Photography and the Making of the Nazi Racial Community

by Julie R. Keresztes

Photography and the Making of the Nazi Racial Community examines the role of photography in the construction of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, a racially exclusive community, during the Third Reich. Julie R. Keresztes explores how the dictatorship promoted photography for those who belonged to that community and excluded Jews from the practice. As Nazi officials dispossessed Jewish photographers and robbed them of their equipment, studios, and lives, they made photography more accessible to non-Jewish Germans. But they inadvertently created spaces for photography to be used as resistance and revenge in concentration camps, where forced laborers salvaged photographs that exposed the extermination of Europe's Jews.

As the victims of Nazi persecution used photography to gather evidence of the Holocaust, German troops and their families used photography to portray themselves as dutiful members of the Volksgemeinschaft rather than show the reality of war and genocide. Ultimately, Photography and the Making of the Nazi Racial Community shows how the configuration of photography along racial lines shaped the imagery of the Second World War.

204 pages, Paperback

Published January 15, 2025

Reviews

[Julia Kerr · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an interesting book! Julie Kerestez emerges as an engaging, and thorough writer as she paints a clear picture of the role photography played in Nazi German. Not only was photography used as a way to advance the morale of the war effort, it was also used to further alienate the victims of the Holocaust. This book answered questions I would’ve never even thought to ask and I was engaged all the way through.