The photographs taken at the liberation of the camps are the most-reproduced visual record of the Holocaust. They were taken in the first days after liberation by Allied military photographers, by photojournalists who had attached themselves to the advancing armies, and in some cases by Allied soldiers with their own cameras.
Margaret Bourke-White at Buchenwald
The American Life magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White entered Buchenwald with the American 6th Armored Division on 11 April 1945. Her photographs of survivors standing behind the barbed-wire fence of the camp, gaunt and silent, were published in Life on 7 May 1945 and have been reproduced thousands of times since. Bourke-White wrote later that she had photographed the scenes by training herself to think of the camera as a barrier between herself and what she was seeing, and that she did not allow herself to feel anything until she had finished the work.
George Rodger at Bergen-Belsen
The British photographer George Rodger of Magnum Photos entered Belsen with the British army on 20 April 1945. He photographed the bodies, the survivors, the SS guards being made to bury the dead. He stopped photographing after several days. Rodger later wrote that he had found himself composing a shot of bodies for visual effect, that he had recognised what he was doing, and that he had decided he would never photograph anything like it again. He left war photography. He spent the rest of his career photographing African tribal life.
Lee Miller at Dachau
The American photographer Lee Miller, working for British Vogue, photographed Dachau two days after the American liberation on 29 April 1945. Her photographs were published in Vogue in June 1945 under the headline “Believe It.” Miller later moved into a Munich apartment that had been Hitler’s and was photographed in his bath. The image is one of the strangest of the immediate postwar period.
The military photographers
Most of the surviving photographs were taken not by the famous photojournalists but by Allied military photographers attached to signal units and intelligence operations. The British Army Film and Photographic Unit, the American Signal Corps, the Soviet Central Newsreel Studio and the Polish state photographers each produced thousands of photographs in the period from July 1944 to May 1945. The complete archive runs to tens of thousands of images. Most are now held by the Imperial War Museum, the US National Archives, Yad Vashem and the USHMM.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards