100 PHOTOGRAPHS 51
Spectacle was like oxygen for the Nazis, and Heinrich
Hoffmann was instrumental in staging Hitler’s grow-
ing pageant of power. Hoffmann, who joined the party
in 1920 and became Hitler’s personal photographer and
confidant, was charged with choreographing the regime’s
propaganda carnivals and selling them to a wounded Ger-
man public. Nowhere did Hoffmann do it better than on
September 30, 1934, in his rigidly symmetrical photo at
the Bückeberg Harvest Festival, where the Mephistoph-
elian Führer swaggers at the center of a grand Wagnerian
fantasy of adoring and heiling troops. By capturing this
and so many other extravaganzas, Hoffmann—who took
more than 2 million photos of his boss—fed the regime’s
vast propaganda machine and spread its demonic dream.
Such images were all-pervasive in Hitler’s Reich, which
shrewdly used Hoffmann’s photos, the stark graphics on
Nazi banners and the films of Leni Riefenstahl to make
Aryanism seem worthy of godlike worship. Humiliated by
World War I, punishing reparations and the Great De-
pression, a nation eager to reclaim its sense of self was ral-
lied by Hitler’s visage and his seemingly invincible men
aching to right wrongs. Hoffmann’s expertly rendered
propaganda is a testament to photography’s power to
move nations and plunge a world into war.