An Image of the Past: Press Photography, Nazi Propaganda, and the Making of Politicized Memory

This article reconstructs the history of a photograph that commonly accompanies public, popular, and academic discussions of Nazi racial policy. It reveals the true origins of this photo, overturning all existing attributions in the academic literature, in museums, and in the popular media. We uncover the reasons for the most common misattributions of this image and scrutinize its de- and recontextualization by various historical actors—from Weimar Germany’s illustrated press to Nazi Germany’s propaganda, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to Holocaust museums worldwide, and from Israeli media outlets to Turkish Twitter accounts. We show that the mobilization of this photograph for various and often conflicting purposes relates to its positioning within the stock photography business, in the present as well as in the previous century. Its popularity stems from its ability to occupy a certain niche within stock photography, one that taps directly into our imagination, our visual iconography, of the past. The stock photography context alters our understanding of the photograph’s actual essence and of its career. Its use to offer a reassuring picture of different national pasts and the continual transformations in its meaning thus furnish novel insights into the relations between visual evidence, propaganda, memory, and historical consciousness.