The Holocaust was the first mass atrocity to be heavily photographed. I co-direct an international research project to collect every available image documenting Nazi mass deportations of Jews, Roma and Sinti, as well as euthanasia victims, in Nazi Germany between and The most recently discovered series of images will be unveiled on Jan. In most cases, these are the very last pictures taken of Holocaust victims before they were deported and perished. That fact gives the project its name, LastSeen.
As descendants of survivors help our researchers identify the deportees in these images and tell their stories, we give previously faceless victims a voice. When it began in late , researchers knew of a few dozen deportation images of Jews from 27 German towns that had been gathered for a exhibition in Berlin.
After contacting 1, public and private archives in Germany and worldwide to find more, LastSeen has now collected visual evidence from 60 cities and towns in Nazi Germany. Most photographs of Nazi mass deportations from local archives published in our digital atlas were taken by the perpetrators, who documented the event for the police or municipality.
That has heavily shaped our visual understanding of these crimes, because they display victims as a faceless mass. When individuals were depicted, it was most often through an antisemitic lens. In January , the LastSeen team shared newly discovered photographs showing the Nazi deportations in what was then Breslau, Germany — today Wroclaw, Poland. It contained 13 deportation photographs — the last images taken of dozens of Jewish victims before they were transported from Breslau to Nazi-occupied Lithuania and massacred in November Many of these pictures in this series show a large, mixed age group of men and women wearing the yellow star — the notorious Nazi-mandated sign for Jews — gathering outside with bundles of their belongings.
Some are taken from a peculiar angle, from behind a tree or a wall, suggesting they were snapped clandestinely. Given the deportation assembly point for the Breslau Jews, a guarded local beer garden, our researchers knew that only a person with permission to access that property could have shot these pictures.
