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June 21, 2011, 5:00 am
Mysteries of a Nazi Photo Album
By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Wednesday | Updated

Readers of Lens and EinesTages quickly figured out that the photographer was Franz Krieger. (“World War II Mystery Solved in a Few Hours.”) And that his wife and children did not survive the war.

DESCRIPTION

Lens has shared this story with Der Spiegel, the leading German newsweekly, and Spiegel Online, its Web edition. We hope readers of Spiegel’s EinesTages site (Once Upon a Time) can help solve a 70-year-old mystery: Who created this photo album of the Eastern Front?

Lens hat Spiegel Online bei dieser Geschichte um Unterstützung gebeten. Wir hoffen, dass die Leser von EinesTages uns helfen können, ein 70-jähriges Geheimnis zu lüften: Wer hat dieses Fotoalbum von der Ostfront fotografiert und angelegt?

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?
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection,
via The New York Times Page 11: Bus window.

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.
DESCRIPTIONThe central figure in the album; presumably the photographer himself.
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection,
via The New York Times

After the interlude with Hitler, the photographer is found recuperating in some kind of convalescent home. He holds his medical chart up to the camera, but it’s impossible to read. From there, it is on to Bavaria, where a motorcycle squad seems to be staging a display of its prowess. Finally, in and around Munich, the photographer is reunited with a pretty woman who may, or may not, be his wife. Or sister. Or mistress.

So many mysteries remain. We’re hoping that the readers of Lens and the Spiegel Online site EinesTages (Once Upon a Time) will help us unlock this highly personal and quite professional wartime chronicle.

The album is owned by a 72-year-old executive in the fashion industry who lives in New Jersey and works in the garment district of Manhattan. He lent it to The New York Times in the hope that press coverage — and a better sense of the album’s provenance — would increase its value. He would like to use proceeds from a sale, which he hopes will be “six figures or higher,” to pay medical bills and get out of debt. He has undergone quadruple bypass surgery and has declared personal bankruptcy. Not all of his colleagues and competitors know that, or that he owns such an album, so he requested anonymity.
This album, which surfaced recently in New York, shows the Eastern Front and Bavaria.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThis album, which surfaced recently in New York, shows the Eastern Front and Bavaria.

He said the photo album and 50,000 baseball trading cards were given to him by a manual laborer of his acquaintance who had fallen on hard times and had to borrow money from the executive. The objects amounted to repayment of the cash loan. The executive said the worker told him he had received the album from an old German man whose lawn he had maintained. Because there are nine pictures of Hitler in the 24-page album, all who handled it were sure it must have some value.

“I knew I had a part of history,” the executive said, “and I was very troubled about it falling into the wrong hands. But my needs are great.”

We accepted the detective assignment with the understanding that we would make our conclusions public even if they undermined the value of the album. And we told the executive that we would not ask any expert to hazard a guess as to the album’s monetary value.

Our only interest was in presenting readers with some astonishing close-up pictures of a great turning point in the Second World War — and in solving a historical puzzle.
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York TimesPage 7: Somewhere in Belarus.

We turned first to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“This album differs from most other albums in the quality of the photos,” said Judith Cohen, the director of the photographic reference collection at the museum. “The photographer was clearly a professional and knew what he was doing. It is possible that it is a personal album of a PK photographer.”

The PK, or Propagandakompanie, was the field unit of the Wehrmacht’s propaganda corps. So that alone was a valuable lead. But Ms. Cohen offered an even more important clue. One of the prison pictures in the album (Slide 3) turned out to be identical to photograph No. 1907/15 from the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, in the collection of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, in Jerusalem.
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York TimesPage 8: At a prison camp in Minsk.

That pinpointed the location of the prison camp in Minsk and fixed the year at 1941. It established that the uniforms seen on some of the prisoners — including the distinctively pointed budenovka (Slide — were those of the Red Army. And it brought Daniel Uziel, the head of photo collections at Yad Vashem, into the conversation.

“It was quite common for PK commanding officers or even individual photographers to prepare private photo albums,” he said. “These were kept either by the company’s staff or were given to generals, party members, etc.

“The dissemination of PK photography after World War II is a fascinating and only partially researched topic,” Dr. Uziel said. “This is obviously one of those cases where PK photos found their way out of the wartime propaganda fraternity and its related archives. We recently learned that some Jewish historical committees active in Europe immediately after the end of World War II got their hands on copies of such photos.”
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York TimesPage 9: At a prison camp in Minsk. “There are not many photos of marked Jewish P.O.W.’s,” said Daniel Uziel of Yad Vashem, “because usually they were handed over to the S.S. within a very short time of their marking and were duly executed.”

After looking at selected images sent to him by e-mail, Dr. Uziel said, “Although some photos are clearly propagandistic and shot according to official guidelines, most of the photos are typical ‘battlefield tourism’ in nature.” He explained that the vertically cropped pictures of individual prisoners were standard “PK portraits of Soviet P.O.W.s, made along specific regulations and requests by the Wehrmacht and the Propaganda Ministry.”

“I would say that only those clearly marked with the yellow badge are Jewish,” Dr. Uziel wrote. “There are not many photos of marked Jewish P.O.W.’s because usually they were handed over to the S.S. within a very short time of their marking and were duly executed.”

Minsk was not only the setting of the prison camp, but also the city whose bombed-out streets and buildings show up in numerous pictures. That was confirmed when Prof. Larry Wolff of New York University, the director of the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, recognized the Baroque spires of the Blessed Virgin Mary Roman Catholic Church. The drumlike Opera and Ballet Theater is another unmistakable landmark.
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York TimesPage 6: Spires of the Blessed Virgin Mary Roman Catholic Church in Minsk are visible through buildings hollowed out by German bombs.

What was most useful in establishing the album’s time frame was the meeting between Hitler and Horthy in September 1941. It was known even to American audiences through Life magazine, which published a photo that seems to have been taken only inches away from where the PKs photographer stood at the train station where the two leaders met. The setting was Ketrzyn, Poland, then an East Prussian city called Rastenburg, where Hitler had the war headquarters known as the Wolf’s Lair (Wolfsschanze).
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York TimesPage 13: Adolf Hitler and Admiral Miklos Horthy, the regent of Hungary, met in September 1941. Life covered their summit at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters, publishing a picture almost identical to this.

“Here Horthy insisted that the Hungarian expeditionary force be withdrawn from the Russian front, believing that the Russian campaign was virtually over,” said Prof. Istvan Deak of Columbia University. “Hitler gave his consent.”

(Horthy and Hitler were not alone in believing that the campaign was almost over in the fall of 1941, after German troops had made spectacular progress in their advance toward Moscow. But when the juggernaut was stalled by the resistance of Russian citizens and soldiers, and the punishing Russian winter set in, the tide was to turn dramatically.)
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York TimesPage 5: A German front-line military cemetery.

Only a few names are to be found in the album. Among them are those on the markers of what Dr. Uziel described as a standard German military cemetery established close to the front lines, with a building behind it whose modernity and massiveness suggests Soviet architecture. The names that are legible include:

Ogefr. (Senior corporal) Gust. Dumke, Flieg. (Air Force private) Fried. Gebhardt, Kf. (Driver) Kurt Henze, Gefr. (Corporal) Bernh. Klassen, Uffz. (Sergeant) Albert Mann, Schtz. (Private) Fritz Wagner and Uffz. (Sergeant) Albert Zimmer.

In the course of seven decades, only two pictures fell out of the album. One is missing. The other — a group picture of 11 officers — is loose, allowing a faintly penciled-in caption to be read, placing it in Bregenz, Austria, on Jan. 1, 1942.
DESCRIPTIONThis group portrait was printed on a much different paper. It is the only loose picture in the album with a caption.
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York Times

The concluding part of the album is centered in Bavaria, first at the Gebirgs-Motor-Sportschule (Mountain Motorsports School) in the town of Kochel am See, operated by the National Socialist Motor Corps. Then it moves to Munich, where the photographer dresses in civilian clothes and seems to have a female companion at his side — or in his viewfinder — at all times. “She’s doing her best to look like Marlene Dietrich,” noted Prof. Marvin J. Taylor, the director of the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University, as he looked at a particularly fetching pose.
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection,
via The New York TimesPage 24: Outside the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.

Professor Taylor called attention to the fact that the pictures were printed on two different types of paper: Agfa Brovira and Leonar. He invited us to consider the possibility that the pictures were culled from a number of sources, not just the PK photographer’s own work; that the album may have been compiled and pasted up by his companion or someone else with little interest in faithful narrative cohesion or chronological order.

Beware of inference, in other words. Professor Taylor has learned this lesson from dealing with other personal photo albums. “We think we can get so close to these people, but we can’t,” Professor Taylor said. “They are not the same people we are. We come up with assumptions — and the material always undermines what we think.”

Dr. Uziel agreed. “The eclectic selection of topics, the different styles of photography and the different papers may suggest an album fetched together by someone else,” he said.

At the very least, Professor Wolff said, there are two albums contained between the covers: one showing the Eastern Front and the other showing Munich and Bavaria. “Maybe the key,” he said, “is to fit them together.” We welcome your assistance in trying to do so.

Locations, Known and Unknown
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York Times Page 4: What is this mural doing in Prussia? Is this even in Prussia?
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York TimesPage 4: This building has a Nazi emblem at the cornice.
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York TimesPage 5: The Opera and Ballet Theater in Minsk.
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York TimesPage 6: Presumably Minsk.
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York TimesPage 12: The Malbork Castle in Malbork, Poland (known in German as Marienburg). The tower was destroyed in 1945.
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York Times Page 18: Presumably at the Mountain Motorsports School.

William P. O’Donnell, assistant editor and manager of image support, made all but two of the scans. Reporting was contributed by J. P. Roth.

June 22, 2011, 5:00 am
World War II Mystery Solved in a Few Hours
By DAVID W. DUNLAP

As Tuesday dawned, what we knew about an anonymous photo album by a Nazi photographer was only what could be inferred from its 214 pictures (all but one uncaptioned). We could see he had amazing access: taking portraits of Russian and Jewish prisoners one month, standing just a few feet from Adolf Hitler the next. We knew he had been to the Eastern Front, we surmised that he worked for the Propagandakompanie and we guessed that the pretty woman in the album’s closing pages was someone special.

There was a striking divide in the album between his Eastern Front pictures, which ended with his convalescence somewhere, and the postcard pictures he took around the Bavarian countryside and in central Munich, when the young woman seemed always at his side.

It was as if war could somehow be partitioned from everyday life. And love.

Of course, that isn’t how war goes.

We now know that the photographer was Franz Krieger, a native of Salzburg, Austria, who lived until 1993. And we know that the woman was Frieda Krieger, his wife. She was killed on Nov. 17, 1944 — as was their 2-year-old daughter, Heidrun — when America’s 15th Air Force bombed Salzburg.
Franz and Frieda Krieger in Munich, probably in 1942.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesFranz and Frieda Krieger in Munich, probably in 1942.

The death and devastation seen in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the album, seemingly so distant from the photographer’s own world, had enveloped Bavaria and Austria within two years and claimed most of Krieger’s family in the bargain. (A baby boy died in October 1944.)

We know all this Tuesday evening because on Tuesday morning, Lens and EinesTages, a Spiegel Online site (loosely translated as Once Upon a Time), simultaneously published posts asking readers to help us find out who had created this chilling, fascinating and unidentified document. (“Mysteries of a Nazi Photo Album” on Lens; “Das Rätsel des Nazi-Fotoalbums,” by Marc Pitzke, on EinesTages.)

Before lunchtime in New York, Harriet Scharnberg had written from Hamburg, Germany, to say:

The photographs, at least a lot of them, were taken by the photographer Franz Krieger (1914-1993). Krieger worked as a photojournalist in Salzburg, Austria. In the summer of 1941, he went to Minsk as a member of the Reichs-Autozug Deutschland. In Minsk, he took pictures of Soviet prisoners of war and he also visited the Jewish ghetto and photographed the poor people there. On his way back to Berlin, he took the pictures of Hitler meeting [Adm. Miklos] Horthy in Marienburg.

Ms. Scharnberg explained in a subsequent e-mail that she is writing her Ph.D. dissertation at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg on German propaganda photographs depicting Jews. This is her specialty as a historian, she said. She has worked in the photo archives of the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial and at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.

In the course of trying to learn more about photos of the Minsk ghetto, Ms. Scharnberg said, she came across the 2008 book, “The Salzburg Press Photographer Franz Krieger (1914-1993): Photojournalism in the Shadow of Nazi Propaganda and War,” by Peter F. Kramml.

“Of course, the pictures came to my mind immediately when I saw them and read the descriptions today at Spiegel Online and The New York Times Lens,” she said. We received her communiqué 3 hours 45 minutes after publishing the post.

Dr. Kramml, too, was most forthcoming, all but clinching the case for Krieger’s authorship by sending a copy of a self-portrait in a rear-view mirror identical to one of the prints in the mystery album. (Slide 16.) The city of Salzburg, Dr. Kramml said, holds 35,000 negatives by Krieger in its municipal archive. He shared the outlines of Krieger’s life:
DESCRIPTIONSalzburg Municipal Archive A picture by Franz Krieger of Marlene Dietrich in Salzburg in the late 1930s.

After graduating with a business degree from the University of Vienna, Krieger opened a business in Salzburg. But he wanted to be a photojournalist. Between 1935 and 1937, he photographed the Salzburg Festival — and stars like Marlene Dietrich. After the German annexation of Austria, Krieger went to work for the Salzburg reichsgau, a Nazi administrative subdivision. In that capacity, Dr. Kramml said, “he took most of the important pictures in Salzburg from 1938 until 1941.”

Krieger joined the Nazi Party and the Schutzstaffel, the Nazi special police, but left the SS in 1941 and became a member of the Propagandakompanie, a propaganda unit of the Wehrmacht. In August 1941, he set out on the trip to the Eastern Front that is chronicled in the album: from Berlin to Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) to Minsk, Belarus. “Here, he took pictures of the Jewish ghetto and the soldiers’ cemetery,” Dr. Kramml wrote, adding that the Germans buried outside the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus had been killed in August.

On his way home, as Ms. Scharnberg noted, Krieger photographed the meeting in Marienburg (now Malbork, Poland) in early September 1941 between Hitler and Admiral Horthy, the regent of Hungary. Heinrich Hoffmann’s photos, on the BPK Photo Agency site, also record that event, as a commenter named Kassandra noted.

After that, Krieger left the Propagandakompanie and “became a simple soldier, a driver,” Dr. Kramml said. He began training in Bregenz, Austria, in November 1941, which explains the presence in the album of the picture captioned “Bregenz 1.1.1942.”
DESCRIPTIONPrivate collection, via The New York TimesThe building in this picture by Krieger was identified Tuesday by Lens readers as the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.

By August 1942, Krieger was back in Russia; this time as a supply driver. That placed him near Stalingrad. In what might be considered a lucky break, he developed jaundice and was evacuated by train before the momentous Battle of Stalingrad began. “Otherwise,” Dr. Kramml said, “he would have been surrounded.” His illness may explain the convalescent pictures toward the end of the album. Frieda Krieger was making frequent appearances in the album pages by this time, in picturesque mountain settings and around the streets of Munich.

After the war, Dr. Kramml said, Krieger picked up his business career again and left professional photography behind. He would later say that some of his wartime photographs had been given away by his mother. “Perhaps he wanted to hide them,” Dr. Kramml said. Some of those pictures — perhaps the very album that is now in the hands of a garment executive in New York who lent it to The Times — were presumed to have ended up in Bavaria. “Probably one of the U.S. soldiers in Bavaria took them to the U.S.A. after 1945,” Dr. Kramml said.

If what he says is true, it may be that the American soldier had no sense of the album’s significance, besides the remarkable proximity of prisoners and Führer. Neither, perhaps, did any subsequent owner. Neither did the editors at The Times and Der Spiegel. All we had on Tuesday morning were a few facts and a lot of conjecture.

Now, we have what journalists are always looking for: a story.

William P. O’Donnell, assistant editor and manager of image support, made the scans. J. P. Roth contributed reporting.