Photographing the Holocaust, Photographing the Real

I've always wondered about the idea that photographs are not real. I would rather not take the line that photographs lie. They don't. People lie.

Photographs are very real, though beneath those little pixels or grains of the image are contained the realities of how they were made, modified and distributed (the indexicality of the photograph points in multiple directions).

There may very often be some dishonesty involved in all of that making, modification and distribution, but that is all part of the photographic story. It's not just the image that matters. The picture might be staged, or manipulated, or captioned with an untruth, but that dishonesty is still real and it's part of life. It's all real.

Anyway. I don't think there is anything more real than what the pictures on this post show, the way they were made, and the history they are part of. And I think that the story of how these pictures were made, and how other pictures were made during the Second World War, by people on all sides, are brutally revealing of the multiple functions of photography in all its forms - as accusation and evidence and defiance (in these pictures), but as much, much more besides; pseudo-science, identification, propaganda, as a mark of humanity, of inhumanity, as a trophy, a souvenir, and ultimately, and most brutally, as a marker of life or death.

These pictures are some of the secretly taken pictures of bodies being burnt at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 (the crematoria were so busy burning bodies that day that additional pyres were set up outside the ovens), and of women running towards the gas chambers.

The people who took the pictures were sonderkommando, prisoners detailed to work around the crematoria. This is an extract from Janina Struk's Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence.


Somewhere about midway through 1944, we decided to take pictures secretly to record our work… From the very beginning, several prisoners from our Sonderkommando were in on my secret: Szlomo Dragon, his brother Josek Dragon, and Alex, a Greek Jew whose surname I do not remember… Some of us were to guard the person taking the pictures. In other words, we were to keep a careful watch for the approach of anyone who did not know the secret, and above all for any SS men moving about in the area… 

We all gathered at the western entrance leading from the outside to the gas-chamber of Crematorium V… Alex, the Greek Jew, quickly took out his camera, pointed it towards a heap of burning bodies, and pressed the shutter… Another picture was taken from the other side of the building, where women and men were undressing among the trees. They were from a transport that was to be murdered in the gas-chamber of Crematorium V.






Read more here.

Why Don't We Believe in Newspapers Anymore?

Mail Online Screenshot

I read Janina Struk's book Photographing the Holocaust: Interpreting the Evidence over Christmas. It was a really interesting perspective on images that we take for granted, on history that we take for granted.

And then I reread this article by Fred Ritchin in Time on the social contract of viewing photographs and the mass of photographs that are currently made. It starts like this.

During the last century, photographs of mass murder in Nazi Germany, Argentina, Cambodia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia seared the civilized conscience with their revelations of barbarity. Some of the more irrefutable images were the most clinical, eschewing the empathy of the documentary observer while cataloging the horrors as a form of record-keeping, leaving it to the viewer to arrive at the moral calculus of each atrocity.

It's a great point to make, but even with the most horrific images, people don't always respond to pictures in the way they are supposed to. They never have. Compassion fatigue is nothing new and often it is shaped not so much by the images but by the places they are published, by the way they are framed. The moral compass has never pointed straight.

In her book, Struk talks about how holocaust images and films were shown in London at the end of the Second World War. Reactions to the images varied; 'In a Mass-Observation report, made to assess the response to atrocity films, one person who did not intend to see them said: 'I'm beginning to get fed up with all these pictures in the papers. I know it's very terrible and I was as horrified as anyone at the beginning... I do think they've overdone it... I mean you keep on looking at dead bodies heaped on top of each other - you just get used to it. Just as you get used to the idea of death all through the war.''

Ohter people felt disgusted not just with the photographs, but with the people in them for their grey skin and emaciated bodies. 'Such views,' writes Struk, 'may have been exaggerated by the dehumanizing way in which those liberated in the camps were often described in the press: 'pitiful specimens', 'the living dead', 'ape-like living skeletons', 'skeletons held together with rags', ' wrecks of humanity'.

People were often confused by the context in which the newsreels of the atrocities were shown; as a prelude to a Donald Duck film or as a short clip. One Mass-Observation respondent said, 'though the film is terrible, it's very short - too short to be properly convincing and of course you know quite well that the worst shots have been cut out. And then it's followed up by a Walt Disney, and that sort of removes any impression it made; people are laughing again within a minute. And it's all mixed up with a propaganda film about Noble London and how wonderful Londoners were in the Blitz, and that makes you feel the whole show really only is propaganda.'

So not everyone was shaken to their boots by these terrible images. They weren't shaken because the pictures were dehumanising, because the journalism that accompanied them was dehumanising, because they were shown in a context where they were surrounded either by entertainment or propaganda. Or maybe even because the publications in which they appeared shared, in some small way, the sense that these people who had been so callously killed were essentially foreign - they were regarded as Jews or Russians or Gypsies or Communists or Poles or.... pretty much anything except Western European (and this is a point Struk makes in the book).

And perhaps these same reasons are why photographs of atrocities today do not touch us in the way we think they should; because for them to touch us, the people they show need to be made real, they need to live and breathe and laugh and cry, they need to be about people who have lives we can understand. They need to be shown in media in which dehumanisation, stereotyping and war-mongering does not take place. They need to be shown in an appropriate context in publications that are free from propaganda and bias.

screenshot from Der Spiegel

And I don't think there are too many publications that can make that claim.

So maybe the problem isn't so much with the mass of photographs that are made as Ritchin suggests, but with the publications that show them. So instead of saying, Why Don't We Believe in these Pictures anymore, maybe we should ask Why Don't We Believe in these Newspapers Anymore? or Why Don't We Believe in these Broadcasters Anymore?

And Struk already answered that.

Photographing the Holocaust: Interpreting the Evidence is a really interesting book. Buy it at your local bookshop. 

The Good, the Bad and the Pervy: Nazis then and Now

From East Germany back to the Second World War and Nein Onkel, the Archive of Modern Conflict's collection of images of German soldiers from 1938-1945. It was published in 2007, but what the heck, it all connects so I'll write about it now.

These pictures go in a sunrise to sunset formation, and feature German soldiers (Luftwaffe, Panzer troops, Afrika Corps and Flak regiments all figure) having fun most of the time.

These are not conflict photographs then. When we see them riding a donkey or standing in a field full of flowers, it's more Dad's Army or the Sound of Music than Come and See or Saving Private Ryan. Except for the guy who's pictured passed out with a bowl full of spew in front of him. Captain Von Trapp it is not.

The stereotype of Germans in films has often been analysed (and no better than here). There's the Man of Culture German (he's not really a Nazi), the Shouty German (Definitely a Nazi), the Pervy German (definitely a Nazi - also see Herr Lipp) and the organised German (can go both ways).

Nein Onkel adds a couple more categories to this list - the Fun Guy, the Family Man and the Farming German are three additions you could have. And even though there a few Swastikas in there, the Nazi side of things is underplayed - there are, quite deliberately I would guess, no SS or Gestapo because, even if they did run sack races or get dressed in ladies' frocks, there's really no getting away from the fact that they did terrible things. We've all seen too many films to know that is not the case.

Which of course ties into the postwar division of Germans into the Evil Nazis and the Germans who Didn't Know Anything soldiers. The idea was unlikely but promoted so that things could be swept under the carpet and Germany be allowed to flourish safe in the knowledge that it was only a few people who were responsible for the atrocities.

Well of course that wasn't the case, but by showing these Germans doing things we (or I, here in the UK) are more accustomed to seeing British or American soldiers doing, the book raises the question that if the Germans look like the Americans or Brits and we know that beneath that sack-racing veneer the Germans did terrible things, what terrible things did our side do?

Buy the book here.

Read another review of the book here. 

Sans Souci,soldiers and Hitchcock

Here's a picture of my uncle at Sans Souci in Potsdam, Germany in 1936.

Sans Souci means without a care and  is also the name of a book by Christian Boltanski (he's the partner of Annette Messager whose Voluntary Tortures featured here a few weeks back).

Sans Souci features pictures of German soldiers relaxing - visually they are without a care in the world. It's an album kind of book, complete with glassine sleeves. The pictures were picked up at flea markets with key images selected to make up the final album.

The strangeness of the album is seeing German soldiers at play. The album  is a kind of counter balance to the Kuleshov Effect. The Kuleshov Effect states that when you see one picture it affects how you interpret the next one. Hitchcock exemplified it best with his Nice Man/Dirty Old Man examples.

The first sequence goes: 1.  Look there's Hitch, 2.  Look there's a nice lady with a baby, 3. Look there's Hitch, he's being kind and thoughtful. What a nice man! Ahhh!

The second sequence goes: 1. Look there's Hitch,  2. Look there's a lady in a bikini, 3. Look there's Hitch, letching after the lady in the bikini like the dirty old fecker that he is! Disgusting!

That's the theory anyway, but I think he looks homicidal and lecherous in the first one and then lecherous in the second one. Which still proves the point.

So the Sans Souci pictures of Nazis at play works in the same way, but there's a counterbalance. We see people in German army uniforms, so we are geared up to see atrocities and death. But that doesn't come.

That's the basic operation of Sans Souci; pictures that defy expectations. In Private Pictures, Janina Struk (and thank you Mr Fox for recommending it to me)  describes audience reactions to an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum of German soldiers pictures that were taken during the occupation of the Netherlands.

In 2007, these everyday pictures were interpreted by the audience as a 'homage', connections were made not only to the Holocaust but also to the war in Iraq and American propaganda. Struk writes that 'Some said they portrayed the humanity of war while others said they protrayed its cruelty. One elderly Dutch visitor looked at the photographs and began to weep and rushed outside. No one knew what he had seen in those seemingly innocuous pictures.'

The picture at the top of the page is of my uncle, but it's from an album from the 1930s. So there are people in army uniforms, there are swastikas and there are Nazi salutes. Which changes the meaning of just about every picture in the album and makes it hard to untangle.

But untangle it I must. That is my challenge. So my latest book purchase is Sans Souci. I'm looking forward to its arrival.

Belarus, Nazis and Psalm 82/2

pictures above from 82, published by AMC

Martin Toft wrote about walking to war earlier this week which connected to Michal Iwanowski's recreating the walk his grandfather did at the end of the Second World War; a walk that went through Russia, Belarus and Lithuania before he reached his devastated homeland of Poland.

Mention Belarus and it automatically makes me think of the Greatest War Film Ever Made (GWFEM), Come and See. I wrote about Come and See here, it's a brutal tale of a young partisan's walk through the murder and devastation of a country where the policy of extermination went on beyond the camps.




Janina Struk writes about what happened in Belarus (and beyond) in her excellent book, Private Pictures, Soldiers' Inside View of War. She talks about the post-war erasing of memory, the simplification and shrinkage of events into the Holocaust and what happened in the camps and the way in which large parts of the Wehrmacht were absolved from all responsibility as though war crimes only happened in the camps and nowhere else.

This was a result of the Nuremberg war trials. Once the leading Nazis were imprisoned. writes Struk, '...a clear distinction was made between crimes committed by the Nazis and the millions of soldiers who had fought an 'honourable' war. Historian Omar Bartov wrote: 'If the initial purpose (of the tribunals) had been to punish and purge, the ultimate result was to acquit and cover up.''

Struk also writes about the War of Extermination exhibition that toured Germany in the late 1990s and  challenged the myth of the honourable war fought by the regular Wehrmacht soldier and how this shook people out of their comfort zones.

Interestingly, Struk extends the argument and describes how these images could be seen as a wider narrative on war and the use of images, that abuse extends into different wars and conflicts and images such as the Abu Ghraib pictures of 2004 share a family resemblance to those of Jews being persecuted in Europe in the 1940s ( and here's a video of anti-semitism in contemporary France).

She also notes that the reaction of the American authorities to the Abu Ghraib pictures - to prosecute those who took and posed in the photographs, was not so different to the reaction of the Nazi authorities to those who took pictures of atrocities in the Second World War: she mentions the case of  Max Täubner, an SS officer who was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in 1943 not for killing Jews, but for photographing their deaths.

The pictures that Täubner took could have appeared in the two volume set  82, published by AMC.

The book is in two parts, both of which feature the private pictures that Struk writes about, the pictures of people directly involved in the events portrayed. 82/1 looks at the material loss of the war; burned out houses and crashed planes. 82/2 looks at the human loss of the war, the humiliations and atrocities, the death, the imprisonment, the violence waiting to be unleashed. Sometimes, the people portrayed (most often Eastern Europeans, Russians or Jews) are shown smiling or giving Nazi salutes

The backs of the pictures are also included (as with Melinda Gibson's great book - it just keeps on getting better and better) so giving the pictures a sense of location.

82 is edited by David Thomson and presents the pictures as they are. The backs of the pictures aside, there is no text so you have to draw your own conclusions and make your own narrative. And as Struk shows, maybe that's not as simple as might first appear.

And the title of the book. There are a couple of psalms, the second of which in particular connects to both the images and the idea that the complexities of war cannot be reduced to polarities of Good and Evil, Wehrmacht and SS, Allies and Axis, West and East.

So maybe the message of the book, and it's volume titles, is not to isolate and demonise what is so obviously evil, but instead to look into our own hearts and question our own behaviour.

A few years back, you would always see banners at World Cup matches reading John 3:16 which refers to eternal life and Jesus. Which is a bit religious for my liking. 82/2 is good for anyone/anywhere. anywhere.


Psalm 82/1: 

God presides in the great assembly; he renders judgment among the “gods”

Psalm 82/2

How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?  Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;  maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.