Album of the Damned: Snapshots from the Third Reich
By Paul Garson
Published by Academy Chicago Publishers, 2008
Concentration camp images of prisoners are easily accessible; a quick search on the Internet turns up thousands of photographs of Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, gypsies and others, each more disturbing than the last. The gaunt look in their eyes, the fatigue on their faces, the broken spirit emanating from their stooped bodies…. The atrocities committed against these innocents speak for themselves. Whoever they were before their numbers were up ceased to matter; most were going to die before they had a chance to live.
Which is why Paul Garson’s collection, Album of the Damned: Snapshots from the Third Reich, is so bizarre. He spent five years putting together this book, and the end result is page after page of Nazi-era Germans enjoying a variety of “life” moments, be it a wedding, frolicking on the beach, roughhousing with friends, or posing with their children.
According to the accompanying press release, Garson bid against auction houses and searched through 100,000 photographs before settling on the near-400 included in this album. The smiles, the laughter, the seriousness of their uniforms, convey time moving – the days changing, the months following each other in rapid succession, the years going by. And while time goes by, more and more Germans are kneeling to Hitler’s mission of establishing the Master Race, while more and more of the inferior races are dying. But most of these are ordinary snapshots, no different than the ones people take everyday, and their purpose is to capture an ordinary moment in time.
Garson’s photos are breathtaking, if for no other reason than that they reveal the fact that the Nazi soldiers and their families saw their collusion in systematic killings as business as usual. He expands the story beyond happiness by incorporating the realities of “the other side,” displaying Russian POWs, wounded soldiers, and the handicapped and mentally ill who were exterminated along with the other undesirables. But their back stories pale in comparison to the energy gleaming from the stills of Third Reich success. In black-and-white, now for all the world to see, these German citizens were enjoying themselves.
Babes in Uniform
The most alarming photographs in Album of the Damned are those of the children. From newborns to teenagers – all covered in Dad’s military gear and Hitler Youth group uniforms – they are shown pledging their loyalty to what they know is right. That’s the insanity buried within the photos; what these children were dedicating themselves to was nothing more than normalcy. It is normal to swell with pride in defending one’s country against an identified enemy. Patriotism is nothing new, nothing odd, and after all, that’s what war is about – taking up arms to defend principles and a people. But did any of these children, 60% of whom valiantly joined the various youth groups as if they were the Boy Scouts, ever take a minute to question the ideology being fed to them, and understand that it boiled down to extinguishing human life? Maybe, maybe not. Nationalistic fervor is a powerful thing.
Teach Your Children What?
On page 141, Garson includes the translation of a German postcard (shown on page 140) produced during the Third Reich. The postcard is entitled “Teach Your Children,” and begins with “Teach your child to protect all living things.” Two paragraphs down, it goes on to say, “Teach your child that animals are cohabitants of this world and that we have no right to set traps for them or to eradicate them from the earth,” and ends with, “Teach your child that those who desire compassion and sympathy for themselves must also accord this to every other living creature.” This, Garson writes, “sums up the Nazi’s ‘enlightened’ views on other life forms. The tragic irony of this prose-poem is all too obvious.”
 |
