Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews: A Photographic Album, Paris, 1940-1944Sarah GensburgerGeographies of the HolocaustEdited by Anne Kelley Knowles, Tim Cole, andAlberto Giordano

Abstract

In 2009, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) published the first volume of a planned seven-volume encyclopedia of camps and ghettos meant to document all sites of Nazi incarceration. More than 42,000 were identified, far more than the researchers had first estimated. The two books under review relate in significant ways to that sobering statistic. Sarah Gensburger’s meticulous presentation of a photographic album containing eighty-five originally uncaptioned images, discovered in the Federal Archives in Koblenz, takes a found object that is in some respects similar to the famous Auschwitz Album, and carefully dissects it. It is not known who took the pictures, though it appears they were collected, and perhaps produced, by Germans stationed in Paris and associated with the work depicted. Organized taxonomically by staff at the Munich Central Collecting Point, one of several depots created by the Allies to temporarily house looted objects and artworks they discovered at the end of World War II with the purpose of aiding in postwar restitution, the Koblenz album proceeds thematically from an introductory section depicting scenes in Paris, to views of the loading and unloading of trucks and then trains, to images of crates, and then to groups of looted objects themselves: garments, toys, tools, kitchenware, lamps, radios, clocks, furniture, and pianos.