, photographs. Moreover, official photographs supplemented the administrative record in virtually every concentration camp. The SS photographed the construction and architecture of the camp, made mug shots of arriving prisoners, recorded roll calls, work details, prisoners who committed suicide or were shot while attempting to escape, and sometimes even medical experiments.

In Auschwitz, SS Technical Sergeant Bernhard Walter, head of the Auschwitz identification service (Erkennungs­dienst), and his assistant, SS Corporal Ernst Hofmann, were the only staff authorized to carry cameras. Their studio and laboratory was located in Barrack 26 in Auschwitz I, the main camp, and their staff for printing and making enlarge­ments consisted of ten to twelve prisoners. The first Auschwitz photography laboratory was supervised by the political department, which reported to both the camp commandant and the Gestapo. 11

A second photographic unit at Auschwitz was established in late 1941 or early 1942 as part of the construc­tion department (Bauleitung). This second photo unit, directed by SS Corporal Dietrich Kamann, was responsible for documenting the building expansion at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II, better known as Birkenau. One album contained 400 photographs, mostly taken in 1943, the peak construction year at Birkenau, and documented the building of prisoner barracks, drainage ditches, storage facilities,

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Photography as Holocaust Evidence

Figure 5. Anonymous, A derelict munitions plant is rebuilt into Dachau concentration camp, 1933-37. Bundesarchiv Berlin, R2/28350.

workshops, gas chambers and crematoria, as well as other buildings. 12 Thirty of these photographs, showing the crematoria at Birkenau, were enlarged and exhibited openly in the entrance hallway of the Auschwitz central construc­tion office in January 1944. SS Private First Class Perry Broad of the political department commented in his postwar memoirs, written during his pre-trial detention in Poland:

The Central Construction Office was so proud of their achievement~ that they placed a series of pictures of the crematoria in the hall of their main building for everyone to sec. They had overlooked the fact that civilians, coming and going there, would be less taken with the technological achievement~ of the building section on seeing the enlarged photos of fifteen ovens, neatly arranged side by side; they would, instead be rather apt to ponder on the very doubtful contrivances of the Third Reich.

The photograph display was removed after one week on orders from SS Second Lieutenant Maximilian Grabner, head of the political department. 13

The following order, issued on 2 February 1943 by SS Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, clearly shows that the SS guards frequently took unauthorized private photographs: 'I am again stressing that taking photographs in the camp is prohibited. Violations will be punished with utmost severity'. 14 On 4 August 1942, Hoss had already forbidden photographing executions: 'Photographing executions is prohibited inside and outside Reich territory. It is not permitted to request that non­members of the Waffen SS photograph executions. Permission for making such official photographs can only be given by the local Gestapo chie£ All other photos made up to now are to be withdrawn from circulation and destroyed' .15 This injunction was repeated by Arthur Liebehenschel, Hoss's successor, on 8 March 1944, when he ordered the identification department 'not to make any more private photographs, except for required official passport photos' .16 These orders were clearly not obeyed and

unauthorized private SS photos remained in circulation. A possible explanation for the continued disregard of the prohibition to take unauthorized photographs might be SS voyeurism, as well as the desire of the SS to retain souvenirs of their work.

SS administrative photographs of the construction of Dachau concentration camp, covering the period from March 1933 to December 1937, are attached to an extensive report by the Munich SS administrative office (Verwaltungs­amt), dated 1 March 1938. The report provides an accounting of all building-related expenditures for the Reich Ministry of Finance and includes detailed charts, maps, budgets for every fixture and structure at the camp, and a constmction history ofDachau (figure 5).

A substantial number of photographs also survived from Mauthausen concentration camp; these were subsequently used as evidence in the proceedings of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. In Mauthausen as in other camps, photographic services were part of the identification department. Photographs were made by SS Staff Sergeant Paul Rieken, head of the identification department, and SS Staff Sergeant Fritz Kornatz. Rolls of film and negatives were later developed by the prisoners, notably by a Spanish Republican Franc;ois Boix, who was sometimes able to steal photographs for later use as evidence of the atrocities that had been committed. Boix, a Spanish news photographer who had fled to France after the Spanish Civil War, had fought as a volunteer in the French army until his capture in 1940. Subsequently deported to Germany, he spent the years from 1940 to 1945 as a prisoner at Mauthausen and its sub-camp Gusen. At Nuremberg, Boix documented SS brutality in his methodical testimony by precisely identifYing the photographs he had saved at Mauthausen. While testifYing about the murder of Soviet prisoners of war at Mauthausen, Boix stated: 'At that time, SS Oberscharfiihrer Paul Rieken, chief of the service, was there with his Leica taking pictures without stopping. He took about 48 pictures.

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Image cannot be displayed for copyright reasons.Please note source of the image in the caption below.

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Figure 6. Friedrich Franz Bauer, 'Morning roll call at Dachau concentra­tion camp'. Cover of Munchener 11/ustrierte Presse, 16 July 1933. Dachau Memorial Museum.

These I developed and five copies of each, 13 by 18 em [5 x 6.5 inches], with the negatives, were sent to Berlin. It is too bad I did not steal the negatives, as I did the others'. 17

Most of the photographs made at Buchenwald concen­tration camp were destroyed in an Allied air-raid. After liberation in April 1945, Eberhard Leitner, a former prisoner at Buchenwald, recorded the following information:

The photography department was conceived and operated mainly for the private use of the SS; in addition, it had the official function of providing identification. Out of the smallest, most primitive beginnings, it was expanded into a modem department. Its work detail had up to thirteen men, who were thus removed from war production. During the bombardment of August 1944, the entire photography department went up in flames, unfortunately destroying many valuable pictures.18

Official photography at the concentration camps was thus an integral part of the daily routine of camp administration. Another type of 'official' photography about the concentra­tion camps is found in the popular German illustrated press. After 1933, the Nazis used the censored press along with other mass media as part of a sophisticated communications arsenal to control, indoctrinate, and intimidate the German public. There was little pretence of objectivity, although there was an obvious need to cover topical stories. Accuracy

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was less important than immediacy, and illustrated photographic stories about concentration camps appeared as early as late spring 1933. Despite disinformation and propaganda, the German public knew about concentration camps from the first, albeit only through censored stories presenting these camps as orderly and wholesome rehabilia­tion centres, where political dissidents worked for their keep. The German press legitimized the camps, indoctri­nating their readers in compliant behaviour by the implied threat of incarceration for nonconformists. This reinforced public acquiescence and passivity in a police state and possibly contributed to tacit acceptance of the concentration camp system.

'A Visit to a Concentration Camp', published in the Deutsche fflustrierte Zeitung on 30 May 1933, was one of the first stories to appear. With a minimum of text, nine small photographs by an unidentified photographer outline the daily regimen at Oranienburg concentration camp in the suburbs of Berlin. From morning reveille at 5:30a.m., arrival and registration of new prisoners, postal censorship, labour in a carpentry workshop, callisthenics, to evening lecture time in dormitories, the notorious early Oranienburg camp is presented as an orderly and wholesome rehabilitation centre.19

Similarly, the new concentration camp at Dachau ouside Munich was the subject of two photographic stories

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in 1933. The first was published in Bayerischer Heimgarten on 22 June and the second in the Munchener Illustrierte Presse on 16 July. The first story contained eleven photographs by the local Dachau studio 'Foto Sessner', and the second story revealed 'The Truth about Dachau' in photographs by Friedrich Franz Bauer, an SS photographer assigned to coordinate liaison between the domestic press and Reinhard Heydrich's personal staff.20 Based on photographs taken during an official SS inspection tour of Dachau on 24 May 1933, Bauer's cover story features the more presentable aspects of an ostensibly model camp: well-fed prisoners marching to the mess hall, at work and at leisure. There were obviously no photographs of the beatings and murders that had already become routine during Dachau's first year of existence. Nevertheless, Bauer's frontispiece photo of 'morning roll call' (Friihappell im Erziehungslager) almost punctures the deceptive veneer of normality, revealing improvised and frayed prisoner clothing (figure 6). Although this photograph is familiar to historians, it is seldom seen in its full context as the front page of an illustrated newspaper that could be purchased at any news-stand in Germany or abroad. Bauer's photographs were republished in an expose about Dachau in the German Communist-exile magazine, Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) in March 1934.21 Focusing on the murder of incarcerated communist prisoners at Dachau, the same Bauer photographs published m a different context served as accusations rather than justifications.

The German illustrated press covered the first camps more intensely in 1933 than in later years. Thus photo stories about other early German concentration camps also appeared in the German regional press during the first year. The Hamburger Fremdenblatt of 4 June 1933 published a photographic supplement, 'Pictures from Wittmoor concen­tration camp', showing morning roll call, and protective custody prisoners digging peat bogs, and cultivating moors. The Wittmoor camp existed only briefly, from April to October 1933, and then merged with the Fiihlsbiittel concentration camp.22

Limited photographic coverage of the early camps continued until the 1936 Olympics in both the German illustrated press and German exile periodicals such as AIZ. Inside Germany, coverage decreased, since the domestic press faced censorship restrictions and exposes were not feasible. Moreover, press access for inspection and public relations visits to these camps was rigidly restricted. On 2 August 1933, SS leader Kurt Daluege, the chief of the Prussian State Police, issued new regulations about visits to concentration camps. These stipulated that 'press representa­tives are not to be permitted access to or inspection of concentration camps without explicit prior written permission', and that without such permission, 'photography and filming in the camps is prohibited, unless the camp administration needs it for administrative purposes'.23

Obviously these restrictions also applied to foreign photojournalists, although Edmond Taylor of the Chicago Daily Tribune did publish a story and photograph of his inspection tour of Heuberg concentration camp before these new regulations went into effect.24 Few American or British

Photography as Holocaust Evidence

newspapers included camp photographs in their coverage. The lack of independent photo-reports probably contributed to the gullibility of The New York Times Magazine on 14 February 1937 in reproducing photos and text by Friedrich Franz Bauer from his Illustrierter Beobachter story of 3 December 1936. In this instance, it reproduced Nazi propaganda without emendation or critical comment, either from ignorance or obtuseness. Previously, The New York Times had published relatively critical stories about the camps. After the 1936 Olympics, however, neither the German nor the foreign press carried major photo coverage of the concentration camps.

After 1939, German military photographers documented all aspects of the German victory. Building on prewar experiences, they used photographs made by propaganda units stationed in the Warsaw, Lublin, and Lodz ghettos in the illustrated German press. Once again, propaganda photos reinforced public indifference and inertia to the fate of the Jews.25 The systematic use of slanted photo-stories about the conscription of Polish labour and the registration in Salonika of Jews for forced labour are typical examples of the German use of photographs to indoctrinate.26 Thus the patterns established by censorship and press photography in Nazi Germany prior to the war continued until1945.

The last major photographic record of the concentra­tion camps was created in late 1944 and early 1945 as Allied troops encountered the last remnants of the vast German camp system. Allied military photographers were suddenly confronted with the realities of German criminality as they saw the dead and the dying in hundreds of former concen­tration and labour camp~. 27 The opening of the Majdanek concentration camp and killing centre by Soviet troops in late July 1944 marked the beginning of massive systematic photographic coverage; Soviet reports, however, lacked timely distribution and were usually not corroborated by the direct experiences of the Western liberating armies until nearly ten months later.Z8 In 1944, isolated individual Soviet photographs from the KJooga concentration camp in Estonia, showing a pyre of prisoner corpses left behind by the retreating Germans, and macabre architectural photographs by western Allied military photographers entering deserted concentration camps at Breendonck in Belgium and Natzweiler in eastern France lacked context for most Western readers. This changed in the spring of 1945 with widespread international media coverage of the liberation of the concentration camps inside Germany.29

The extensive photographic record created by American and British military photographers in the liberated camps was also used for re-education in occupied Germany and as an integral aspect of war crimes analysis. The well­known photographs of General Dwight David Eisenhower inspecting the carnage of liberated Ohrdruf on 12 April 1945 reveal the presence of Army photographers probably taking official as well as personal photographs (figure 7). Although ubiquitous, individual Army photographers were generally unknown to the public since they were seldom given individual credit for their photographs, unlike their more celebrated press counterparts: Lee Miller at Dachau

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Sybil Milton

Figure 7. US Army Signal Cozps, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and American soldiers view liberated Ohrdruf concentration camp, 12 Apri11945. Several soldiers on the far right are photographing the event. Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas.

and Buchenwald for British Vogue; Margaret Bourke-White for Life at Buchenwald; David Scherman at Dachau; George Rodger at Bergen-Belsen; William Vandivert at Gardelegen; and john Florea at Nordhausen.30

Two of the most famous Life photographs of the massive atrocities found in the liberated camps were in all probability 'designed' for visual impact: George Rodger's neatly dressed small Dutch Jewish boy walking past a row of corpses at Bergen-Belsen and Margaret Bourke-White's print from liberated Buchenwald of a truck symmetrically stacked with alternating toes and heads of corpses.31

Whether staged or not, these photographs reflect a symbolic reality that enable us partly to understand the enormity of the Holocaust. Rodger later explained it as follows: '... l discovered that I could look at the horror of Belsen - the 4000 dead and starving lying around - and think only of a nice photographic composition. I knew something had happened to me, and it had to stop'. Similarly, Bourke­White reported her reaction as follows: 'It is a peculiar things about pictures of this sort. It is as though a protecting screen draws itself across my mind and makes it possible to consider focus and light values and the technique of photography, in as impersonal a way as though I were

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making an abstract camera composition. This blind lasts as long as it is needed - while I am actually operating the camera. Days later, when I developed the negatives, I was surprised to find that I could not bring myself to look at the fthns'.32

The systematic reconstruction of the history of the concentration camps depends, in part, on a more sophisti­cated analysis of the surviving photographic record. The SS officers and managers who administered the camps used photography as part of their administrative routine, including presentation albums to superiors as well as individual photographs attached to their routine reports. This photographic record has been fragmented since 1945. Some photos, often not in their original sequences, are found in the archives of the camp memorials erected at the original sites; there these images are invaluable for the archaeological preservation of the former camps as memorial museums. Other photographs, elusive and disembodied, are found in isolated files of the German administrative agencies to which the camps reported; that is, the ftles of the interior and labour ministries, the Central Office for Reich Security, and the Inspectorate of the Camps, now usually housed at national and state archives in Germany. Many photographs

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were destroyed as the war ended and as perpetrators attempted to destroy tangible evidence of their complicity in crimes. Some photographs were captured by the Allies armies, and others were removed as souvenirs by Allied soldiers. Some pictures were removed to be appended to Allied war crimes trial records. Furthermore, the sequence and chronology of many original concentration camp photos are suspect, since many loose photos were reassembled by German archives in photo albums after the war. After liberation, the Allied armies themselves also created a photographic record of the camps. This new record included the forensic photographs by Allied war crimes investigators, seeking to exhume and explain the crime scenes that confronted them.

Still, huge gaps remain in the photographic record. It is thus virtually impossible to find the full photographic record of any concentration camp. For this reason, the surviving photos are an especially important documentary source for the historian. But historians must be careful; they must analyse photos as carefully as they evaluate textual records. Since the camera does not record events in a neutral or value-free way, historians must consider the setting of the photograph, the motives of the photographer, and the provenance of the photo.

Notes

l. See Henry Friedlander, The Origins '![Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press 1995, 239-40. The excerpted quotations are from the testimony of Viktor Brack in United States Military Tribunal, Official Transcript of the Proceedings in Case I, United States v. Karl Brandt et al. (Medical Case), 7644-45; and Ernst Klee, 'Tot und seziert: Bilder eines Albums und die Schrecken', Die Zeit (10 May 1984), 24.

2. See Sybil Milton, 'Images of the Holocaust, Part II', Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 1:2 (1986), 194 and 203-10; Herbert Schultheis and Isaac E. Wahler, Bilder und Akten der Gestapo Wurzburg uberdie]udendepor­tationen 1941-1943, Bad Neustadt a.d. Saale: Rotter Druck und Verlag 1988, 8, 34, 41-42, and 51. Quote in Herbert Schultheis, ]uden in Mainfranken 1933-1945, Bad Neustadt a.d. Saale: Max Rotter Verlag 1980,543.

3. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction '![the European jews, New York: Holmes and Meier 1985, 26--27.

4. See Sybil Milton, 'Antechamber to Birkenau: The Zigeunerlager after 1933', in The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the Reexamined, eds Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1998, 387-400.

5. Such publications include: Heinrich Wilhelm Kranz, 'Zigeuner, wie sie wirklich sind', Neues Volk 5:9 (September 1937), 21-27; Sophie Ehrhardt, 'Zigeuner und Zigeunermischlinge in Ostpreuflen', Volk und Rasse 17:3 (1942), 52-57; and Eva Justin, 'Die Rom Zigeuner', Neues Volk 11:5 (1943), 21-24, with photographs by Karl Morawek.

6. See, for example, the following pronouncement: 'The Gypsy question is for us today primarily a racial question. Thus, the national socialist state will basically have to settle the Gypsy question just as it has solved the Jewish question. We have already begun. Jews and Gypsies have been placed on equal footing in marriage prohibitions in the regulations for implementing the Nuremberg laws for the Protection of German Blood. The Gypsies are not of German blood nor can they be considered related to German blood.' Adolf Wurth, 'Bemerkungen zur Zigeunerfrage und Zigeunerforschung in Deutschland', Verhandlungen tier deutschen Gesellschaji for Rassenforschung, Sonderheji des A nthropologischen Anzeiger Stuttgart 9 (1937-38), 92. Unless otherwise noted, all transla­tions are my own.

7. The slides and photographs arc in the Bundesarchiv (Berlin and Koblcnz) in record group R165. The photographs of the Zigeunerlager carry precise dates and localities; the portraits are, however, unlabelled except for the mug shots and police identification photographs made at the time of arrest or deportation.

Photography as Holocaust Evidence

8. Benno Miiller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection '![Jews, Gypsies, and Others; Germany 1933-1945, trans. George R. Fraser, Oxford, New York and Tokyo: Oxford University Press 1988, 345.

9. For Stangl, see Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness, New York: McGraw Hilll974, ISS-59 and 192-93.

I 0. Courtesy Hubert PCoch, Vienna. The diary excerpts were published in Franz Hiesel, Im Strom tier Zeit: Hubert l'foch, Beschreibungs eines Ottakrin­gers zu seinem 70. Geburtstag, Vienna: Dokumentationsarchiv des osterrei­chischen Widerstandes, 1990, 22-23.

II. Teresa Swiebocka, ed., Auschwitz: A History in Photographs, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993, 34-45.

12. The Central Construction Office (Zentralbauleitung) photo albums are in the archives at Yad Vashcm, Jerusalem. See also Ute Wrocklage, 'Architektur zur "Vernichtung durch Arbeit": Das Album der "Bauleitung der Waffen-SS und Polizei Konzentrationslager Auschwitz"', Fotogeschichte 14:54 (1994), 31-43.

13. 'Reminiscences of Perry Broad', in KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS: Hoss, Broad, Kremer, eds Jadwiga Bezwinska and Danuta Czech, New York: Howard Fertig 1984, 184-85.

14. Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum Archives: Kommandanturbe-fehle, no. 4/43, item 3 (2 February 1943), vol. 2, 117.

15. Ibid.: Kommandanturbefehle, no. 13/42 (4 August 1942), vol. 1, 2. 16. Ibid.: Standortbefehle, no. 9/44 (8 March 1944), vol. 2. 17. For Boix's (born Barcelona, 1920 - died France, late 1960s)

testimony on 28-29 January 1946, see Trial '![the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, 42 vols, Nuremberg, 1947-49, vol. 6, 263-78, quotation on 275. The photographs tbat Boix saved are located in the National Archives and Records Service (NARA), Overseas Commands, Record Group 338, Records of USAREUR, War Crimes Branch, War Crimes Case Files 1945-49, Cases Tried, Case 000-50-5.

18. David Hackett, trans. and ed., The Bucheflwald Report, Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Wesrview Press 1995, 131.

19. 'Besuch im Konzentrationslager', Deutsche Illustrierte Zeitung (30 May 1933), 4.

20. Dachau Memorial Museum Archives: H. Larcher, 'Ein Gang durch das Konzentrationslager Dachau', Bayerischer Heimgarten 25 (22 June 1933), 170-73, with II photos by Sessner Foto-Studio in Dachau; and 'Die Wahrheit iiber Dachau', Munchener lllustrierte Presse 10:28 (16July 1933), 850-56. Today, sixty-five years later, Foto Scssner provides photographic services for researchers at the Dachau Memorial Museum. See also Sybil Milton, 'Argument oder Illustration: Die Bedeutung von Fotodokumenten als Quelle', Fotogeschichte 8:28 (19RR), 60-90; and idem, 'Die Dedeutung von Photodokumente als Quelle', Revue d'Allemagne 27:2 (April-June 1995), 175-86.

21. 'Dachau, wie es in Wirklichkeit ist', AIZ (Prague edition) 13:9 (I March 1934). See Detlef Hoffinann, 'Fotografierte Lager: Oberle­gungen zu einer Fotogeschichte deutscher Konzentrationslager', Fotogeschichte 14:54 (1994), 3-20.

22. Willy Klawe, '1m iibrigen hemcht Zucht und Orrlnung ... ': Zur Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Wittmoor, Hamburg: VSA Verlag 1987, 16, 21, 28, 45, and 58.

23. Quoted in Erich Kosthorst and Bernd Walther, Konzentrations- und Strajgtfangenenlager im Ems/and 1933-1945: Zum Verhiiltnis von NS­Regime utul Justiz; Darstellung und Dokumentation, DUsseldorf: Droste 1985, 57. See also Sybil Milton, 'Die Konzentrationslager der drcifligcr Jahre im Bild der in- und ausl~ndischen Presse', in Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, and Christoph Dieckmann, eds, Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: Entwicklung und Struktur, vol. 1 Publikationsreihe der Gedenkstatte Buchenwald, Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag 1998, 135-47.

24. Edmond Taylor, 'Eyewitness View of Prison Life in Germany: Tribune Man Visits Large Camp', Chicago Daily Tribune (7 Aprill933), 1 and 12; a photograph of Heuberg concentration camp was printed in the same newspaper on 2 July 1933, 3.

25. Ulrich Keller, ed., The Warsaw Ghetto in Photographs, New York: Dover 1984; Joe J. Heydeckcr, Where is Thy Brother Abel? Documentary Photos'![ the Warsaw Ghetto, Sao Paulo 1981; Dieter Reifarth and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, 'Die Kamera der Tater', in Vernichtungskri£g: Verbrechen der Wehnnacht 1941-1944, eds Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition HIS Verlag 1995, 475-503; and Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel, 'Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Photos', Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998), 265-93. Also see Alex Rossino's essay in this issue of History '![Photography.

26. Christa Rotzoll, 'Ostarbeiter: Im Lager und in der Fabrik', Das Reich (21 November 1942); and 'Juden-Musterung in Saloniki', Donauzeitung (Delgrade) (26 July 1942), 3.

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Sybil Milton

27. Sybil Milton, 'Confronting Atrocities', in Liberation 1945, Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 1995, 55-70.

28. 'Lublin Funeral', Life 17:9 (28 August 1944), 34; and Illustrated London News (14 October 1944).

29. John Hersey, 'Prisoner 339, Klooga', Uft 17, no. 18 (30 October 1944), 81-82. See also Susan D. Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat, New York: Basic Books 1989, 155-247; George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experiences during World War II, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1993; John Taylor, War Photography: Realism in the British Press, London and New York: Roudedge 1991; and Frederick Voss, Reporting the War:

312

The joumalistic C<Mrage of World War II, Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallety - Smithsonian Institution Press 1994.

30. 'War Photographers', Life (11 May 1945), 97 If. and 'The German People', Life (7 May 1945), 32 If.

31. Life: The First Decade, 1936-1945, Boston: New York Graphic Society 1979, 169 (Rodger) and 171 (Bourke-White). See also Dagmar Bamouw, Germany 1945: Views of War and Viokna, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1996, 71-83.

32. Jane Carmichael, 'George Rodger: Gendeman, Traveller, Photographer', in Imperi41 War Museum Rl'View 9 (1994), 12-14; Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography, New York: Harper & Row 1986,247.

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