These Nazi stereographs were precious propaganda for the discerning fascist
The invasion of Poland as seen from Hitler’s inner circle
Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism—Nazis knew how pictures worked. The Third Reich’s clinical obsession with image propaganda is well documented. The Nazis used photographs and symbols to propel their vision of hateful superiority, harnessing propaganda as tool to quell resistance while glorifying the Aryan ideal of physical prowess and strength. In films and textbooks, posters and parades, Nazi ambitions for visual impact were predicated on wide exposure in popular media.
So there’s something odd about the embrace of stereographic imagery by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer and confidant, who in the late 1930s and early 40s published a series of limited-run portfolios chronicling various German conquests under the auspices of his military-aligned publishing house, Raumbild-Verlag Otto Schönstein. The books—precious, expensive collections of stereo-view cards sized for the glasses they came with—offered an intimate viewing experience inherently at odds with the scenes of military aggression depicted. Stereography, a quasi 3D combination of offset images seen separately through left and right eyes, entails deep immersion in an image field detached from textual substance or graphic reinforcement. Hoffman’s coffee table books offered a level of engagement with photography that went beyond the flatness of print and a reprieve from the slogans of workaday propaganda at the time. If mass messaging necessitates immediate identification, the layered vagaries of stereoscopy — which by then had been out of fashion for nearly half a century — can be seen as opening the door for critique.
Raumbild-Verlag Otto Schönstein enjoyed a privileged position in the Third Reich’s media landscape, with access to diverse resources and exemptions from regulations governing most businesses during wartime. The pictures here, excerpted from the album Die Soldaten des Führers im Felde (Adolf Hitler’s Soldiers in the Field), depict the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and, as such, the beginning of WWII. In them we see the familiar militarism of cavalry parades and border demarcations alongside more quotidian scenes of German soldiers at rest and play. We also see inklings of the horror to come. Polish Jews pressed into labor, prisoner interrogations, evictions—even if the anonymous cameraman spares us the specificity of death, he conveys its looming presence through moments tinged with dread and precipitous uncertainty, sentiments resulting in no small part from his intimate, ground-level perspective, and underscored here through repetition and the implicit vernacularity of photographs which at times read more as amateur snapshots than professional propaganda. Like family photos from Hitler’s inner circle, these ready-made diptychs come as close to foreshadowing the nefarious mobilization of fascist aggression as any press pictures. Which perhaps sheds some light on Hoffman’s intentions in publishing the collection in the first place: with war on the horizon, images like these detailed the urgent efficiency of Hitler’s conquest through instances of violence and calculated humility, rendered real in three dimensions and bolstered by nostalgia for the comforts of a previous era’s technology.
