Photography as a Wartime Service to Family and Nation in Nazi-occupied Europe

Abstract

Abstract Photography’s significance for German soldiers and their families during the Second World War is especially apparent when it is seen as a social practice rather than simply a series of images. As this article demonstrates, photography was critical for maintaining wartime sociability between war and home fronts, a function that Nazi state officials, military leaders and businesspeople promoted years before the war began. With the encouragement of the Nazi regime, deployed soldiers and their families understood exchanging photographs and compiling photo albums as more than mere acts of personal communication; they were a patriotic duty. This article explores how photography functioned as a wartime service to family and nation by focusing on the photograph collection of one member of Reserve Order Police Battalion 131, who between 1940 and 1942 sent his wife hundreds of photographs for their family albums. The policeman’s concerted emphasis on family and comradeship through his photography embodies what so many other German soldiers and civilians found appealing about wartime photography: as a communal practice, it allowed them to protect and honour the values of family, comradeship and community, which had taken on new significance during the Third Reich and would be tested during the Second World War.