German MG-34 gunner on the march on the Eastern Front, 1942
German MG-34 gunner on the march on the Eastern Front, 1942 Northern Front For the invasion of Russia, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, the German army assembled some three million men, divided into a total of 105 infantry divisions and 32 Panzer…
Rare color photos from World War II
An Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) scout manning a 3.7-inch anti-aircraft gun. 1942. These are rare color images from the Second World War, featured in the Imperial War Museum’s book “The Second World War in Color.” Many of them are published for the…
30 old black and white photos capture the streets of Hamburg in the early 1970s
Heinrich Klaffs began taking photographs in 1970. From 1972 to 1974, he worked as a freelance photographer for a daily newspaper, after which he became an editor until 2010. From St. Georg to the Speicherstadt and Deichstraße: These photos of…
Guards of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp: The Banality of Evil in Portraits.N
The term “banality of evil,” introduced by political scientist Hannah Arendt, expresses the disturbing idea that ordinary people can commit cruel acts. The portraits of the Bergen-Belsen camp guards vividly illustrate this concept. Despite their banal and unremarkable appearance in…
Racial education classes at a school for German girls, 1943
German students take part in racial education classes in 1943. The three groups depicted on the poster are (from top to bottom) the “East Baltic race,” the “Eastern race,” and the “Dinaric race.” All three groups were considered sub-races of…
The Last Days of the GDR: 40 Fascinating Photographs Capturing Everyday Life in Berlin in the Late 1980s
Between 1961 and 1989, the Berlin Wall divided East and West Germany, preventing mass exodus after World War II. During the Cold War, it also served as a symbolic dividing line between democracy and communism. The Wall was built in…
The Second World War – Faces of a Defeat
On July 13, 1944 , approximately five weeks after the Allied landings in Normandy, a wounded German soldier is escorted from a landing craft at a port in southern England by two American medics . The prisoner had been wounded during the fighting in Normandy and is now…
Rare photos of devastated Germany during World War II
Cologne Cathedral in World War II Bridges over the Rhine POW camp in Remagen, Germany prisoners of war Frankfurt am Main Cologne, Germany Bombed bridge Bombed hospital…
Battle for Berlin: April-May 1945
In August 2016, I saw an online ad for sale negatives by Soviet war photographer Valery Faminsky, who had photographed in Crimea in 1944 and Germany in 1945 during the Great Patriotic War. I had never heard of this photographer’s…
Historical photographs of destroyed Berlin in 1945.
In April 1945, as Russian and German troops fought bitterly street by street for control of the German capital, it became increasingly clear that the Allies would win the war in Europe.