Georg Vogt: Cataloguing the population of Thal in 1940

Abstract

Some ten years ago, I found my niece and nephew playing in the attic of my parents' house in Aedermannsdorf, in the Solothum disrrict of Thal, with several rolls of photographic negatives, having great fun using them as yo-yos. When I saw this, I immediately jumped in and said: ‘stop!’. I asked them where they had found the negatives, and they showed me a dusty old tin box. I rescued the box and found it contained altogether about twenty rolls of negatives, some quite dirty. I unrolled a few and looked at them. Initially I was disappointed, as I saw immediately that the negatives were all pictures of people. I thought they were variations on the usual pictures of the same family relatives. The only unusual thing was that the people always had the same pose. I decided, therefore, to have prints made of two of the fIlms. When I looked at them in the photo-shop, I immediately became aware of the treasure the children had stumbled across. I recognized people from my home town of Aedermannsdorf, looking back at me in the bloom of youth, but who at the end of the 1980s were well into their seventies. I asked my father, Georg Vogt, whether he had made these pictures. He said he had made them in 1940, when Hider invaded France. As a consequence, everyone was required to have identity cards made, and he had taken the passport photographs for them. So that was the story.