Uncovering Soviet Photos of the Holocaust and World War II

University of Colorado history professor David Shneer's lecture at Encina Hall Wednesday was much more than an objective display of vintage black-and-white photographs.

Pointing toward the meaning behind the images, Shneer revealed why half of the photographers in the Red Army were Jewish, how editors chose which photos to publish based on their propaganda value, and how American and Russian photojournalists differed in their depictions of Holocaust scenes.

Shneer’s talk, “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War and the Holocaust,” was based on his recent book of the same title and sponsored by Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES).

Shneer began his eight years of research and image collecting in Moscow after viewing a photo exhibition called “Women at War,” which showed how Soviet women—unlike American and British women—fought on the front lines and in the crews of fighter planes. Concurrently, he observed that all the photographers had Jewish-sounding names and discussed this phenomenon with the curator, who was the granddaughter of one of the photographers.

Shneer found that being a professional photographer in Russia in the early days of the 20th century was like managing a high-tech start-up today. Under the tsars, Jews had been restricted to living in a “Pale of Settlement” that surrounded Russia. Becoming a photographer, then, was a way to get permission to live in St. Petersburg or Moscow—as well as a more interesting path than joining the ranks of tailors and cobblers. And as one Jewish photographer became successful, he often invited friends and relatives to join him, thus creating a “chain migration” to the big city.

During the lecture, Shneer showed examples of photographs taken by Pyotr Otsup, one of the first Russian Jewish photographers. He was the leading photographer during the Russo-Japanese War, as well as in the aborted revolution in 1905, World War I and the Revolution in 1917.

Another Jewish photographer, Moisei Nappelbaum, created iconic images of Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders, as well as famous Soviet cultural figures.

By 1925, photographs began appearing in Der Emes, a Yiddish language Soviet newspaper. The photos Shneer displayed were intended to lure Jews to the newly established Jewish autonomous oblast of Birobidzhan in Russia’s Far East near China.

Evgenii Khaldei became famous as the photographer of the Reichstag in ruins in April 1945 when the Soviets took Berlin. This photo is often compared with Joe Rosenthal’s shot of the American flag being raised on Iwo Jima. 

On numerous occasions before photographing a city liberated by the Red Army, Khaldei planted a Soviet flag in a prominent position.

Working for the TASS wire service, Khaldei’s photos were seen all over the world. His war photography began with a street scene in Moscow of people hearing the broadcast of the declaration of war against Germany. His photo of the scorched earth devastation of Russian’s northern port city of Murmansk in 1942 is an eerie sight, with chimneys standing like tombstones as the only remaining structures.

Khaldei’s photo of a couple wearing Jewish stars in the ghetto of German-occupied Budapest was not published in mainstream media during the war, because it was considered “too Jewish.” However it was published in the Yiddish press.

Many of the shots taken by the Soviet photographers were ultimately used as evidence in war crimes trials. Perhaps, the first photo of Nazi atrocities appeared in Ogonyek, the Russian magazine that has often been compared to Life magazine. Taken by a German photographer, the photo shows Poles being forced to dig their own graves. Ogonyek published it just four days after the declaration of war. Consequently, Shneer thinks it was used to generate anti-Fascist propaganda.

Shneer showed several Holocaust photographs taken by American liberators, including one showing Elie Wiesel in Buchenwald. “While photos taken by Americans often showed survivors, the Soviet images were typically of corpses, ruins and burial pits,” Shneer said. He also pointed out that Soviet editors referred to the Holocaust murder victims as “Soviet-citizens” rather than “Jews,” because it would be better for propaganda.

Shneer’s talk ended with his discovery that, based on research through the Library of Congress, the U.S. Office of War Information had obtained many of these Soviet Holocaust photos in the early 1940s but had never published them. He referred to Laurel Leff’s book Buried in the Times, which reveals how The New York Times would not portray Jews as the particular victims of Nazism—and how it gave very little print to the news of genocide targeting Jews as it emerged from Europe.