Manufacturing Hate: Nazi Photography and the "Parasite" Image in the Warsaw Ghetto

1939 in the Warsaw Ghetto. Emanuel Ringelblum decided to refute the Nazi narrative of Polish Jewry. Ringelblum, forty years old at the time, was the perfect man for the job: he was an eminent historian whose doctorate focused on the early history of Warsaw Jewry. He was also a realist. Professor Samuel Kassow argues in his book Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archives that after the Great Deportation in late 1942, Ringelblum feared there was no chance for wide scale survival for Polish Jews. Warsaw Jewry, once arguably the crown jewel of Ashkenazi Judaism, was living on borrowed time.

Ringelblum fully understood how Nazi propaganda worked. First, the Nazis crammed all the Jews of Warsaw and its surrounding areas into the Warsaw Ghetto. The ghettos were established as a temporary solution as Nazi leadership decided what European Jewry’s ultimate fate would be; the Nazis also exploited Jewish labor within the ghettos, forcing Jews to work in factories and workshops that served the German war effort. Next, the Nazis claimed that the ghetto’s bad conditions were actually the rich Jews’ fault, as they indulged in espressos at the ghetto’s cafes and continued to dress luxuriously while they exploited impoverished Jews. Nazi propaganda effectively argued that the Reich was the first line of defense against the Jewish threat.

Ringelblum set out to chronicle Polish Jewry’s last chapter. He formed the underground Oyneg Shabes archives, a diverse group of historians, writers, teachers, artists and “ordinary” ghetto residents. Together, they collected testimonies, diary entries and official documents to show posterity both the German crimes against humanity and the brave Polish Jews’ struggle to preserve their humanity. It was time for the masses of the Jewish metropolis to claim their history themselves. Ringelblum also hoped that even if all its archivists were killed, the Oyneg Shabes documents would survive so that they could serve future generations to prevent similar evil from ever resurfacing.

Ringelblum’s thesis - or the fears that motivated it - are confirmed here in this private photo album taken by a Luftwaffe soldier stationed in the Warsaw Ghetto. The collection reflects the multifold goals of Nazi photography of Polish Jewry.  While the Reich sent Nazi camera crews and photographers to officially document the daily life of the ghetto, curious soldiers also took photos of the alien people they were imprisoning. They often sent photos of these fascinating creatures - the archetype of Eastern European Jewry that young German men had never had the opportunity to see before - to their families, who ogled at the exotic world of the ghetto from afar.        

In photo #1 we see a group of emaciated, staggered Jews sitting in despair on the street. The exaggerated poverty on display strips the subjects of any agency, implying that the ghetto Jews never tried to alleviate their suffering or suffering, passively accepting their fate instead.

In photo #2, we see a stark contrast between the more elegantly dressed pedestrian and the battered man slumped in defeat in the rubble. The elderly man appears to have held on to a semblance of normalcy of a previous life  - before the Nazi occupation or ghettoization- and his apparent ability to continue with his daily life stands in stark contrast to the neglected man laying in despair. The photographer’s message is clear: there is a cruel hierarchy even amongst imprisoned Jews, and Jews have no sympathy or even basic awareness of their fellow Jews’ suffering. Jews, the logic maintains, are incapable of contributing to their own society, let alone to European society.

In her book Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence, Janina Struk explains that the German soldiers were obsessed with the anti-Semitic trope that Jewish culture was inherently decadent. Adam Czerniakow, the head of Warsaw’s Judenrat (Jewish Council) who committed suicide on July 23rd 1942 so he would not round up the ghetto’s Jews to be killed in the extermination camps, recorded in May 1942 that German propagandists loved to highlight disparities of extreme destitution and splendor, conveniently ignoring all of the initiatives the Jews built themselves to take care of each other.

Struk explains that German film crews forced relatively well-dressed pedestrians to act as if they were lazily chattering with one another over food and drinks - props that hardly reflected any ghetto Jew’s diet - in an opulent apartment. Struk cites Chaim Aaron Kaplan, the prominent educator who perished in Treblinka but whose diary Scroll of Agony was smuggled out of the ghetto, who explains that Nazis often confined beautiful and fashionable Jewish women into a restaurant and commanded them to laugh, creating the blatant illusion that they enjoyed a carefree life. Czerniakow describes a dehumanizing scene where the SS order him to provide them with twenty Hasidic Jew and twenty “high society” women so they could film them engaging in an absurdly staged orgy.  Families across German-occupied Europe would watch the debased, sex-obsessed Jews dripping in fancy clothing. With cruel propaganda successfully poisoning the minds of so many Europeans throughout the Shoah, it is no wonder that many civilians saw Jewry as an inferior, animalistic race and the Germans  as the savior of European civilization.

Photo #3 shows the glorious masculinity that the Third Reich purported to embody. The reclining officer’s white uniform signifies his rank and authority over the ghetto’s tormented Jews. the fourth photo displays two soldiers joking around in a garden; the lush scenery is juxtaposed against the destruction rampant across the ghetto, and the jovial soldier’s laugh is likewise an absurd contrast to the wailing Jewish children begging for food on the street next to piles of corpses. The Nazi ideal was hypermasculinity and the Jewish male, by extension, embodied everything effeminate and weak. It was the Nazi ideal man, Ringelblum describes in his diary on May 20th 1941, who thrived leading excursions to the ghetto’s graveyard where they - soldiers and approved tourists alike - gleefully snapped shots of the piles of bodies waiting for burial.  Ringelblum bitterly adds that some of these valiant German men were disappointed with the “low” number of Jewish deaths in the graveyard of a community undergoing a gradual destruction.

This photo album - and the Nazi propaganda machine at large - omits many things; the Oyneg Shabes archives battle this cruel, historical omission. These photos do not show Janusz Korczak continuing to run his educationally cutting-edge orphanage for 200 children and teach about their fundamental rights and democracy, even when any semblance of basic human rights was robbed of Korczak and his fellow Warsaw Jews. The Nazi narrative haughtily declared that Jews were inherently selfish and either enjoyed or were completely apathetic to the suffering of their struggling compatriots. There was no room for the fact that Korzcak, a famous personality on the Polish radio, refused several opportunities offered by Christian friends to hide on the Aryan side of the city,  choosing instead to stay with the orphanage’s children, who he saw as his own. Korczak knew that sharing the orphanage’s fate meant they would all be murdered in the East. He had the chance to escape a certain death but chose not to take it: his last act of heroism, of a camaraderie rendering the Nazi values of masculinity and sacred brotherhood ludicrous.

The Nazi narrative gloated that the better off Jews gauged on fine dining right next to completely neglected Jewish beggars but in reality, while battling her own severe hunger, Rokhl Auerbach managed a soup kitchen that fed thousands of starving people. Her soup kitchen fostered a vital sense of community and provided emotional support alongside physical sustenance. As a member of Ringelblum’s archives, Auerbach would gather countless first-hand testimonies from within the soup kitchen that spoke to the ghetto’s rampant hunger. She was one of three core members of Oyneg Shabes who survived. Ringelblum was murdered in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in March 1944.

The Nazis envisioned a postwar museum in Prague that would memorialize European Jewry through vivid photographs and artifacts from the ghettos, camps and killing pits.  The museum would serve as the ultimate Nazi triumph over the extinct Jewish race. But in the battle over historical narratives, Ringelblum has emerged victorious over the poisonous Nazi photographs that justified the murder of approximately six million Jews. Yad Vashem, which Auerbach helped to establish after she uncovered the Oyneg Shabes archives in 1946 and 1950 respectively, stands proudly in the heart of Jerusalem, ensuring the memory of the victims is never forgotten, instead of a Nazi museum in Prague boasting the decimation of European Jewry.

Bibliography:

• Struk, Janina. Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence. Routledge, n.d. 2005
• Kassow, Samuel D. Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018.