3. La documentation photographique des cimetières juifs de Hambourg

Abstract

This article examines the photographic documentation of Hamburg’s Jewish cemeteries based on the Hertz family archive, the primary source of these images. It discusses who contributed to this documentation and identifies their motivation for doing so.In 1935, the city of Hamburg called on two Jewish communities to clear the Jewish cemetery in the Grindel area. In response to the National Socialists’ threat to clear the cemetery, an effort to document the city’s Jewish cemeteries began in 1936 with the assistance of the lawyer Hans W. Hertz. Hertz aspired to a career in the State Archives but was turned away because he was deemed a “non-Aryan.” As a result, he turned to photo documentation. By producing memoranda and memoirs, he quickly become the main contributor and eventually led the effort. In the process, he forged an extensive network of well-known Jewish and non-Jewish financiers. In the following years, additional cemeteries were documented under Hertz’s direction in cooperation with representatives of the Jewish community.Beginning in 1943, Hertz entered into a brief but intensive cooperation with the National Socialist Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany, which photographed Jewish cemeteries in Germany. The goal of Reichsinstitut was undeniably racist and anti-Semitic. Hertz continued to document these sites after 1945. By the time the project finished in 1960, all Jewish cemeteries in Hamburg had been documented, and over twelve thousand photographs of Jewish gravestones were taken.