efforts of the Nazis—even propaganda minister
Joseph Goebbels regularly bemoaned the miserable
quality of the photographic material presented to
him. What happened in Germany in 1933 was to be
repeated in Austria in 1938: When the Nazis came
into the country, a number of photographers like
Wilhelm and Laszlo Willinger had to flee from their
homes and businesses.
Photography, of course, was an integral part of
the Nazi propaganda machine. As photography was
seen as inherently modern in proposition and effect,
there was no rejection of modern or even avant-
garde styles in the first years of the regime. In
1929, the Stuttgart exhibitionFilm und Fotohad
set the framework for a common foundation of
knowledge about modern German photography;
historically, this exhibition must be seen as an
important retrospective of the various experimental
techniques and styles of German photography to
date. When the exhibition traveled to a number of
German cities, it was welcomed by critics and public
alike, and graphic designers could no longer think of
effectively advertising products without using
photographs. As a result, modernism was well es-
tablished at the time of the Nazi regime, and a
number of modern designer-photographers contin-
ued working without change. Herbert Bayer worked
for advertising agencies and curated large exhibi-
tions featuring works that utilized photomontage,
serial imagery, and avant-garde leaflets. Bayer’s last
show accompanied the Berlin Olympic Games and
was an enormous success, while it also marked the
tolerance of modernism by the Nazis. In early 1938,
Bayer left for the United States, where he went on to
become a leading designer and photographer.
The fate of another modernist was not as lucky:
Else Simon-Neula ̈nder, better known under her
brand name Yva, was the most famous fashion
photographer in Germany of the 1930s and pub-
lished in all important magazines. In 1936, she was
urged to sell her business to a friend; in 1938, she
began work as an X-ray assistant in a Berlin hos-
pital. In 1942, she was deported to the Majdanek
concentration camp, where she is suspected to have
been murdered. Her last apprentice, Helmut Newton
(Neustaedter), however, survived by fleeing to Aus-
tralia. Many other photographers, including Lotte
Jacobi, left their businesses behind, sold them for
cheap or gave them away for nothing, using all of
their belongings to pay for their emigration. On the
other hand, some of these cheaply acquired photo-
studios allowed other careers to flourish, a pheno-
menon which continued after World War II.
In many minds, Nazi photography is synonymous
with the work of Heinrich Hoffmann. A well-trained
portrait photographer with stages abroad, including
at the atelier of E. O. Hoppe ́in London, he opened a
small studio in Munich shortly before World War I.
In 1921, he met Adolf Hitler and became a personal
friend; Hitler eventually transferred to Hoffmann
the copyright of his image, resulting in the fact that
no one was allowed to take or sell photographs of
Hitler without Hoffmann’s permission. To this mo-
noculture of imagery came a racist ideology, as
spread in photographic books by Erna Lendvai-
Dircksen and Erich Retzlaff. The result was an
average boredom of the public when looking at
photographs, and this would only be overcome by
propaganda strategies of individual authorship. As
with the communist Arbeiterfotografie (Worker
Photograpy) movement, the Nazi government
tried to stimulate amateur photography by ins-
talling local groups, subsiding amateur magazines,
and combining sport or travel activities with photo-
graphy. Leni Reifenstahl is also closely associated
with the Nazi movement, especially her film and the
photographs adapted from it of the Berlin Games.
The amateurs, however, needed stars to look
up to, and by 1933, two were already available:
Walter Hege and Paul Wolff. Both were mode-
rately modern in their work; both were extremely
productive and actively teaching at workshops and
in academies, but their work focused in different
directions. Walter Hege was an interpreter of an-
cient ruins, and Paul Wolff depicted the beauty of
everyday life, especially for those few lucky and
rich enough to afford driving around Germany in
automobiles. In the late 1930s, he was followed by
the Austrian Stefan Kruckenhauser with similar
images on what was now called the Ostmark. Al-
bert Renger-Patzsch still was recognized as the
greatest photographer at the time but did not gain
the status of a star during this era as did Hege and
Wolff. The most important aim of these photogra-
phers and their role in state propaganda was not
achieved, however: to inspire a large number of
young women and men to become the next genera-
tion of propagandists. As a result, World War II
began with the Nazis undertaking great efforts to
install Propaganda companies (PK) and to enlist
such well-known photographers as Hanns Hub-
mann, Fritz Kempe, Hilmar Pabel, and Lothar
Ruebelt. But, despite their being masterfully pho-
tographed and printed, these military propaganda
pictures had little lasting influence.
Those images that would have interested the
German public in a totally different way were not
published before 1945: photographs of acts of per-
secution against Jews, the Sinti and Roma people,
political opponents, and all those not able or will-GERMANY AND AUSTRIA, PHOTOGRAPHY IN