It is 1945, the Second World War has ended, nothing is left of Hitler’s Third Reich. A photo shows a destroyed building, somewhere in Germany, with painted in large letters “It took Hitler 12 years to do this”. It is a reference to the slogan with which Hitler promised the German people a glorious future in 1933: “Give me 4 years”.
The photo symbolizes the destruction and devastation that Hitler and his Nazi regime left behind, say NIOD researchers Erik Somers and René Kok. In recent years they have studied the role that photography has played in the sophisticated creation of the ‘Führer myth’ around the person of Hitler. Their book comes out today Adolf Hitler, the visual biography.
Propaganda
“Hitler was the first in history to emphatically use image as a means of amassing power and then use it more extensively to maintain power,” says Somers. The rise of Hitler and National Socialism in the 1920s therefore coincided exactly with the stormy rise of photography.
Somers and Kok studied tens of thousands of original photos of Hitler in archives. With each photo, they re-examined the historical context and the intention with which the image was made. “The research has given us much more insight into how image propaganda worked then.”
Heinrich Hoffmann, photographer and member of the NSDAP, convinced Hitler as early as 1923 that photography was an important means of increasing his fame and image as a strong man. “Hoffmann will also work with him in a studio, where Hitler practices gesturing as if he were giving a speech to a large audience,” says Kok. Hoffmann sold the photos as postcards.
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