Eastern Front World War Ii

Mysteries of a Nazi Photo Album

There are certainly many photo albums of Nazi leaders and many photo albums of the Nazis’ victims. But it’s hard to imagine many albums depicting both, just a few pages apart.

At least one does, however, and it has surfaced in New York City. Its creator was able — apparently within weeks — to photograph Hitler as he warred on Russia and also to photograph some of the earliest victims of that brutal campaign, known as Operation Barbarossa, which began 70 years ago Wednesday.

Two pages in this album, on the Eastern Front in 1941, are devoted to prisoners. Some are dressed in rags, some dressed in uniforms of the Red Army, some wearing jackets with Star of David patches. They stand before what might be freshly dug graves. (Their own? Their landsmen?) In six almost intimate pictures, verging on portraiture, men gaze hollowly or defiantly at the camera.

Four pages later, there is Hitler himself, waiting at a train station for the arrival of Adm. Miklos Horthy, the regent of Hungary, with whom he will shortly be bargaining at the East Prussian war headquarters known as the Wolf’s Lair. The photographer stands just a few feet from Hitler, almost as close to the Führer as he stood to the Führer’s prisoners.

Clearly, this photographer had a lot of access — and not a little talent.

But who was he? His perfectly ordinary, store-bought album carries no identification or inscription. A caption is visible on only one of the 214 three-by-four-inch photographs.

And what was he showing to posterity?

First and foremost, he documented the progress through Eastern Europe of a bus convoy in the service of the Reichs-Autozug Deutschland, a Nazi Party unit whose responsibilities included the logistics needed to stage mass rallies. Judging from graffiti written on the dusty bus windows, the overall itinerary was Berlin-Minsk-Smolensk-Munich. Identifiable landmarks in the album show that the convoy made its way through Gdansk, Poland, which was then Danzig; Kaliningrad, Russia, which was then Königsberg; and Barysaw, Belarus.

Little of the battlefield is seen (the front was, by then, far ahead), but a great deal of destruction is evident. Minsk, the capital of what was then the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and fell within days of the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, is in ruins. There are many views of the countryside, as well as pictures of peasants that bring the work of the Farm Security Administration photographers to mind.

Eastern Front (World War II) | My World My Word

Eastern Front (World War II) refers to different front in Eastern Europe during the second world war, marketed but mostly with the German Soviet war in connection with numerous battles as the most comprehensive and bloodiest war is.

, The eastern front was distinguished in usage, with the Western allies, from the Western front in Western Europe and the fronts in North Africa, Northern Europe or later Italy.

Eastern Front (World War II), Theater (warfare), Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, CentralEurope, Eastern Europe, Great Patriotic War (term), TheHolocaust, Extermination Camp, Death Marches (Holocaust),Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, Pogrom, Genocide

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