Mystery of 565 eerie Jewish photos solved
IN 1997, during a re-organisation of the anthropological department at Vienna’s Museum of Natural History, one of the curators, Margit Berner, came across a paper box labelled: “Tarnów Juden 1942”. (Tarnów is a town in south-east Poland.) Inside, numbered 1 to 565, were photographs akin to mugshots, sets in which each subject facedthe camera, then off to the side, and finally upward.
Ms Berner discovered that these belonged to an anthropological study of Jews living in Tarnów, undertaken by two Viennese Nazi racial scientists.
They now form the centrepiece of a new exhibition about the project and the Jewish community of Tarnów, The Cold Eye, running at Vienna’s House of Austrian History.
Aligned in rows on parallel black walls, the photographs face inward at one another – an aesthetic choice, Ms Berner told the JC, designed to avoid “further humiliation” of those made subject to Nazi racial science.
The story behind the pictures begins in March 1942, when Dora Maria Kahlich and Elfriede Fiethmann set out to Tarnów. The town was once a Habsburgian melting pot where half of the population was Jewish.
By Kahlich and Fiethmann’s arrival, 30,000 Jews were living in Tarnów’s ghetto. Over two weeks, the pair collected data photographs of and fingerprints from 565 Jews from 106 families before returning to Krakow, where they worked for the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit, set up in April 1940 following the Nazi occupation of Poland.
Their findings, first published in May 1942, supported the pre-existing conclusions of Nazi racial science, purporting to show patterns that proved a genetic inheritance of certain “racial characteristics”.
Deportations from Tarnów to Belzec began in June 1942. By the autumn of 1943, the Nazis declared the town judenrein.
Of the 565 Jews photographed as part of the Nazis’ anthropological case work, Ms Berner was only able to trace 27 survivors.