The Holocaust was the primary mass atrocity to be closely photographed.
The mass manufacturing and distribution of cameras within the Thirties and Nineteen Forties enabled Nazi officers and odd individuals to extensively doc Germany’s persecution of Jews and different spiritual and ethnic minorities.
I co-direct a world analysis undertaking to gather each accessible picture documenting Nazi mass deportations of Jews, Roma and Sinti, in addition to euthanasia victims, in Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1945. Essentially the most lately found collection of pictures might be unveiled on Jan. 27, 2025 – Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Typically, these are the final photos taken of Holocaust victims earlier than they had been deported and perished. That reality provides the undertaking its identify, #LastSeen.
A number of of the photographs we’ve tracked down had been taken by Jewish individuals, not Nazi officers, providing a uncommon glimpse of Nazi mass deportations from a sufferer’s perspective. As descendants of survivors assist our researchers establish the deportees in these pictures and inform their tales, we give beforehand faceless victims a voice.
Jewish Germans assemble for deportation in Breslau, Germany, in November 1941.
Courtesy of Regional Affiliation of Jewish Communities in Saxony, Germany, CC BY-SA
A rising archive
The #LastSeen undertaking is a collaboration between a number of German educational and academic establishments and the USC Dornsife Middle for Superior Genocide Analysis in america. When it started in late 2021, researchers knew of some dozen deportation pictures of Jews from 27 German cities that had been gathered for a 2011-2012 exhibition in Berlin.
After contacting 1,700 private and non-private archives in Germany and worldwide to seek out extra, #LastSeen has now collected visible proof from 60 cities and cities in Nazi Germany. Of those, we’ve analyzed 36 collection containing over 420 pictures, together with dozens of never-before-seen picture collection from 20 cities.
Most pictures of Nazi mass deportations from native archives revealed in our digital atlas had been taken by the perpetrators, who documented the occasion for the police or municipality. That has closely formed our visible understanding of those crimes, as a result of they show victims as a faceless mass. When people had been depicted, it was most frequently by means of an antisemitic lens.
The LastSeen digital atlas exhibits areas of deportations the place visible documentation has been uncovered.
Screenshot, LastSeen, CC BY-SA
We’ve got, nevertheless, obtained a handful of pictures taken from a sufferer’s perspective. In January 2024, the #LastSeen workforce shared newly found pictures exhibiting the Nazi deportations in what was then Breslau, Germany – right now Wroclaw, Poland.
They had been despatched to us for evaluation by Steffen Heidrich, a workers member of the Regional Affiliation of Jewish Communities in Saxony, Germany, who got here throughout an envelope titled “miscellaneous” whereas reorganizing his archive. It contained 13 deportation pictures – the final pictures taken of dozens of Jewish victims earlier than they had been transported from Breslau to Nazi-occupied Lithuania and massacred in November 1941.
Jewish resistance
Many of those photos on this collection present a big, combined age group of women and men sporting the yellow star – the infamous Nazi-mandated signal for Jews – gathering exterior with bundles of their belongings. Some are taken from a peculiar angle, from behind a tree or a wall, suggesting they had been snapped clandestinely.
Individuals ready for deportation in Breslau in November 1941.
Courtesy of Regional Affiliation of Jewish Communities in Saxony, Germany, CC BY-SA
Given the deportation meeting level for the Breslau Jews, a guarded native beer backyard, our researchers knew that solely an individual with permission to entry that property might have shot these photos.
For these two causes, we concluded that an worker of the Jewish neighborhood of Breslau should have documented the Nazi crimes – most certainly Albert Hadda, a Jewish architect and photographer who clandestinely photographed the November 1938 pogrom in Breslau.
Hadda’s marriage to a Christian partially protected him from persecution. Between 1941 and 1943, town’s Jewish neighborhood tasked him with caring for the deportees on the meeting level till their pressured removing.
These 13 lately found photos represent essentially the most complete collection illuminating the crime of mass deportations from a sufferer’s perspective in Nazi Germany. Their unearthing is testimony to the lately rediscovered widespread particular person resistance by odd Jews who fought Nazi persecution.
Documenting Fulda
Our undertaking has additionally recognized new deportation photographs taken within the German city of Fulda in December 1941, throughout a snowstorm.
Beforehand, historians knew of solely three photos of this deportation occasion. Preserved within the metropolis archive, they present the deportees on the Fulda prepare station throughout heavy snowfall.
We found two new pictures of the identical Nazi deportation, apparently taken by the identical photographer, in a videotaped survivor interview within the Visible Historical past Archive of the USC Shoah Basis in Los Angeles.
In 1996, the Shoah Basis interviewed Miriam Berline, née Gottlieb, the daughter of a profitable Orthodox Jewish service provider in Fulda. On the finish of the two-hour interview, Berline held two pictures as much as the digital camera. They clearly present the identical snowy deportation in Fulda.
Screenshot from Miriam Berline’s interview concerning the Fulda deportations.
USC Shoah Basis Visible Historical past Archive, CC BY-SA
Berline, born in 1925, escaped Nazi Germany in 1939. She didn’t bear in mind how her household obtained the photographs however recalled the photographer as Otto Weissbach, a “wonderful” man who had helped Fulda’s Jewish households.
Our researchers investigated and realized his identify was Arthur Weissbach, a non-Jewish neighbor of the Gottliebs. The manufacturing facility he owned nonetheless exists. Descendants of Jewish households have since confirmed that he stored valuables for them and took care of aged relations who stayed behind.
Weissbach’s niece mentioned he was a passionate interest photographer. Since Weissbach stored contact with survivors after the battle, he might need given the photographs to the Gottlieb household. As we speak, the household’s copies are misplaced, however their existence is preserved in Berline’s video interview on the USC Shoah Basis.
The images present the Jews on the Fulda prepare station on Dec. 9, 1941 – revealing how Nazi deportations occurred in plain view.
The day earlier than, Jewish women and men from round Fulda had been summoned and spent the night time at an area faculty fitness center. Within the morning, they had been taken to the prepare station and compelled by police to board a prepare to Kassel, in central Germany, after which eastward onto Riga, in Nazi-occupied Latvia.
In complete, 1,031 Jews had been deported from Kassel to Riga. Solely 12 from Fulda survived.
Figuring out the deportation victims
It’s tough to establish the individuals within the photographs we uncover. Thus far, we’ve revealed 279 biographies within the digital atlas.
Sooner or later, synthetic intelligence might assist us establish extra individuals from the photographs in our assortment. However for now, this course of takes exhaustive analysis with the assistance of native researchers and descendants of survivors, whose names are identified from archived transport lists.
Households typically wrestle to acknowledge people in these pictures, however typically they’ve household photographs that assist us accomplish that.
Take, for instance, this posed household portrait of two younger women. They’re Susanne and Tamara Cohn.
Susanne and Tamara Cohn, circa 1939.
Non-public Archive, CC BY-SA
Kinfolk of the Cohn household had this picture. It, together with information from the native Nazi transport listing, established that two women photographed in one in every of his Breslau deportation photographs had been the daughters of Willy Cohn.
Cohn, a well known German-Jewish medieval historian and highschool trainer in Breslau, stored an in depth diary concerning the persecution of the city’s Jews from 1933 to 1941. It was unearthed and revealed within the Nineties.
This picture, beneath, often is the final image ever taken of his kids with their mom, Gertrud.
Gertrud, Susanne and Tamara Cohn, Breslau, November 1941.
#LastSeen Mission, CC BY-SA
New insights
The #LastSeen analysis undertaking is producing new insights into the historical past of Nazi mass deportations, new methodologies for picture evaluation and new instruments for Holocaust schooling.
Along with the digital atlas, which has been visited by greater than 50,000 individuals since its launch in 2023, we’ve got developed a number of award-winning instructional instruments, together with a web based recreation that invitations college students to seek for clues, info and pictures of Nazi deportations in a man-made attic.
In workshops for academics and seminars with college students, #LastSeen teaches the historical past of Nazi deportations and demonstrates how historic picture analysis works. In Fulda, for instance, excessive schoolers helped us find the precise locations the place the pictures had been taken.
These photos might be revealed in our atlas on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025. A public commemoration in Fulda will function the native college students’ contributions.
Relying on fundraising, we hope to increase the #LastSeen undertaking past Germany. Amassing pictures from all 20-plus European international locations annexed or occupied by the Nazis will assist us higher perceive these crimes and advance analysis and schooling in new methods.