The summer of 2022 marked 80 years since the first deportation of Jewish families to Auschwitz by the Nazis.
Although the Nazis deported hundreds of thousands of Jews, men and women, to places where tragic events took place, there were no photographs documenting these crimes. Moreover, there are not even photographic documents from Berlin, the Nazi capital at the time and the city with the largest Jewish community.
The lack of photos is a matter of great importance. Unlike in the past, historians now agree that photographs and films should be taken seriously as primary sources for their research. These sources can complement the analysis of administrative documents and testimonies from survivors and thus help us to have a better picture of the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis.
In an article on the website "The Conversation", historian Wolf Gruner, who is originally from Germany but teaches in the US, says that he has been researching the subject for 30 years and has published 10 books on the Holocaust.
Gruner searched for unpublished images in all the archives he visited during his investigations. However, he admits that both he and many of his colleagues did not take this evidence seriously enough as a primary research source and used it more as an illustration in their books.
Researching the photos of the deportations
Between 1938 and 1945, more than 200.000 people were deported from Germany, and most were sent to ghettos and concentration camps in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe.
In order to make the photos available for research and educational purposes, a group of university, educational and archival institutions, as well as the University of Southern California's Dorsnife Center for Genocide Research, launched the #LastSeen Project – Photographs of Nazi Deportations in October of 2021.
This effort aims to locate, collect and analyze images of Nazi mass deportations in Germany. The deportations began with the forcible removal of some 17.000 Jews of Polish origin in October 1938, shortly before the outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in Kristallnacht, and culminated in mass deportations to Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945.
Mass deportations targeted not only Jews, but also people with disabilities, as well as tens of thousands of Roma.
What can we learn from these images?
These images help us understand not only where, when and how all these forced relocations happened, but also who participated in them, who witnessed them and who was affected.
When this project began, Gruner's collaborators were unsure whether they would be able to find a significant number of unpublished photographs of the mass deportations.
But after reaching out to the German public and searching 1.750 German archives, they received dozens of previously unknown photographs within the first six months of the project, and doubled the number of German cities (from 27 to 60) from which Nazi deportation photographs now exist.
Many of these photos were gathering dust on shelves of local archives, while others were in homes. In the future, project leaders hope to make new discoveries in archives, museums and family-owned items in the US and UK, as well as Canada, South Africa and Australia.
Looking for photos outside of Germany
The project has already discovered photos in the US. In two cases, they had been donated by survivors to archives.
In particular, Simon Strauss gave the US Holocaust Memorial Museum an image from the deportation to his German birthplace of Hanau. On the photo was written: "Uncle Ludwig has been transferred."
The second photo was at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, which had received the only image to date of the Nazi deportation of Jews in Bad Homburg.
To locate more photographs, the project relies on the help of ordinary citizens, researchers, archivists, museum officials and families of survivors.
Identification and identification of victims
The identity of those deported as well as those carrying out the deportations remains unknown in the existing photographs. Most show groups of people the project is trying to identify so their stories can be known. This is a very difficult one, as close-up photos are rare.
For this reason, researchers are in dire need of the public's help in uncovering the stories behind the countless and unidentified victims of the Nazis.
SOURCE: DAILY website, 2.9.2022