Amazing photos of Nazi Germany by Hugo Jaeger using a Leica LTM??

[peterm1]

While these are interesting if chilling as a historical record of that era, on the subject purely of their photographic value I tend to agree that these appear to be for the most part competent but uninspiring official photos made for the purpose by someone who was most likely an offical photographer rather than a talented artist trying to provide an insight into the Nazi top echelon.

I would qualify this slightly in one case. The image that appears below apparently is a photo of Hitler together with Maria Reiter Kubisch with whom he is strongly reputed to have had a sexual dalliance. The same image turns up as image 9 in this series. I have also seen this same photo before at one other source at least. Interesting question as to how it could turn up in such a collection of "official" images although of course any relationship Hitler had was kept secret so the photographer would not have suspected and the image was probably taken at some semi official function.Here is a link to the photo on another site.

Say what you like about 'dolf he sure could attract the hotties. (A surprising number of whom attempted or succeeded in committing suicide so I am shocked to conclude that he was not a nice man.) 😉

http://www.ww2incolor.com/german_leadership/Maria+Reiter+Kubisch.html

An interesting aside. Another woman closely associated with Hitler (although not I think sexually) was Leni Riefenstahl the woman who made the film Triumph of the Will - a propaganda piece that is associated with the Nazi rise to power. What may be interesting to people on this site is that she was herself a very accomplished still photographer who survived the war and went on to make some excellent images.

 

[Roger Hicks]

. . . but associating the use of color film with "humanizing" or "making them more scary" is not up to the high standards of debate that I enjoy reading on this forum. . . .

Like you, I was puzzled by 'humanizing' because on the one hand it didn't seem to be the right word, while on the other, it did. Then I realized that they are 'humanizing' in the sense that while we associate B+W reportage with 'the past', we associate colour with 'the present', and what is disturbing is how like us the people in the pictures look: as Leonard Cohen said in "All there is no know about Adolf Eichmann", there are no oversize incisors or green saliva. Because the people in the pictures look very like the rest of us (apart from the comic-opera uniforms), this does point up a sort of common humanity, which contains in itself the seeds of a common inhumanity.

As many others have said, the Nazis were an illustration of the banality of evil, and as you point out (in a part of the letter I deleted in the interests of saving space, as everyone would have read it anyway) these are essentially banal pictures. Colour actually does make them more 'scary', simply by knocking down the barrier of 'safely in the past' and making them more immediate, more up-to-the-minute.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Roger Hicks]

been also wondering why Hitler and Nazis still create so much passion. dont think its the "we must keep on remembering it, so it wont happen again". what did people talk about before there was Hitler?

am fan of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and other Russian 1900'th century classics, and what do they include often their stories are incidents and persons of Napoleonic wars (least thats my impression). perhaps people are obsessed about the greatest human misery and devastation, until next historic events over shadow the previous ones? Second World War and everything that happened during those years is still the biggest misery to man (so far), and Hitler probably biggest culprit why the ball started rolling.

Yes. Read Zamoyski's account of Napoleon's Russian campaign and you soon come to the conclusion that the main thing which distinguished Napoleon from Hitler was the technology available to him. Plenty of people in the Grande Armée would have been more than at home in the most brutal extremes of the Gestapo or SS.

Admittedly, Napoleon wasn't obsessed with the destruction of the Jews, but there's not much else you can say in his favour.

Then again, I remember reading an account by the International Commission of Jurists (I think) which pointed out that while Hitler was responsible for the deaths of maybe 32,000,000 people, Stalin roughly doubled that, and Mao roughly doubled Stalin's total. And yet Mao's face still appears on banknotes...

R.

 

[Paul T.]

Very true. But it's always more acceptable to murder your own people than to kill foreigners.

I recently read Vassily Grossman's Life And Fate; it's a fantastic evocation of the presence of Stalin, and the Russian people's relationship with him; rather like the relationship with a psychopathic father, who nonetheless inspires filial affection. It's hard to disengage from that; I find myself hating Franco more than Stalin, and Franco merely murdered, what, 200,000?

Great photos, though. I think it's the combination of mundanity - and glamour. As David Bowie pointed out, Hitler had great marketing. Who's to say any of us wouldn't fall for it?

 

[LeicaTom]

It's spooky to see really detailed color shots of the of that period, seems like you can almost reach out and touch the horror and madness of it all, when I see stuff like this, the photos seem to date from 1937 to 1941 (I see images of the French campaign there, and some that might even be later like in 1941 in Russia?).

I think it's something that has to be shown publicly and constantly remembered, while if we forget about the terrible things the Nazi's did, it's bound to repeat itself in history, with some other crazy group with radical ideas........

Has anyone seen any places online with postwar color photos of Germany, in the aftermath of the war, shots of the destroyed Berghof (Hitler's House) or shots of the major cities taken with color film, by American or British military photographers?

Tom

 

[victoriapio]

Like you, I was puzzled by 'humanizing' because on the one hand it didn't seem to be the right word, while on the other, it did. Then I realized that they are 'humanizing' in the sense that while we associate B+W reportage with 'the past', we associate colour with 'the present', and what is disturbing is how like us the people in the pictures look: as Leonard Cohen said in "All there is no know about Adolf Eichmann", there are no oversize incisors or green saliva. Because the people in the pictures look very like the rest of us (apart from the comic-opera uniforms), this does point up a sort of common humanity, which contains in itself the seeds of a common inhumanity.

As many others have said, the Nazis were an illustration of the banality of evil, and as you point out (in a part of the letter I deleted in the interests of saving space, as everyone would have read it anyway) these are essentially banal pictures. Colour actually does make them more 'scary', simply by knocking down the barrier of 'safely in the past' and making them more immediate, more up-to-the-minute.

Cheers,

R.

Roger,
I had not thought about it in that way. In my years as a PJ I shot primarily Kodachrome and Tri-x, and didn't consider either "more humanizing" or "more scary". No doubt that is skewing my opinion. Today I am shooting black and white on an M9 so it's hard for me to relate to color making the images more immediate.
One other thing about the images; they are surprising to many here because they are exactly the kind of images the propaganda machine would produce and had no real "news value" per say. Hitler may not have personally killed a single person during the war but IF he had it would never have been allowed to be photographed because these events were done for propaganda and set up to produce these exact type of images. These images were produced to make Hitler and the German army look good, and yes to a certain extent, human.

 

[kossi008]

That was mere window dressing even at their very start - they had started out as one of the associated party of the extreme-right Freikorps paramilitaries, who had been engaged in coups and terrorist acts against socialist Post WWI governments (and French and British troops) in all German regions. There was absolutely nothing left about them or any of their allies.

Sorry, but I think you are referring to our modern (post-war) ideas of left- and right-wing politics. To people of the era, especially right-wing conservatives of all shades, the Nazis were left-wing.

 

[Keith]

What's with this 'humanizing' and 'looking human' rhetoric permeating parts of this thread?

They (the Nazis) were humans ... we are all humans!

Hitler may have been a psychopathic meglomaniac but he was as much a 'human' as any of us here ... like it or not!

 

[Rayt]

and Mao roughly doubled Stalin's total. And yet Mao's face still appears on banknotes...

R.

History depends greatly on who is telling it. Seems their version is quite different from yours. Given the lack of access to recent Chinese history even by her own people if there is Western bias for telling of tales we will never know.

 

[kossi008]

As many others have said, the Nazis were an illustration of the banality of evil [...]

Absolutely. And reading Klemperer's diaries ("I will bear witness") has tremendously helped me to understand how the scale of evil evolved over the years. The Nazis were quite smart to realize they couldn't just take the rights of the Jews (and others) away from one day to the other.

Rather, they did it in endless tiny steps over a span of 12 years, so people got used to it gradually, all the while backing this up with propaganda on how each step was justified and necessary to avert harm from the German Volk. And finally you find yourself all the way down that spiral of doom, when absolute atrocities have become commonplace.

 

[Roger Hicks]

History depends greatly on who is telling it. Seems their version is quite different from yours. Given the lack of access to recent Chinese history even by her own people if there is Western bias for telling of tales we will never know.

Highlight: very true.

But equally, even official Chinese sources set the number of deaths from the Great Leap Forward alone at 16.5 million, and you need to be quite a keen Mao apologist to argue that this was an underestimate.

In other words, their version is not really 'quite different': it's just a quibble about numbers. If one can call many million deaths a quibble.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Roger Hicks]

Roger,
I had not thought about it in that way. In my years as a PJ I shot primarily Kodachrome and Tri-x, and didn't consider either "more humanizing" or "more scary". No doubt that is skewing my opinion. Today I am shooting black and white on an M9 so it's hard for me to relate to color making the images more immediate. . . . . These images were produced to make Hitler and the German army look good, and yes to a certain extent, human.

That was pretty much my point. By the time colour was everyday, no-one thought twice about it. But because (pseudo) reportage from that era was so unusual in colour, it has a disproportionate impact and immediacy.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Paul T.]

Absolutely. And reading Klemperer's diaries ("I will bear witness") has tremendously helped me to understand how the scale of evil evolved over the years. The Nazis were quite smart to realize they couldn't just take the rights of the Jews (and others) away from one day to the other.

Rather, they did it in endless tiny steps over a span of 12 years, so people got used to it gradually...

THey are indeed a monumental piece of work, fascinating and horrifying.

There's another amazing work in the same vein, the Journal of Mihail Sebastian.

He was a Romanian, Jewish poet and playwright; his is an everyday story of writers' block, insecurity, creativity - but with the gripping backdrop of the advance of the Iron Guard, the nation's fascist party. And in this case, he knows his oppressors personally, unlike Klemperer he can debate with them, as other writers and academics sign up to the party for personal advancement. Finally you have the pogroms and then the ROmanian army going off triumphantly to... Stalingrad! So the insanity of it all is even more obvious here.

Sebastian's tale is all the more tragic in that Romania threw out the fascists once it was obvious the war was irredeemably lost - but he was run over by a car and killed, just at the point when he was looking forward to life after the war.

 

[nebraska]

been also wondering why Hitler and Nazis still create so much passion. dont think its the "we must keep on remembering it, so it wont happen again". what did people talk about before there was Hitler?

am fan of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and other Russian 1900'th century classics, and what do they include often their stories are incidents and persons of Napoleonic wars (least thats my impression). perhaps people are obsessed about the greatest human misery and devastation, until next historic events over shadow the previous ones? Second World War and everything that happened during those years is still the biggest misery to man (so far), and Hitler probably biggest culprit why the ball started rolling.

For me he causes a very strong response because of the horror he caused to my parents (not Jewish). I personally experienced what Germany was like in the second half of the forties. I will spare you the details. Those nicely pictured/shot people were all around us and suffered from a sudden onset of amnesia when the rotten difice collapsed in 45 and then begged my parents for character testimony during their de-nazification hearings. In addition, the abysmal ignorance about this period in the US,in particular, is very disconcerting - e.g. Obama as Hitler/socialist.

 

[nebraska]

Sorry, but I think you are referring to our modern (post-war) ideas of left- and right-wing politics. To people of the era, especially right-wing conservatives of all shades, the Nazis were left-wing.

You may want to look into the "money trail" that financed Hitler's propaganda machine before he came to power. Hitler played both political cards. What brought him to power were the right wing forces (finance, industry, etc.). The Night of the Long Knives which resulted in the assassination of Roehm and other SA leaders was Hitler's way of laying to rest the myth of him being on the "left" of the political spectrum.

 

[sevo]

Sorry, but I think you are referring to our modern (post-war) ideas of left- and right-wing politics. To people of the era, especially right-wing conservatives of all shades, the Nazis were left-wing.

No, there was no post war change in ideas of left- and right-wing positions, nor were the Nazis ever considered left wing by the general public or any relevant political group in Germany. There had been a few runaway leftists among the later Nazis, but the initial key members like Hitler, Himmler or Goering never were associated with the left. The core of what later would become the Nazis had already been part of the ultra-right militias in the unrest after WW I, long before they formed the party. Besides, Hitler got into power as part of a right wing coalition and with the help of the no less right wing president.

British conservatives (who mostly still had sided with Franco in the Spanish civil war) later tried to downplay their sympathies for Hitler, claiming that they can't possibly have helped him as he had been left wing all along, citing Oswald Mosley's zigzag path to fascism as evidence - but for one, Germany is not Britain, and even Mosley, who had flirted with the Labour Party before founding the British Union of Fascists, had originally started out as a Tory MP.

 

[semilog]

...and from the United States, Hitler was enthusiastically and materially supported by many on the right wing, including Henry Ford, Charles Lindberg, and Prescott Bush.

Never forget.

 

[hollandphotos]

...and from the United States, Hitler was enthusiastically and materially supported by many on the right wing, including Henry Ford, Charles Lindberg, and Prescott Bush.

Never forget.

If you study these people in detail you'll find that stating that he was enthusiastically and materially supported by them may be a bit of a stretch.

 

[elmer3.5]

Awesome, thanks for sharing! Sure this folk was colse to the inner circle...

Some days ago came to my knowledge that Hugo Boss designed and made the SA and SS uniforms, didn´t know that house was so old....nowadays soccer players and famous people pay huge amounts to use their garments...

Bye!

 

[Sparrow]

If you study these people in detail you'll find that stating that he was enthusiastically and materially supported by them may be a bit of a stretch.

History is often kind to powerful people, I think semilog's version is the more accepted view .... certainly here in the UK there were many Nazi supporters in the government, aristocracy and royalty, it was in fact a close run thing as to weather Churchill or Lord Halifax became the wartime leader