How should we view photos of the Holocaust?
A new exhibition asks whether it is right to display images of Jewish victims taken by the Nazis. Etan Smallman reports
Winston Churchill and Hermann Göring both uttered a version of the adage “History is written by the victors”. But when it comes to the visual record of the near-obliteration of European Jewry, extraordinarily, the Nazis still reign supreme.
Up to the point of liberation, almost every photo of ghettos and concentration camps displayed in almost every museum in the world is one that was carefully crafted and captured by the perpetrators. As the world marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp on Monday, a new exhibition suggests it is time to reflect on the way our often-thoughtless use of these photos is continuing to perpetuate Nazi propaganda messages – with images depicting Jews as terrified, pitiful figures either meekly surrendering or dying in squalor.
“They’re meant to be degrading, they’re meant to be anti-semitic,” says Maiken Umbach, professor of modern history who led a team of Nottingham University academics to create the National Holocaust Centre and Museum’s touring exhibition, The Eye as Witness.
“While we might respond now with pity rather than disgust, pity is not the exact opposite of disgust. We might shake our heads at the cruelty, but it doesn’t really help us to see these victims as people very much like ourselves, which is, of course, what they were.”
The photos were commissioned not just as contemporary propaganda and “a kind of revenge fantasy”, says Umbach. “The Nazis had this very acute sense that they were creating a historical record.” One example is the leather-bound albums produced by Jürgen Stroop, commander of the German forces that suppressed the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising. Designed to document the “end of Jewish life in Eastern Europe”, Stroop dedicated them to “future historians”.
One of his photos, showing a young boy at the head of a line of Jews with his hands up above his head, was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most iconic images in history, but it is used in the exhibition as an example of the way in which the Nazis set out to portray the brave members of the uprising as helpless victims.
Another picture from the album has inspired a virtual-reality exhibit. Headset-wearing visitors are invited to “step into” the image and enter what looks very much like a computer game. There they get a 360-degree view to examine what was studiously left in and out of the frame. During the ghetto uprising – one of the fiercest acts of resistance during the Holocaust – a group of Jews is shown sitting on the street cowering in the face of a single German soldier. The VR experience allows you to see that the street is in fact surrounded by soldiers, along with mounted machine guns – and to observe the photographer himself.
The key message is that, far from being a neutral observer, he was a Nazi working to a brief, and that the same techniques are used today to produce misleading images of human rights abuses that frequently go viral online.
The Allied liberators provided virtually the only non-nazi photographic evidence we have of the atrocities committed in the camps, which was crucial in subsequent war crimes trials. But these pictures too can be problematic. “The liberators were not concerned at all with ethical questions that we might raise today, about the dignity of the victims,” says Umbach. “How appropriate is it to photograph identifiable people as naked bodies piled up as a heap of rubbish? I wouldn’t be very happy if that were my grandmother being displayed in this way for the public to just sort of gaze at.”
The Imperial War Museum’s updated Holocaust galleries, opening next year, will feature far fewer of these highly graphic images, and a wallheight photo, taken by liberators, of a bulldozer pushing bodies into a mass grave will be removed.
However, Marc Cave, the CEO of the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, believes that we have a duty to share some of these depictions.
“I’m very struck by an image which actually I have decided that we will put into a video for Holocaust Memorial Day. It features a man whose photograph was taken two days after liberation. He is fully naked and he is emaciated,” he says.
“The conventional view would be that it is dehumanising for that person to have his photo shown around the place today. I disagree – I think that man wanted the world to know and that’s why he agreed to have the picture taken. So I think we can sometimes be over-sensitive on behalf of the subject.”
The exhibition also makes a point of using photos taken by Jews and members of the Resistance, who risked their lives to document their experiences. These haunting images are the antithesis of images taken by the Nazis showing nameless masses of skeletal victims.
“A big emphasis is on the individuality of these people,” says Umbach. “There are many more portraits amongst them. They thought, ‘I know I will not survive, but I want to leave a record behind of my existence.’”
As the ghettos were cleared and those inside began to realise their fate, they went to great pains to hide the pictures, burying them in jam jars or sewing them into the linings of winter coats, for example.
“There was the idea that, a bit like a message in a bottle, somebody at some point will find them who might look at them with a more sympathetic eye and preserve this history,” adds Umbach.
Agnes Kaposi survived Debrecen ghetto in Hungary and labour camps in Austria after her train, en route to Auschwitz, was diverted at the last minute. She has since visited the camp twice. More than the Nazi photography, the 87-year-old is concerned by the snaps taken by today’s witnesses. “I have seen somebody pretending to be a bunny rabbit with two fingers up on either side of his head, and grinning. And that is in Auschwitz-birkenau against the barbed wire.”
There are frequent reports of people using a visit to the death camp as a photo opportunity – turning up with selfie sticks or having pictures taken using the train tracks as a balance beam, or as a stage for their Lego collections. One Instagram user made sure to note in the caption
The Nazis’ images depicted Jews as pitiful figures either meekly surrendering or dying in squalour
Photos taken by Jews are the antithesis of those taken by the Germans. ‘The emphasis is on people’s individuality’
accompanying his image that his jacket came from River Island.
But Kaposi believes that photos shared on social media can have a value. “I took some pictures myself, of the wagon and the gas chamber, and there were other people taking pictures. And, of course, rather than disturbing me, that pleased me, because that meant that they want to remember and they want to show it to others and spread the word.”
Joan Salter, 79, survived by fleeing with her family across Europe, from Belgium to France, Spain, Portugal and the US, before settling in London.
“What really gets me is the selfies,” she says. “They just don’t seem to understand where they are. That narcissism really makes me angry. Whoever takes these kids should say: leave your phone in the coach.”
Salter cites with admiration a 2017 art project that took aim at the youngsters juggling, doing yoga or performing a handstand atop Berlin’s memorial – by superimposing them on a background of corpses.
“I think [Salter’s approval] is the best feedback you can get,” says the Israeli-german artist himself, Shahak Shapira, who called the series Yolocaust – “Yolo” being a social media acronym for “you only live once”.
“I think that’s the only feedback – if survivors were bothered by it, then I would have failed in my work.”
Shapira is not convinced that mobile phones should simply be banned at such sites. “I don’t know if you should forbid anything. On the other hand, I’m not sure what you’re going to do with a cell phone there, except for be a douchebag.”
He concludes: “Maybe we kind of need to know that this is how people treat Auschwitz nowadays.”
The Eye as Witness exhibition is touring the UK. Visit witness.holocaust.org.uk for more details