Liberation Photographs Were Staged

The liberation photographs are among the most thoroughly documented images of the twentieth century. The photographers, the dates, the locations, the cameras used, the assignment orders, and in many cases the negatives themselves all survive. The images were not staged. The exception was the small number of formal civilian-burial photographs at Bergen-Belsen and Ohrdruf, which were taken of organised civilian-burial operations that the Allied commands had initiated; in those cases, the burial was an organised event, the photographs are of the event, and the photographers said so at the time. The general claim that the photographic record is fabricated requires the listener to dismiss thousands of images by dozens of named photographers across many camps.

Who took the photographs

The American photographic record of the camps was largely the work of the US Signal Corps photographers attached to the 12th Army Group. The lead Signal Corps photographers at Buchenwald (entered 11 April 1945) were William A. Scott, Walter Chichersky and others; their work is held at the National Archives in College Park (Record Group 111-SC). The photographers at Dachau (entered 29 April 1945) included Eric Schwab, Lieutenant Arnold Bauer and the photographers attached to the US 7th Army headquarters. The photographers at Mauthausen (entered 5 May 1945) included Donald R. Ornitz and the personnel of the 11th Armored Division Signal Section. Each photographer’s work is identifiable by caption, by the consecutive numbering of the negatives within his assignment series, and by the unit war diary.

The civilian press photographers who entered the camps in the days after the military photographers included Margaret Bourke-White (for Life magazine, at Buchenwald), Lee Miller (for Vogue, at Dachau and Buchenwald), George Rodger (for Life, at Bergen-Belsen), Ed Vebell (for the US Army’s Stars and Stripes) and others. Their photographs were taken on their own equipment, transmitted through their own publications’ editorial channels, and credited individually. Bourke-White’s contact sheets survive in the Margaret Bourke-White Papers at Syracuse University; Miller’s negatives survive in the Lee Miller Archives in Sussex; Rodger’s are at the George Rodger estate. The work of all these photographers can be examined for itself, and has been by historians of war photography from the 1970s onwards.

The Soviet photographic record of Majdanek (1944) and Auschwitz (1945) was the work of war photographers attached to the Red Army units that liberated the camps, including Yevgeny Khaldei, Mikhail Trakhman, Boris Ignatovich and others. Their negatives survive in the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive in Krasnogorsk and in the TASS archive.

The Bergen-Belsen organised burials

The famous photographs of British soldiers using bulldozers to push bodies into mass graves at Bergen-Belsen, of German civilians being made to bury bodies by hand, and of SS women being made to load bodies onto lorries, were photographs of organised events. The British 11th Armoured Division had been confronted with approximately 13,000 unburied bodies at the camp on 15 April 1945, in conditions that posed an immediate public-health emergency (typhus was active in the camp and threatening to spread to the surrounding population). The Division’s medical officer, Brigadier Glyn Hughes, organised a rapid burial operation using whatever methods would dispose of the bodies fastest. The British command, led by Lieutenant-General Sir Brian Horrocks of XXX Corps, ordered local German civilians from the surrounding villages to participate in the burials, and ordered the captured SS personnel (men and women) to participate too. The photographers attached to the Division and the press photographers who arrived in the days following filmed and photographed the operation.

The British command was entirely clear at the time about why it was making the German civilians participate: it wanted the civilians to see what had been done in their name and the world to see them seeing it. The photographs were not of spontaneous burial but of an organised event. The bodies were real; the burial was real; the German civilians were real; the SS personnel forced to handle the bodies were real. The framing was British. Recognising the framing does not require dismissing the underlying evidence. The same Bergen-Belsen photographic record includes thousands of unstaged images of the camp as found, of the survivors before any food relief had reached them, of the layout of the barracks, of the unburied bodies in the camp’s open spaces, taken in the first hours and days of the British presence.

The denier conflation

The denier argument conflates the documented organised-burial photographs (which were exactly what the photographers said they were) with the much larger body of unstaged photographs of which they form a small subset. The implicit suggestion is that if some of the photographs were of organised events, all of them were. This does not follow at all. The specifically organised images are identifiable as such by the captions, the contact sheets, the photographers’ own accounts, and the historical record of the events they documented. The vast majority of the liberation photographs are of conditions found, not events organised. Distinguishing the two categories is an elementary task in the historical analysis of war photography.

The deniers also conflate “posed” with “staged”. A photograph in which the photographer asked a survivor to look at the camera, or arranged a group for a portrait, is a posed photograph; the people are real, the conditions are real, the photographer’s framing is acknowledged. A staged photograph is one in which the depicted scene was contrived for the camera. Posing is universal in war photography; it is not evidence of fabrication. Staging would be evidence of fabrication, and almost no examples of staged liberation photographs have ever been alleged with specific identification.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it asks the listener to apply a standard of photographic authentication that no historical photographic record could meet, and to apply it specifically and only to the liberation of the camps. The liberation photographs are exceptionally well documented (provenance, photographer, date, location, contact sheet, assignment record, in many cases the original negatives) by the standards of mid-twentieth-century photography. The denial requires the listener to accept that thousands of images by dozens of named photographers across multiple armies and many media outlets were collectively fabricated, in a way that left no inconsistency in the contact sheets, no discrepancy in the unit war diaries, no contradiction between the photographers’ personal accounts. This is impossible.

Who took the photographs? Where are the negatives held? What does the photographer’s contemporary caption say?

See also

• The Photographic Record

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Sources

• US National Archives, Record Group 111-SC (Signal Corps Photographs), with the Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Ohrdruf and other liberation series, individually catalogued by photographer and negative number
• Imperial War Museum, Department of Photographs, British Army Film and Photographic Unit collection on Bergen-Belsen, with the original captions and photographer attributions
• Margaret Bourke-White, contact sheets and prints from Buchenwald, April 1945, Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Syracuse University Libraries Special Collections
• Lee Miller, photographs from Dachau and Buchenwald, April to May 1945, Lee Miller Archives, Farley Farm House, Sussex; Antony Penrose (ed.), Lee Miller’s War: Photographer and Correspondent with the Allies in Europe 1944 to 1945, Bulfinch Press, 1992
• George Rodger, photographs from Bergen-Belsen, April 1945, George Rodger estate; Carole Naggar, George Rodger: An Adventure in Photography 1908 to 1995, Syracuse University Press, 2003
• Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive, Krasnogorsk, Soviet liberation photography of Majdanek (1944) and Auschwitz (1945), with photographer attributions
• Brigadier Hugh Llewellyn Glyn Hughes, after-action reports on the burial operations at Bergen-Belsen, April to May 1945, Imperial War Museum and Wellcome Library
• Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, Oxford University Press, 1985, with extensive treatment of the photographic record and its production
• Cornelia Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung: Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945, Akademie Verlag, 1998
• Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye, University of Chicago Press, 1998
• Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence, I.B. Tauris, 2004
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Liberation Photographs and Their Provenance”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org