Visualizing Farewell: A Jewish Soldier’s Return to Postwar Germany through Private Photography

ABSTRACT

This article explores the experience of German-Jewish refugees who joined the U.S. Army and returned to Germany wearing uniforms through an examination of their private photographs. Focusing on two case studies of images taken by soldiers in 1945–6, the study uncovers their complex dynamics of identity and belonging as they confronted their traumatic past. These photographs reveal a profound detachment from sites of Jewish trauma, enabling the soldiers to bid farewell to their old Heimat on their own terms. By shedding light on their struggles, the analysis provides insights into the process of identity formation and memory negotiation.

KEYWORDS:

• Allied armies
• German Jews
• private photography
• trauma
• refugees
• return

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. David Jünger, “Farewell to the German-Jewish Past: Travelogs of Jewish Intellectuals Visiting Post-war Germany, 1945–1950,” in Juden und Nichtjuden nach der Shoah: Begegnungen in Deutschland, ed. Stefanie Fischer, Nathanael Riemer and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2019), 69.

2. Herbert Freeden, “Berlin – To-Day,” AJR Information (November 1947): 83. Cited in Jünger, “Farewell to the German-Jewish Past,” 69.

3. Hannah Arendt, “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany,” Commentary 10 (October 1950): 342–53. For insights into Arendt’s and Scholem’s attitudes towards their return to Germany, see Elisabeth Gallas, A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust, trans. Alex Skinner (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2019), 210–2. See also idem, “Hannah Arendt: Rückkehr im Schreiben,“ in “Ich staune, dass Sie in dieser Luft atmen können”: Jüdische Intellektuelle in Deutschland nach 1945, ed. Monika Boll and Raphael Gross (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2013), 233–63; Noam Zadoff, Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back, trans. Jeffrey Green (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018), 129–34; Jünger, ”Farewell to the German-Jewish Past.”

4. Maiken Umbach, “Selfhood, Place, and Ideology in German Photo Albums, 1933–1945,” Central European History 48, no. 3 (2015): 339.

5. Janina Struk, Private Pictures: Soldiers’ Inside View of War (London: Routledge, 2011), 69.

6. Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 259. According to Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, various professional photographers who toured Germany after the war adopted different perspectives. American and British photographers underwent a shift from capturing punitive images to compassionate ones. Soviet photographers, on the other hand, emphasized depictions that celebrated the triumphant subjugation of Germany. Within German post-war photography, there was a notable prominence of elegiac Ruinenfotografie, which became a distinctive genre in itself. See idem, “Gazing at Ruins: German Defeat as Visual Experience,” in The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History, ed. Jennifer Evans, Paul Betts and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018).

7. Ofer Ashkenazi, “Reading Private Photography: Pathos, Irony and Jewish Experience in the Face of Nazism,” American Historical Review 127, no. 4 (2022): 1607.

8. To clarify, the scope of this study does not encompass the topic of Jewish remigration to Germany in the aftermath of World War II, which has already been extensively examined by historians and sociologists, despite its relatively limited scale. It is worth noting that only around 30,000 Jews who had previously emigrated from German-speaking areas of Europe chose to return after the war, representing a small percentage of the overall number who had left. See Marita Krauss, “Jewish Remigration: An Overview of an Emerging Discipline,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 49, no. 1 (2004): 107–20. As Michael Brenner noted, in the early post-war years, approximately 10 percent of restored Jewish communities consisted of permanent returnees. See idem, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 60.

9. Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 23.

10. Ibid., 115.

11. Arno Lustiger, “Der Anteil der Juden am Sieg der Alliierten im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Jüdische Soldaten im Kampf gegen den Faschismus,” in “Gegen alle Vergeblichkeit”: Jüdischer Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, ed. Hans Erler, Arnold Paucker and Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2003), 323.

12. Bruce B. Henderson, Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler (New York, NY: William Morrow, 2018), xi.

13. Maiken Umbach and Scott Sulzener, Photography, Migration and Identity: A German-Jewish-American Story (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

14. Ibid. 4.

15. Struk, Private Pictures, xvi.

16. Alexander B. Rossino, “Eastern Europe through German Eyes: Soldiers’ Photographs 1939–42,” History of Photography 23, no. 4 (1999): 320; Umbach, “Selfhood, Place, and Ideology,” 365. See also Petra Bopp, “Fremde im Visier: Private Fotografien von Wehrmachtssoldaten,” in Mit der Kamera bewaffnet. Krieg und Fotografie, ed. Anton Holzer (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2003), 97–117; Frances Guerin, Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 37–92.

17. Derek Penslar, Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 254. Penslar argues that for Western European and North American Jews who served in the military since the French Revolution, uniforms served a dual purpose. Not only did they foster a sense of connection and loyalty to their homeland, but they also provided a means for asserting their religious particularism.

18. Jennifer Craik, “The Cultural Politics of the Uniform,” Fashion Theory 7, no. 2 (2003): 134; Sharon Peoples, “Embodying the Military: Uniforms,” Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion 1, no. 1 (2014): 16. See also Michael Berkowitz’s observation regarding postwar photos of uniformed Jews as exuding a sense of confidence and charm in his book The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press, 2007), 218–9.

19. Samuel W. Taylor, “The Private Air Force of Cpl. Weinberg,” Air Force: The Official Service Journal of the U.S. Army Air Forces 28, no. 2 (September 1945): 59.

20. On revenge fantasies and questions of Jewish identity and victimhood see Daniel H. Magilow, “Jewish Revenge Fantasies in Contemporary Film,” in Jewish Cultural Aspirations: The Jewish Role in American Life. An Annual Review of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, Volume 10, ed. Ruth Weisberg (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2013), 92.

21. The biographical details on Weinberg were taken from the following sources: his Findbuch document at the collections of the Jewish Museum Berlin; an interview with Weinberg’s son, David: Ita Yankovich, “The Ultimate Revenge: Erwin Weinberg Fights Back Against the Nazis,” The Jewish Press, April 18, 2013, https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/interviews-and-profiles/the-ultimate-revenge-erwin-weinberg-fights-back-against-the-nazis/2013/04/18; and Taylor, “Private Air Force”.

22. On the use of the term Schutzhaft in the Third Reich see Ulrich Herbert, “Von der Gegnerbekämpfung zur ‘rassischen Generalprävention’: ‘Schutzhaft’ und Konzentrationslager in der Konzeption der Gestapo-Führung 1933–1939,” in Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: Entwicklung und Struktur, ed. Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth and Christoph Dieckmann, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998), 60–81.

23. For the political and social background to the mass internment of aliens in 1940, see Tony Kushner, “Clubland, Cricket Tests and Alien Internment,” in The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain, ed. David Cesarani and Tony Kushner (London: F. Cass, 1993), 79–101.

24. Anne C. Schenderlein, Germany on Their Minds: German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988 (New York, NY and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2020), 86.

25. Cited in Ibid., 82.

26. In one of those air raids, which took place on December 27, 1944, about 700 Fulda residents died after getting trapped inside a bunker: “Heute vor 70 Jahren starben 700 Menschen im Grezzbachbunker,” Fuldaer Zeitung, December 26, 2014, https://www.fuldaerzeitung.de/fulda/heute-jahren-starben-menschen-grezzbachbunker-13730290.html.

27. Taylor, “Private Air Force,” 72.

28. Ibid.

29. Diane T. Putney, introduction to ULTRA and the Army Air Forces in World War II: An Interview with Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Lewis F. Powell, Jr., ed. Diane T. Putney (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, United States Air Force, 1987), xvi. Powell also served as the Special Security Representative to the Headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces. After his military service, he pursued a career in law upon returning to the United States. Notably, in 1972, he assumed the position of Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and served until his retirement in 1987.

30. Yankovich, “Ultimate Revenge.”

31. “Buchenwald,” in Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945. Volume I, ed. Geoffrey P. Megargee (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 293. Buchenwald was liberated by U.S. troops on April 11, 1945, after most of its SS men had fled the camp, leaving the prisoners to take over the guard towers. On Margaret Bourke-White’s iconic Buchenwald photo in the context of post-war camp documentation, see Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 127–38.

32. Geoffrey Batchen, “Vernacular Photographies,” History of Photography 24, no. 3 (2000): 262.

33. See Ofer Ashkenazi and Guy Miron, “Jewish Vacations in Nazi Germany: Reflections on Time and Space amid an Unlikely Respite,” Jewish Quarterly Review 110, no. 3 (2020): 523–52; Rebekka Grossmann, “Nazi Germany in the Viewfinder: On Space and Movement in German-Jewish Youth Culture,” Naharaim 16, no. 2 (2022): 203–27.

34. Grossmann, “Nazi Germany in the Viewfinder,” 205.

35. Thy Phu, “The Spaces of Human Confinement: Manzanar Photography and Landscape Ideology,” Journal of Asian American Studies 11, no. 3 (2008): 350, 352–3.

36. Till Hilmar, “Storyboards of Remembrance: Representations of the Past in Visitors’ Photography at Auschwitz,” Memory Studies 9, no. 4 (2016): 463.

37. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 16–17. See also Meir Wigoder, “Some Thoughts about Street Photography and the Everyday,” History of Photography 25, no. 4 (2001): 368–78.

38. On the history of the Obersalzberg complex during the Third Reich and after 1945, see Arthur H. Mitchell, Hitler’s Mountain: The Führer, Obersalzberg and the American Occupation of Berchtesgaden (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2007).

39. Gil Pasternak, “Playing Soldiers: Posing Militarism in the Domestic Sphere,” in Visual Conflicts: On the Formation of Political Memory in the History of Art and Visual Cultures, ed. Paul Fox and Gil Pasternak (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 148–9. Pasternak’s bases his analysis of this distancing on Harry Berger Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

40. See, for example, Liam Kennedy, “Soldier Photography: Visualising the War in Iraq,” Review of International Studies 35 (2009): 817–833; Joey Brooke Jakob, “Beyond Abu Ghraib: War Trophy Photography and Commemorative Violence,” Media, War & Conflict 10, no. 1 (2017): 87–104.

41. Kennedy, “Soldier Photography,” 826.

42. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Cult of Unity and Cultivated Differences,” in Photography: A Middle-brow Art, by Pierre Bourdieu et al., trans. Shaun Whiteside (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 30.

43. Ibid., 24.

44. A comparable photograph captured by another German-Jewish-American soldier, Henry Butler (1921–2023), is housed in the photo archive of the Jewish Museum Berlin under the reference number 2012/306/201. This photograph, taken in June 1945, features Butler, originally known as Hans Buxbaum and born in Würzburg, standing on the terrace of Berghof, directly facing the camera.

45. Michael Imhof, Joachim Schulz and Rudolf Zibuschka, “Das Schicksal der Juden unterm Hakenkreuz,“ in Juden in Deutschland und 1000 Jahre Judentum in Fulda, ed. Michael Imhof (Petersburg: M. Imhof, 2011), 221.

46. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, NY: Dell, 1977), 57.

47. Anna Koch, “Returning Home? Italian and German Jews’ Remigration to Their Countries of Origin after the Holocaust,“ in Migrations in the German Lands, 1500–2000, ed. Jason Coy, Jared Poley and Alexander Schunka (New York, NY and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018), 178. In this comparative chapter, Koch notes that this experience was different than that of Italian-Jewish returnees, who “emphasized their pain in seeing their hometowns in ruins” (Ibid.) See also Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2011); Jack Kugelmass, “Sifting the Ruins: Émigré Jewish Journalists’ Return Visits to the Old Country, 1946–1948,” Belin Lecture Series 23 (2013), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.13469761.0023.001.

48. See Hoffmann, “Gazing at Ruins.”

49. The biographical details on Peter H. Reiche were taken from the descriptions of items 2005/51/3 and 2005/51/13 at the photo archive of the Jewish Museum Berlin; Verein zur Förderung des Gedenkbuches für die Charlottenburger Juden, ed., Juden in Charlottenburg: Ein Gedenkbuch (Berlin: Text-Verlag, 2009), 128–9; and email correspondence between Reiche and Jewish Museum personnel, 29 June–5 July 2005, Stifterakte Peter H. Reiche, Jüdisches Museum Berlin. I would like to thank Rickie Lynne Giesel and Jörg Waßmer from the museum for their kind assistance.

50. Letter from Peter H. Reiche to multiple relatives, 1 January 194[6], Archiv des Jüdischen Museum Berlin, 2005/51/1/001 (also mentioned in Koch, “Returning Home,” 185). Reiche wrote the letter in English but for specific personal phrases, terms, and descriptions of the streets and places he visited in Berlin, he reverted to his mother tongue, German.

51. Letter from Reiche to relatives, 1 January 1946.

52. Hoffmann, “Gazing at Ruins,” 146–7.

53. Leo Spitzer, “The Album and the Crossing,” in The Familial Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 213. For an extended version of this work, see idem, Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998). Spitzer draws on the psychoanalytical approach to migration and exile proposed by Leon Grinberg and Rebecca Grinberg in their book Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration and Exile (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Another scholar who utilized similar methodological tools, sometimes in collaboration with Spitzer, is Marianne Hirsch. For instance, her book The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) explores related themes. Umbach and Sulzener have challenged their interpretations of the photographs as “often counter-intuitive” and have questioned the depiction of a “near complete chasm, brought upon by the traumas of the flight” in their works (Photography, Migration and Identity, 67, 74).

54. Jacqueline Vansant, Reclaiming Heimat: Trauma and Mourning in Memoirs by Jewish Austrian Reémigrés (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2001).

55. Ibid., 151–2.

56. Ibid., 111–2.

57. Jünger, “Farewell to the German-Jewish Past,” 75.

Additional information

Funding

This article was funded by the Israel Science Foundation, Grant 2648/20.

Notes on contributors

Amit Levy

Amit Levy is a Bloom Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Israel Studies, University of Haifa. He is a historian of knowledge and migration in the 20th century and their impact on cross-cultural encounters, using both textual and visual sources. His book A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel will be published in 2025 by Brandeis University Press. Amit served as a research fellow in the ISF project “German-Jewish Photo Albums, 1928–1948: Meaning and Agency in Inconceivable Times”.