6 harsh photos taken in the Buchenwald death camp upon its liberation by the Allied forces, stamped on the reverse with the ink stamp of the Ministere de l’information. Germany, 1945.
Photographs: liberated prisoners, horrifyingly emaciated, around the wooden bunks; human bones in the crematorium; a prisoner whose face was severely injured from beatings and frostbite; a prisoner lying on the wooden bunks (according to period press reports, this prisoner died only minutes after the photograph was taken); citizens of Weimar brought from their city by the Allied forces to view the crematorium and the horrors of the camp; Allied soldiers with shocked expressions standing beside the freight elevator that transported the bodies of prisoners executed in the basement to the ground floor where the crematorium ovens were located.
The liberation photographs taken by the photographic unit of the American army greatly shaped the collective visual memory of the Holocaust. The order to send photographic units into the camps and bring back images of the atrocities served two principal purposes intended by the Allied forces – first, to present to the public the crimes of the Nazi regime in order to justify the total mobilization and the many sacrifices exacted by the war. The second, no less important, was the gathering of as much evidence as possible for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the trials conducted after the war. The visual documentation indeed served the prosecution during the trials and became a significant factor in their final conviction. Following the trials, the Allied forces distributed these photographs among the German population so that they would know the atrocities committed by their own people in the name of Nazi ideology, and to instill the message: Never Again!
Uniform size: 23×17 cm. Very good condition.
