Crossing Borders in the Summer of 1935: Fritz Fürstenberg’s Photographs of Persecution in National Socialist Germany

Abstract

Abstract While there are hundreds of written accounts of the Holocaust, there are only a few photographs known to document the fate of the persecuted from their own point of view. This article presents the case study of a photographic series taken inside Germany by Jewish businessman Fritz Fürstenberg in order to provide evidence of National Socialist persecution beyond its borders. After a close reading that reveals where and under which circumstances Fürstenberg took his photographs, the article broadens its scope to discuss how the images were eventually used in the Netherlands as a means of documenting National Socialist persecution. In the process, the article’s authors add another layer to the ‘integrated history’ famously advocated by Saul Friedländer, and call attention to the astonishing fact that research into such private photographs is still a desideratum—and as such a promising field for future research.