Germany and National Socialism

For half a century nobody was interested in them, twenty years ago the first ones appeared on the scene, since then they have been collected, scientifically evaluated, shown in exhibitions and published – the private, long forgotten snapshots taken by German soldiers in the Second World War. Petra Bopp has put some of them together, with annotation, in her exhibition catalogue, “Fremde im Visier – Fotoalben aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg”, (Strangers in Sight – Photo albums from the Second World War), published by Kerber Verlag, 2009. They are disturbing pictures that show a hitherto unseen side of the war – a collection of images that might well lead to a more realistic view of the war.

The Second World war was the first war ever to be so comprehensively photographed. According to conservative estimates between 30 and 40 million photos were taken in the duration of this war. Over two million negatives from the German propaganda companies have remained in tact, Great Britain has about three million photos from this period in its archives.

Curiosity and sensationalism

In the period between the wars industrial mass production turned the camera into an article of daily use, thus enabling millions of people to capture their impressions of the war for posterity. In the year 1939 about ten per cent of all Germans owned a camera, mainly due to the overtures issuing forth from the Ministry of Propaganda that had strongly supported amateur photography right from the start.

For the soldiers - and not only the Germans - the camera was not a weapon in the “war of images”, as it was for the professional photographers of the propaganda units, but was more an effective means of documenting their own experiences and perceptions. They photographed what they found interesting, strange, unusual, exciting, anything that aroused their tourist curiosity or triggered their craving for sensation, maybe even things that were impossible for them to grasp – and in the war there was certainly a lot of things that exceeded everybody’s imagination. They took photographs for all kinds of reasons and motives, but never because they had been ordered to or told to from above. In the end they took photographs to put both themselves and others in the picture about what was going on – in other words, to be able to remember later.

Many of these pictures made their way into photo albums, where, over the decades, they turned yellow – forgotten and hidden away because nobody wanted to be reminded of what happened. For quite some time now, however – to be more exact since the 1990s – people have started to dig them up again and exhibit them, publish them and simply look at them. Is it because they want to remember? Perhaps. Historians definitely are into remembering – especially those who have decided that these (amateur) photos are a historical source and are now trying to make them speak.

Documents of everyday life and barbarity

This volume of photos by Petra Bopp is an expression of the reversal in this trend towards suppressing the past. It is the result of a research project on private photos taken by the soldiers of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. The project started in 2004 at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg with backing from the German Research Foundation, and that was continued from April 2006 to December 2008 at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena with funding from the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture.

The photos that were selected from about 150 mostly privately owned albums do not give the viewers an idea of what the war was really like, but they do show how it was seen by German soldiers through the viewfinder of their cameras. The majority of the images are documents of everyday life, taken behind the front lines, at moments of relative peace and quiet. At the same time however they are also documents of violence and barbarity – especially when they depict the idyllic.

Above all they are nettlesome images that not only demand to be looked at, but also demand to be “read” – “read” in quite the literal sense. If you want to understand them, if you want to know what the picture is about, you often have to turn them over and read the words on the back or the caption beneath them in the album. The cover photo, for example, is one of these images. It shows a woman in a farmer’s wife overall and headscarf, possibly a peasant woman, who is in the process of wading through a shallow river; the sun is shining, a tree is reflected in the water. There is no hint of the violence that is actually inherent in the image, no hint of the danger in which the woman finds herself. When you look at the caption on the back, you read, “Clearing landmines ...” - and you are suddenly confronted with the full horror of internecine war.

Strangers photographing strangers

It is photos like this one that provoke the question – who were the people that took them, who were just following orders when they forced the woman, a so-called “Mine Detector No. 42”, into the river and were apparently not at all perturbed by the horror of the scene? Who were all those people who took all the other photos – some of them harmless, some of them not – and stuck them in albums and sometimes wrote a brief comment about them?

Seventy years after the beginning of the war this volume of photos does not only feature the Wehrmacht soldiers’ previously unknown observations of people and lands that are strange to us, but they also show us Germans who are strange to us; Germans who alienated themselves to us by taking such photos – photos of them posing as “members of the master race” having their shoes cleaned by children, photos of burning homes and remote stretches of water. They are strange to us because despite the ravages of war they were still able to sort and label photos for possible re-orders later, as if everything was hunky-dory!

It is often not just the pictures that appear strange, upset and shock us, but also the captions that help to explain them. For example, when they describe the graves of fallen soldiers as “heroes’ graves” or when the photo of a black soldier who has been taken prisoner is labelled with, “And HE is supposed to save French culture”. It is then that we realise just how powerful the ideology of the Nazis in many cases was – both in the way it influenced the choice of subject, as well as in the way it was perceived.

An “optical tank” in their campaign of conquest

No way should it be said that all the photos in this volume represent the Nazi view of the war. That in fact only applies to a small minority. Most of the photos, more often than not taken from a purely aesthetic point of view, simply show everyday life in the field, in the country and in the war-torn cities. Nevertheless there were others who were working towards a different end – the Wehrmacht soldiers who used photography as a means of denunciation and the photo albums as an ideological line of argumentation; who, with the aid of a “German camera”, strove to annexe everything, turning anything foreign into their own property, enabling them to wage their war of conquest on a media-technological level. They may not all have been Nazis, but they were quite obviously people who willingly answered the call of the propaganda.

One of the more outstanding qualities of this publication is the fact that it does not just show single photos, but whole series of related photos, along with the relevant explanatory – or in some cases, somewhat exalted - captions. In this way the viewer is not only able to understand the aesthetics of the image, but also its original context and the motive for taking the photo. Above all this approach has spawned strategies for “coming to terms with the past” (and the subjective construction of war memories) that extend well into the post-war period. One thing the volume quite definitely makes clear – national-socialist ideology had a greater effect on the thinking and awareness of many soldiers of the Wehrmacht than they would care to believe and which they suppressed for so many years.