Memory through the Perpetrator’s Lens: Witnessing via Images Taken by Wehrmacht Soldiers and Offi cers on the Eastern Front

Abstract

As the number of images taken by perpetrators, bystanders, and accomplices of the Holocaust continues to grow, privilege is, nevertheless, still given to images taken by victims and survivors in the ongoing and urgent search to remember and memorialize World War II and the Holocaust. Even as we rapidly approach a time when those who suffered and survived at the brutal hands of Nazi Germany will no longer be alive to tell their stories, an insistence on theirs as the only authentic perspective on the violent crimes continues. Furthermore, the denigration of perpetrator and bystander images as “biased” and “unreliable” comes in spite of repeated instances of unself-conscious dependence on visual representations taken by Germans-civilians, offi cers, soldiers, Nazis and non-Nazis-in discussions and historical exhibitions focused on the Holocaust and World War II.1 Lastly, there is a persistence of critical and historical discourses that malign the effectiveness of the image-no matter who has taken it-in favor of the use of written and oral texts for processes of witnessing. Such prejudices persist in spite of the proliferation of images that can contribute new and unusual perspectives to the work of memory, not only of World War II, but also, of other historical traumas in the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries.