Project background
Photographs crucially defined National Socialism for contemporaries as well as later generations. Yet outside some instances of formal propaganda, scholars have paid little attention to photos – with ethical consequences that continue to affect the ways we remember Nazism and its victims today.
Millions of photos were taken in this period by hobbyist and casual photographers; an estimated 10% of Germans owned a camera in 1939, many more participated in the practice. These photos are records both of people's engagement with the dictatorship, and of their efforts to distance and separate themselves from it.
They are evidence of the interaction between ideology and subjectivity, of politics and lived experience: materially, because many albums mixed personal photos and ideological artefacts, eg, newspaper cuttings, and metaphorically, because many people positioned themselves in and through photos, as participants in public life under Nazism, at political events and rallies, in organised leisure programmes, child evacuations, volunteer and compulsory labour services, or in the war.
Some photos also offer insights into alternate private worlds that individuals sought to construct as a refuge or a place of separation from politics. In the case of Jewish Germans, photos show different emotional dispositions, contracting social spaces, narratives of emigration and escape, or experiences of persecution, in ways that challenge the official photographic record.
Advisory board
- (Professor for Modern German History at Humboldt University Berlin)
- (Director of Leo Baeck Institute London and Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary University of London)
- (Professor of Social History and Director of Brigstow Institute at the University of Bristol)
- (Associate Professor at Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut)
- William Niven (Professor in Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent University)
- (Photo Archivist and Chief Acquisitions Curator at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Museum partners
The National Holocaust Centre and Museum are project partners. Together, we have been awarded a further grant from Arts Council England, to create the exhibition , which will tour the UK in 2020 and 2021.
We have also appointed two international museum curators who work within our project team. They are Herbert Justnik, from the and Magdalena Vukovic from the .
Planned outputs Planned impacts
Eye Witness: Improving Public Engagement
Project team
This is an interdisciplinary project bringing together experts in their respective fields:
Maiken Umbach Elizabeth Harvey Experts on the relationship between subjectivity and ideology among the different groups living under the NS regime
Gary Mills Specialist in Holocaust education in schools
Steve Benford Specialist in supporting museums to use digital technologies to engage visitors with difficult ethical issues
Project consultant, Senior Researcher,
Jonathan Stafford Postdoctoral researcher, working on audience responses to photographs of National Socialism and the Holocaust
Honorary researcher, Rabbi and project advisor
Honorary researcher, expert in private Jewish photography