LE MAGAZINE DE LA FRANCE- NAZI CRIMES – The French magazine – Nazi crimes. A harrowing booklet of testimonies published in France in June 1945, a month after the end of World War II, publicly exposing for the first time in a comprehensive overview and with uncensored photographs from the death camps the crimes of the Nazis as discovered by the Allied forces liberating the camps.
The booklet opens with letters written immediately after the war by leaders of the French Resistance Pierre-Henri Teitgen, Augustin Bido, Jacques Soustelle, Henri Frenay Sandoval and others on the importance of the Allies’ victory, the shock of the world learning the enormous scale of Nazi atrocities, and demands for justice against the war criminals still alive at that time. It then provides an extensive overview of how the Nazi party rose to power in Germany, the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, the Gestapo and its brutality, executions in forests, establishment of death camps, and the Nazi conquest of France. The booklet exposes for the first time the crimes of the Nazis at the Buchenwald camp – the horrific daily lives of prisoners in death camps, documentation of the appalling experiments Nazis conducted on prisoners’ bodies, and more. It includes a map depicting numbers of victims of the Nazis in Europe by country, as well as a list of clauses in the Treaty of Versailles signed by Germany and how it violated all of them during the war. A lengthy article profiles the Nazi war criminals – how they acted to conceal their crimes and the systematic nature of their genocide.
The booklet contains many distressing photographs, including one of a Nazi party rally in Nuremberg alongside the results of Nazi brutality in bodies of victims, piles of corpses at death camps, the horrific way Allied forces found people driven in transport trains to Buchenwald who died along the way, the crematorium at the camp, emaciated prisoners who somehow survived the inferno with their last remaining strength, Gestapo torture and punishment facilities, and more.
The cover features a photograph of an emaciated inmate who passed away approximately 10 minutes after being photographed by French-Jewish war photographer and journalist Eric Schwab [1910-1977]. Schwab was among the first photographers to join the French news agency (AFP) in 1944. Along with American journalist and writer Meyer Levin, he traveled to Germany in April 1945, immediately after liberation from Nazi rule. Schwab photographed the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. His most famous photograph is the one featured on the booklets cover, known as the “Dying Dysentery Man from Buchenwald”. Though he survived, the man passed away just a few minutes after Schwab took his photograph. Famous pop singer David Bowie chose this photo as one of the magazine Die Zeit’s photos of the century in 1998, saying “To me, this picture represents the violence and destruction that reigned over large parts of the 20th century. The terrible tragedy of a man who regained his freedom only to die moments later breaks my heart”.
48 [1] p. 30 cm. Very good condition.
