Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany

3. The Privilege and Possibility of Color: The Case of Walter Genewein’s Photographs

■ 93 ■ 3 ■ The Privilege and Possibility of Color: The Case of Walter Genewein’s Photographs Some of the most extraordinary photographs from World War II were those taken in color. These images are remarkable because the technology used to produce and process color-transparency film stock was in its infancy in the late 1930s. Due to this innovation, together with beliefs regarding the potency of its representational qualities, the Nazis were keen to explore the color photograph as a weapon of domination. According to the Ministry of Propaganda, color photography had the potential to sway the masses emotionally and thus open people’s imaginations to political persuasion.¹ This said, however, its use was rare because the results were too unpredictable. Yet this unpredictability was the Nazis’ inspiration to put time and energy into the development of color film for use in a future they believed was theirs to own. As critics have pointed out, the first known color negative represented female workers before a laboratory in Wolfen with a swastika flag in the background.² As I detail in this chapter, the relationship between Agfa, a subsidiary of I. G. Farben, and the Ministry of Propaganda was ever more intimate as the war progressed . Color photography had a potentially key role in the realization of National Socialist goals, and I. G. Farben was happy to provide stock and processing, especially to high-ranking officers who could be entrusted to carry out experiments and explore developments in the new medium. Color stock fell into the hands of officers such as Walter Frentz, a photographer for the German Air Force who was to become Göring’s official photographer, and Adolf Würth, a research anthropologist for whom photography was central to the exposition of the “Gypsy and Jewish problems.”³ Weper Hermann was another photographer who produced color images of familiar scenes such as soldiers at rest and the 94 ■ the privilege and possibility of color campaign on the Eastern Front. Like Frentz and Würth, Hermann was employed as a unit photographer—for which he was equipped with a Leica camera—and radio operator. Another well-known set of color photographs is that made by Johannes Hähle of the roundup of Jews and prisoners of war in Kiev and their mass burial at Babi Yar ravine in 1941. Hähle was a member of Propaganda Unit PK37 of the Sixth Army, which was fighting in the Ukraine at the time.⁴ These officers were designated unit photographers and thus had access to color stock and processing. However, color stock was also known to be available to ordinary soldiers as amateurs, though perhaps not as readily.⁵ Nevertheless, in this chapter I focus on the photographs of Walter Genewein, chief accountant of the Lodz Ghetto and self-identified amateur photographer. Genewein himself may not be anonymous, but his photographs engage with the medium to incite a sustained reflection on their generic status as amateur color photographs. Moreover, I will show that Genewein was distant and absent from the anonymous realist images he took, ordered, and archived. This distance is, once again, key to the images’ role as potential agents in processes of witnessing the crimes committed in, around, and behind them. Genewein’s photographs came to me through their recycling on a rainy winter’s night in New York City when I saw the 1998 film Fotoamator (Photographer) by Dariusz Jablonski.⁶ Prior to the making of Jablonski’s film, the images were first brought to public attention when they were exhibited at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt in 1990.⁷ I was impressed by Fotoamator; I found it haunting, convincing, and thought-provoking, presenting a complex vision of the Holocaust. And perhaps most fascinating was its relationship to the images it presented. The film does not accuse them of anything, nor does it point a finger at their creator. It is true that the film uses conventional documentary strategies to reveal the images, but all the time, Jablonski draws attention to Genewein’s camera and film through the discrepancy of image–sound relations, the conflicting testimonies of those who are profiled, the use of color and black-andwhite footage, and other techniques I discuss later. Fotoamator seemed to be more about questions of the transparencies as representation—how they change across time, across generations and countries—and how to the privilege and possibility of...