![]() However, there are no footage documenting the arrival in Poland or the extermination process. ![]() While certain sequences bring to mind the propaganda film shot during the same period in Theresienstadt to deceive public opinion regarding the fate of its prisoners, the rushes from Westerbork lift a corner of the veil on the genocide, showing the boarding and departure of a convoy of Jews and Gypsies that left the concentration camp for Auschwitz on (see figure 1). In July 1941, a sergeant of the Kriegsmarine, Reinhard Wiener, shot a nearly two-minute footage with his non-professional 8mm camera, showing the execution of a group of Jews from Liepāja, Latvia (Latvia).Įqually exceptional is the footage shot in the spring of 1944 in the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, where Jewish internees produced a documentary on the orders of Commandant Gemmeker. In the Soviet territories that were invaded and later occupied, soldiers of the Wehrmacht and members of Einsatzgruppen took “souvenir photographs” of their crimes, despite a formal ban on doing so issued by the German general staff. It led to actual dramatizations for which internees were enlisted by force, powerless extras in a fiction seeking to discredit them by presenting the misery and death of the ghetto as a consequence of the exploitation of Jews by Jews. The ways in which the cameramen filmed reflects their desire to distort reality-in order to conform to anti-Semitic stereotypes-with the film cynically presenting the consequences of ghettoization as proof of the ontological degeneration of the “Jewish race.” In the spring of 1942, a more ambitious shoot was organized in the Warsaw ghetto. This footage, which was primarily shot in Lodz, was edited by Fritz Hippler in the documentary Der Ewige Jude ( The Eternal Jew, 1940). In 1940, Goebbels sent cameramen to the ghettoes of Poland for propaganda purposes. There were more images when Poland joined the war and was subsequently invaded, attesting to the policy of ghettoization in particular. The perspective of persecutors and victimsīeginning in 1933, photographers and cameramen captured the early stages of Jewish persecution: store boycotts, Kristallnacht, the torching of synagogues, book burnings, and humiliation of all kinds. ![]() In addition to these images taken by the persecutors-and more rarely by their victims-there is a considerable body of photographs and footage shot when the extermination camps of Poland were discovered. In fact, there is no shortage of images to document the persecution of Jews in Hitler’s Germany, ghettoization in Eastern Europe, roundups and deportations, and pogroms and execution by firing squad on Soviet territory. However, this way of grasping the “Holocaust” does not consider the final stage of a broader process, one whose chronological and spatial scope it shrinks considerably. The destruction of Europe’s Jews can thus appear as a blind spot, justifying its qualification as “an event without an image.” We do not know of any photographs or footage depicting the mass murder of Jewish victims in the gas chambers of death camps. From the 1980s onward, historians have gradually pieced together this fragmented corpus, documented it, and shed light on its meaning.ĭuring the same period, debates regarding “Holocaust images” occurred in the wake of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, with a focus on the extermination of Jews in the death camps of Poland, which was governed by a policy of secrecy and invisibility. For nearly forty years, footage and photographs of the persecution and genocide of Jews were used to illustrate articles, conceive exhibitions, and make films with no concern for the origin of the images, the context of their recording, or the viewpoint they convey.
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