Held as part of the Traces of Belsen Exhibition Event series.

Much of the imagery that emerged from Nazi-occupied Europe is marked by the clandestine nature in which it was often secured.

According to Struk some images were taken from a place of hiding or framed by the fabric of clothes or materials concealing the camera lens. Other images were taken by Nazis themselves who brazenly photographed their own crimes. These were secured by civilian workers in photo laboratories who recognised the propaganda value of the incriminating images. In occupied Poland a sophisticated underground network emerged. Films were stuffed inside specially adapted everyday objects – a pen or a key – and carried at great risk across heavily guarded borders by couriers – among them a Swedish businessman based in occupied Warsaw who smuggled the first report concerning the Nazi leadership’s decision in early 1942 to launch the so-called ‘Final Solution’ to exterminate all European Jews.

After Germany’s defeat in 1945, photographs taken and secured by the resistance were used as evidence in the War Crimes Trials. The images from Birkenau for example were used to convict Rudolf Höss, the former commandant of Auschwitz.

After the trials ended the changing post-war world political order determined the way in which images were used and understood. Struk interrogates how some – seen as important collections today – were neglected for decades, including those taken in the ghettos by Jewish photographers or those buried in Emanuel Ringeblum’s remarkable secret Warsaw Ghetto archive which was unearthed shortly after the war.

Struk’s exploration demonstrates not only the manifold reasons for photographing the crimes committed by the Nazis, but also the ways the images have – and continue to be – interpreted. She questions whether the ways in which we have engaged with them has honoured those who risked their lives to take and secure them.

About the speaker

Janina Struk is a freelance documentary photographer, writer and lecturer. She is the author of the acclaimed book, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (2004), which presents a history and critique of images taken during the Holocaust, and Private Pictures: Soldiers’ Inside View of War (2011), a thought-provoking perspective of soldiers’ pictures that span the wars of the past hundred years. Her recent book, Photography and Resistance: Securing the Evidence in Nazi-Occupied Europe, published in November 2024 by Routledge, tells the stories of those who resisted fascism in Europe by taking or securing photographs.