A good friend of the house of Wagner

BBC News reports ~ Photographs of Adolf Hitler - taken by a Nottinghamshire spy weeks before the start of World War II - have been made public for the first time. Charles Turner took the images at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany in July 1939. He was given unprecedented access to the Nazi leader, and toured the festival as part of his entourage.

The photographs have been released by Mr Turner's son David, 64, after he began researching his family history. Mr Turner, of West Bridgford, told the Nottingham Evening Post that his father had chatted to the German leader and other members of the Third Reich - including Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess - as the party toured the festival. They assumed Mr Turner - a guest of a member of Hitler's inner circle - was merely a fellow music fan.

Mr Turner said: "My father regarded these photos as an extraordinary souvenir of a remarkable and fortuitous event. "They are very, very important to me and my family and for all this period of time - my father died in 1977 - I have regarded the possession of these photos as an intimate family matter. "My father never spoke to me about it. Only he could answer why. That's not to say I didn't know what happened but as a child your perception and awareness of things are very different," he said.

He said he made the decision to release the images to the newspaper, which were taken on a Kodak Eastman folding camera, when he began to trace his family's roots. Charles Turner sent a detailed report of his meet back to London. His son has been told by the Home Office that the document is still classified and may never be released.

From BBC News. My header photo is not one of the spy photos, but comes from Winifred Wagner, A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth by Brigitte Hamann which I reviewed in my article The Phantom of the Opera, and which also supplies my headline quote. Elsewhere read how Hitler said Wagner - I don't get to hear anything else. And view more extraordinary photos from the Third Reich discovered via An Overgrown Path.
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Simon Rattle revives contemporary composer

"There was also the Proms reappearance of very old man: Berthold Goldschmidt (left), ninety that year. Simon Rattle, who had championed Goldschmidt’s music in Birmingham, was keen to conduct something of his in the Proms. Goldschmidt’s life was being much written about: how he had shown brilliant promise in pre-Hitler Germany but had much later been forced to leave, and how after successful years in Britain, including conducting the first performance of Deryck Cooke’s version of Mahler’s Tenth in 1964, he and his music had faded from view. I found it very hard to evaluate Goldschmidt’s music: it had obviously seemed remarkable in the 1920s and ‘30s, but struck me as less so after sixty years.

The work Rattle chose, the Ciaconna Sinfonia, had a triumphant reception, as if the audience wanted to compensate for years of neglect by refusing to let the composer leave the platform, and Goldschmidt really revelled in the applause. We gave him dinner afterwards in a nearby restaurant, during which he became seriously unwell and eventually slumped forward apparently dead. It was a dreadful moment. Simon Rattle stood behind him and felt for a pulse. I rushed about phoning ambulances and looking for a doctor. By the time the ambulance arrived Goldschmidt was sitting up chatting, quite unaware of the panic he had caused. ‘It’s rather hot isn’t it?’ he said.

He went home in a taxi, accompanied by a charming young woman, as if nothing had happened. At his ninetieth birthday party his publisher, Anthony Fell of Boosey & Hawkes, said it was marvellous that Goldschmidt was not bitter at his roller coaster of a life. In reply, Goldschmidt said, ’Bitterness is a question of taste.’ I am glad he lived long enough to hear his music performed again and to return to Germany and be feted everywhere, but I am still not sure how good the music is."

John Drummond recalls the revival in 1993 of a 20th century composer in his autobiography Tainted By Experience.

Now playing – Berthold Goldschmidt’s Ciaconna Sinfonia, with Simon Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. You can judge yourself how good Goldschmidt’s music is by listening to The Goldschmidt Album. This 1996 Decca CD features the composer’s music conducted by Simon Rattle, Yakov Kreizberg, and Goldschmidt himself. Rattle was so keen to champion Goldschmidt’s music that he persuaded EMI to release him from his exclusive contract to record his 20 minute contribution to the album.

The CD was an early release in a Decca series Entartete Musik (Degenerate music) featuring works suppressed by the Third Reich. The first release in the much hyped series was the opera Jonny spielt auf which I wrote about recently. Its composer Ernst Krenek studied with Franz Schreker, as did Berthold Goldschmidt. But more than ten years later the Decca website only lists four titles in the series, and neither The Goldschmidt Album nor Jonny spielt auf are among them, although the Goldschmidt CD is available from Amazon resellers. Once again Entartete Musik has been suppressed, but this time by the corporate planners within Decca’s parent Universal Music.

Now read about another forgotten victim of fascism
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Berlin March 28th 1933

Berlin was thrown into great excitement last night by two fires - the one at the Reichstag building (the German Parliament) and the other at the former Imperial Palace. Fire broke out at the Reichstag shortly after 9 p.m., and burned so fiercely that within an hour the main hall in which representatives of the German people meet when Parliament is in session was completely destroyed. Flames leaping from the great glass dome surmounting the building could be seen for miles around, and attracted huge crowds to the scene.

Police in full force on horseback and on foot kept the crowd back, while all the fire brigades in Berlin poured water on to the flames. The building was surrounded by the fire-fighting appliances, and high ladders were run up the walls and illuminated by searchlights. Firemen directed streams of water into the burning building, and hoses were run in through the numerous entrances to the seat of the fire, in the main session hall. It is believed (says an Exchange Berlin telegram) that the fire was due to arson, as it commenced at five or six different points simultaneously. A man was arrested in the building . He was found clad only in his trousers.

A Reuter telegram says that the fire was started by heaps of documents which were set alight in six different places. The police assert that Communists are responsible, and apart from the man who was arrested there were several other people in the building, although the Reichstag is not in session. The wildest rumours were circulating in Berlin last night, adds Reuter. One was to the effect that secret orders had been issued to the Nazi Storm Troopers to create a Bartholomew night on Saturday, when all political opponents of renown were to be "disposed of." Although the police asserted the Communists are responsible, some people think that the fire might have bee started by irresponsible Nazis with the object of provoking trouble.

The fires were extinguished at 10.45 p.m. The session hall presents a scene of desolation with all the deputies' seats, diplomats', public, and press galleries destroyed, and all the iron pillars supporting the dome twisted out of shape. The fire brigade state that the fire must have started at several points. It developed with extraordinary rapidity and began to find its way downstairs to the rooms below.

The police, "suspecting the conflagration to be the first of a series of Communist acts of terrorism," have arrested a number of Communist leaders "in order to forestall any attempt to cover up tracks." The man who was discovered in the Reichstag building and arrested is stated to be a Dutchman named Van der Luebbe, aged 24 (photo left). He is said to have confessed that he started the fire, but denied that he was acting as anyone's agent. It is added that he said he used his shirt as firing material. The police found a rag steeped in petrol as they entered the building, and the arrested man's cap was found close to other firing material. He has been conducted to police headquarters, where he is being subjected to a thorough examination. His manner had been extremely calm and self-possessed throughout.

Herr Hitler, Herr Göring, Herr von Papen, and other prominent persons including Prince August Wilhelm, entered the building whilst it was still burning, and Herr Goring, President of the Reichstag and "Commissarial" Minister for the Interior in Prussia, took command of the police and issued orders to keep the crowds at a distance. If the new Reichstag is summoned after next Sunday's elections it is unlikely to be able to meet in the Reichstag building owing to the extensive damage done by the fire. The fire at the former Imperial Palace broke out earlier in the day in an attic, and was quickly subdued by the fire brigade before any damage had been done. The police suspect arson, as burnt matches were found in the attic.

Report from the Guardian. Now visit the rebuilt Reichstag.
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The Phantom of the Opera

'Yes, Hitler had always been a good friend of the house of Wagner; she, Winifred, admired him and was grateful to him. Yes, he had been misled by the people around him, and pushed into making decisions. No, she had never slept with Hitler.'

An extract from an interview with Winifred Wagner, given, quite unbelievably, in 1945 immediately after the collapse of the Third Reich. The extract is from an interview with Klaus Mann (son of Thomas Mann) published in the US army newspaper Stars and Stripes, and quoted in the recently published Winifred Wagner, A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth, which also supplies my header photograph of Hitler with the book's subject.

The story of Winifred Wagner is the stuff of fiction. In 1907 a nine-year-old English orphan, Winifred Williams, was sent to live with distant relatives in Berlin. In 1915, in the middle of World War 1, the eighteen-year-old girl was married in Bayreuth. Her groom was Siegfried Wagner, the 46 year-old only son of Richard Wagner, head of the Bayreuth Festival, and a homosexual, or as author Brigitte Hamann tactfully puts it, “a man’s man”.

Therein lies one of the the many flaws in this meticulously researched book, which at 582 pages is Wagnerian, both in length and sympathy. Hamann lives in Vienna, studied in Germany and Austria, and is the author of a study of Hitler’s early years. A good biography gives the details of the subject’s private life, but does not pass judgement. I can only conclude that Hamann decided that chronicling Bayreuth’s musical beds might invite judgement. Her circumvention of issues central to the story verges on the comic. An eighteen-year-old girl marries a 46 year-old homosexual to provide an heir (Wieland) to the Wagner dynasty. Yet in the lengthy index entry for Siegfried Wagner there is no entry at all under 'homosexuality', and just one (on page 8) under the tactful heading 'sexual proclivities', while elsewhere we read that the notorious Nazi homosexual Ernst Rohm stays in Siegfried’s house with his 'friend' Franz von Epp. But at least gender equality is respected, and Winifred’s affair with Bayreuth artistic director Heinz Tietjen also gets the ‘don’t mention it in front of the children’ treatment.


Although there is a wealth of detail on the wonderfully bitchy world of Bayreuth and the ‘Master’, this is much more than a music book. It tells of a cataclysmic collision of politics and music, and the photo above from the book shows one of the points of impact - Tietjen and Furtwängler with Winifred’s friend ‘Wolf’ at the new Berlin City Opera staging of Lohengrin in 1929. As worlds collide Brigitte Hamann only makes a token attempt to disguise her allegiance to the Wagner camp, just one small example is how she recounts on page 374 how performances of the Wesendonck Lieder were banned at Bayreuth by Wagner’s widow Cosima, but omits any mention of the song cycle in the entry for Wagner, Richard Compositions in the comprehensive index, despite their appearance in the text.

Winifred confirmed the Wesendonck ban in 1944, and the end of the war did not see the end of her political blunderings. In 1952 she visited the GDR (interestingly following the same itinerary as my recent visit - Leipzig, Dresden and Zwickau), and upset the West Germans with her praise for the communist regime. Back in Bayreuth she lived in her husband's old house which she referred to as the Führer building, and it became a gathering place for the widows and children of the former Nazi leaders. When they were there Hamann describes how they "could talk openly about old times, which for all of them were the best times of their lives. And they could express their enthusiasm for the Führer to their heart's content." Another contact of Winifred was David Irving, who Hamann generously describes as "the revisionist British historian". Others describe him as a holocaust denier.

In 1975, at the age of 78, Winifred was at the center of yet another controversey when Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's documentary film about her was released. In the film she says the following - "If Hitler were to walk in through that door now, for instance, I'd be as happy and glad to see him here as ever, and that whole dark side of him, I know it exists, but it doesn't exist for me because I don't know that part of him". Four years later, in 1979, she was guest of honour in Bayreuth at a rally of hundreds of former Hitler Youth and Bund Deutscher Mädel members, and she followed this by attacking the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to Yehudi Menuhin with these words - "despite all his achievements, I regret the prize has been given to a Jew, because it's just more grovelling to that race on the part of this generation - haven't we got any pride?" Winifred Wagner died in March 1980, aged 82.

An extraordinary, and truly frightening tale that is essential reading, particularly for the bon mots that litter the text. The most memorable include Winifred's description of Hitler's personal physician, Karl Brandt, who was responsible for carrying out Hitler's euthanasia programme which systematically murdered the mentally ill and the disabled. On hearing of Brandt's death sentence in 1948 Winifred Wagner complained: "What a nice, decent fellow he was, and what a price he's got to pay now for the things he was made to represent." (P 441)

Elsewhere Hassmann writes about the Bayreuth concentration camp (see note 1 below), in which Winifred's son, Wieland (see note 2), held a senior position until April 1945, and reassures us with these words - After 1945, ex-inmate Hans Imhof described his stay at Bayreuth as ‘the best part of my whole time in concentration camps’ (P 380).

Extraordinary words from an extraordinary book. Unless you read it you will never believe it.

Note 1. Bayreuth concentration camp was a satellite of the Flossenbürg KZ site. Around 30,000 died in Flossenbürg and its subcamps. Among those killed were Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, General Hans Oster, and others involved in the plot to assasinate Hitler on 20th July 1944. These men had been arrested following the collapse of the plot, but they were held in various prisons and camps until being sent to Flossenbürg, where they were hanged on 9th April 1945, shortly before the liberation.


Note 2. In 1949 Wieland Wagner was cleared of all political charges despite his Nazi past and close friendship with Hitler - the photo above shows him with Hitler watched by a member of the Bayreuth domestic staff. Wieland's failure to mention in his de-Nazification questionnaire that he held a senior position in the Bayreuth concentration camp was of no consequence as enquiries into these activities had ceased by 1949. He took over as Bayreuth Festival Director in 1951, holding the position until his death in 1966. Although Wieland symbolically removed the old order from the Bayreuth productions the pre-war legacy remained very much present behind the scenes, including Winifred's close friend Dortmund steel magnate Moritz Klönne, who became president of the Society of the Friends of Bayreuth. In another of the book's bon mots designer Emil Preetorius describes Wieland Wagner as "the arsehole of Bayreuth".

Although Winifred was removed from involvement in the Festival, the Wagner dynasty continues its control of Bayreuth to this day through Wieland's brother Wolfgang. He was born in 1919, and his close association with Hitler is chronicled in Hamann's book. Despite these Nazi connections musicians of the calibre, and integrity, of Daniel Barenboim work at Bayreuth. In an illuminating conversation with Edward Said Barenboim says - "one has to distinguish between Wagner's anti-Semitism, which is monstrous and despicable and worse than the sort of normal, shall we say, accepted-unacceptable level of anti-Semitism, and the use the Nazis made of it."

Winifred Wagner, A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth by Brigitte Hamann is published by Granta Books, ISBN1862076715

For more on Hitler’s musical inner circle take An Overgrown Path to Hitler’s court composer was a Harvard alumni.
Photo credits - Winifred Wagner, A Life at the Heart ofHitler’s Bayreuth, Granta Books. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Wagner - I don't get to hear anything else

He was genuinely convinced that he had an infallible musical ear. Heinz Lorenz suggested, 'My Führer, you ought to give a concert in the Great Hall. After all, you could afford to invite the best German musicians, Gieseking, Kempff, Furtwängler and so on. You don't go to the opera or the theatre any more, but you could listen to music. It wouldn't strain your eyes either'. Hitler rejected the idea. 'No, I don't want to trouble such artists just for me personally, but we could play a few records.'

A thick book listed all the records that the Führer owned. There must have been hundreds of them. The wooden panelling of the wall turned out to be a cupboard holding records, with a built-in gramophone that was invisible till the cupboard doors were opened. The black discs stood in long rows, labelled with numbers. Bormann operated the gramophone. Hitler nearly always had the same repertory played: Léhars operettas, songs by Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf and Richard Wagner. The only pop music he would let us play was the 'Donkey serenade'. It usually formed the conclusion of the concert.

Hitler's colleagues enjoyed the musical evenings with the records even less than those conversations around the hearth. One after another they would leave the Hall. You could hear them laughing and giggling and talking in the living room, where the deserters assembled to amuse themselves in their own way, leaving their boss alone with the sleeping Morell and the faithful Eva, the duty adjutant and the von Below and Brandt ladies. I must admit that I sometimes slipped quietly away myself, until the valet came in to say, 'The Führer misses his company, and back there in the Hall he can hear your noise.' Then the 'faithful' reluctantly went back on duty again.

'No, my entourage isn't very musical,' Hitler said, resigned. 'When I was still going to official festival performances of opera I usually had to keep an eye on the men with me to see they didn't go to sleep. Hoffman (he meant the press photographer Heinrich Hoffman) once almost fell over the balustrade of the box during Tristan und Isolde, and I had to rouse Schaub and tell him to go over and shake Hoffman awake. Brückner was sitting behind me snoring, it was terrible. (Pliable - this is Wilhelm Brückner, one-time adjutant to Hitler.) But no one went to sleep during the Merry Widow because there was a ballet in it.'

I asked Hitler why he only ever went to hear Die Meistersinger or other Wagnerian opearas. 'It's just my luck that I can never say I like something without finding I'm stuck listening exclusively to one piece of music or hearing one particular opera. I once said that Meistersinger is really one of Richard Wagner's finest operas, so since then it's supposed to be my favourite opera and I don't get to hear anything else.'

From Traudl Junge's 'Until the Final Hour - Hitler's Last Secretary' (Weidenfield & Nicholson ISBN 0297847201). Traudl Junge was Hitler's private secretary from 1942 to his death, and she typed his last private and political will and testament in the Berlin bunker. Her journal was written in 1947, and the extract above describes the musical soirées at Hitler's Berghof retreat in the Obersalzberg. Oliver Hirschbieger's excellent film Downfall draws heavily on Traudl Jung's account of the last days of Hitler.

The photographs in this article are from the remarkable Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection. Follow these links for the extraordinary story of this archive, and to view more stunning photos:- * Downfall - and the mystery of Karajan's personal photographer * The mystery of the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection solved via the internet * How photo archive was salvaged from a trash can *

Also relevant are * The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour * Furtwängler and the forgotten new music * Dresden Requiem for eleven young victims * Holocaust opera's rare performance *

How photo archive was salvaged from a trash can

My two posts, Downfall and the mystery of Karajan's personal photographer and The mystery of the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection solved via the internet on the fascinating, and chilling, Siegfried Lauterwasser archive of photos has generated a lot of interest, not the least from a very supportive post on The Periscope which is the companion blog to the Euro-correspondent.com journalist network.

The whole Lauterwasser story hinges on the archive held at George Eastman House which is part of Ryerson University in Toronto. Although the archivist there, Jo Struble, has been helpful there have been problems with broken links on their web pages, and latterly performance problems on their server which mean some of the images are slow in loading.

Andy Eskind is the original researcher whose remarkable internet detective work while working at George Eastman House proved conclusively that the remarkable, and powerful, archive of Nazi photos was indeed the work of Siegrfried Lauterwasser; who later became conductor Herbert von Karajan's personal photographer, and whose images grace many CD and LP covers. Because of the various navigation glitches on the George Eastman House pages I asked Andy to give me a summary of the 'missing' parts of the Lauterwasser Collection story. Here it is.....


'Look this way and smile' - Karajan in his more normal position in front of the camera, again caught by Lauterwasser.

The key evidence is the one photograph which shows the front page of the newspaper Fränkischer Kürier which was successfully matched against microfilm of that newspaper in the archives at Marburg. It turned out to be September 1935 rather than the annual Parteitag Rally in Nurnberg of 1934 which I had erroneously written in the 1995 article in Image. It was the appearance of Riefenstahl in 2 frames which had led me astray. Otherwise, the Parteitag Rallies looked very similar from year to year in the mid-1930s. My mistake was failing to realize that Riefenstahl's presence wasn't necessarily on the occasion of making Triumph of the Will (1934); rather she was there working on the much less known follow-on project Hitler encouraged her to do the following year which resulted in Tag der Freiheit (1935) - which Riefenstahl herself avoided acknowledging (no mention in her lengthy autobiography) until a surviving print surfaced after the Cold War. This part of the story is best told by David Culbert's 1995 article in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. I simply wasn't aware of his work when I was writing in 1995. The full citation and illustrations of the key newspaper front page are easily viewed at this link.


A classic Lauterwasser DGG cover

The link to the attribution notes which explain in detail the Lauterwasser research which came later does indeed appear to be somehow broken. If I had a copy handy, I'd offer it to you and GEH for posting, but that goes back at least 2 computers for me, and my backup habits aren't up to quickly locating a copy. In brief, Lauterwasser would have been about 22 in 1935 when he did this work which technically isn't very proficient. Sadly, he never - even at the end of his life - revealed much about how he was engaged to cover the Borman outing to Unteruhldingen in May 1935, the Parteitag Rally that September, nor the subsequent small jobs over the next couple of years. What we do know is that he served in the German Army and survived the War - establishing a reputation as a successful photographer specializing in musicians. Returning home to a French Occupation zone, he apparently feared that possession of these pre-War negatives could get him in trouble. So he simply threw out roughly half of them. The match between the half he kept (which today are in the hands of his family), and the half he threw away (those now at GEH) doesn't superficially appear to have much rhyme or reason. Perhaps he did it in haste; perhaps he returned to such a clutter after VE day that they had been accidentally scrambled into 2 batches. Further study may or may not clarify this.



Another photo from the Lauterwasser Collection

What is very clear is that his neighbor, Mr. Ernst Zaumseil, unbeknownst to Lauterwasser, salvaged/rescued the negatives from the trash. Zaumseil subsequently gave the negatives to his American brother-in-law, Mr. Konrad Klein, who apparently hoped to market the images in the US. Klein self-published a book (which I've never seen) based on some of the images. His failed effort led to bankruptcy proceedings from which GEH purchased these assets. The strips of film arrived at GEH with absolutely no notes, markings, sleeves, order, or any clue beyond their self-evident image content. Only thru the subsequent outstanding intermediary efforts of Dr. Gunter Schoebel was this story reconstructed. Schoebel tracked down and interviewed Mr. Zaumseil living in a nursing home at age 92. It was also Schoebel who showed Lauterwasser the discarded images and relayed Lauterwasser's reactions at age 86 upon being reconnected with this long forgotten material. In some ways, the story of Schoebel's detective work, the research effort, etc is more interesting than the scattered photographic record. Afterall, the Parteitag Rallies were documented by 100s of photographers - both casual attendees, as well as professionals. There are 100s of thousands of negatives similar to these at US National Archives, in Germany, and elsewhere. Many are from more priviledged vantage points than those Lauterwasser enjoyed. Puzzles are always fun to work on just for the sake of solving puzzles. There are certainly more pieces which could be assembled, more work which could be done.
Hope this helps for now.
ahe


More from the Lauterwasser Collection

This is a fascinating, and exclusive, story. I am particularly grateful to Andy Eskind for providing additional material as I know he is very busy with a grant application in the US at the moment (I know the feeling Andy!). On An Overgrown Path will return to the more familiar ground of music postings tomorrow. But following this particular overgrown path, which started quite innocently with a photo caption in my post My first classical record, and has led from the UK to Canada, the US, and Germany totally validates the random wanderings that determine the content of this blog. Andy very wisely writes.."puzzles are always fun to work on just for the sake of solving puzzles", which I guess applies to Bach's Art of Fugue, and much else.

Update 3rd May - in another fascinating development the blog Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey has pointed out that the Lauterwasser family photo business is still trading in Unterlingen, Germany. You can visit their web site through this link. They have a page on Siegfried Lauterwasser with lots of Karajan images, (plus a page of mildly erotic stuff which is a new direcion on the overgrown path) but unsurprisingly there's nothing from the George Eastman House archive.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The mystery of the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection solved via the internet

In my post Downfall and the mystery of Karajan's personal photographer I wrote about the mysterious Siegfried Lauterwasser archive of photographs of Nazi Germany, and told how Ryerson University in Canada had not responded to queries about the identity of the photographer.


All photographs on this post are from the remarkable Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection

I have have now had a most helpful communication from a lady in Fairhaven, Massachusetts which does confirm that the photographer of these chilling photos was actually Siegfried Lauterwasser, who was later personal photographer to Herbert von Karajan.

Here is the message which really illustrates the power of blogging, and the interconnectedness of the World Wide Web.

"I must confess to having visited “The Overgrown Path” link via the BBC People's War website —finding that we have some shared musical interests as well. I took advantage of my presence here in the States to call the Eastman House photo archivist, Joseph Struble, to get help with the Lauterwasser question you posed the other day. He is sorry he has not responded to your inquiry sooner as it typically takes him about 3 weeks to turnaround email inquiries (having worked at a local museum with a lone photo-archivist, I know they tend to be stretched very tightly but I have suggested to him that in the case of particularly long-distance inquiries, at least sending a brief note of acknowledgement, if not a full answer, is a good policy to adopt so the person writing at least knows their question made it through the ether! I learned this when I had several European clients during my career at SilverPlatter Information). This is what he told me:

The collection was a purchase from a Konrad L. Klein and it came with virtually no provenance as to photographer or time period, other than it was during the Nazi regime. Eastman House took it on due to the compelling subject matter. Andrew Eskind, the person who wrote the piece on the website indicating that the photographer was unknown, was in the process of researching the collection. At some time post-article, Andy ascertained that the photographer was indeed Lauterwasser and this is what Eastman has in its catalog—unfortunately, the website is not as current as the internal catalog. If you wish to know more detail, Joe said you can email Andy and inquire of him. He no longer works at Eastman House but stays in touch with them and Joe felt he would be receptive to the question. Joe, by the way, helped with some of the research by recognizing Leni Riefenstahl in the photos.

I have mentioned the broken link on the website although I have suspicions that this is handled separately by another division in the museum and will probably take time to fix up. I also hinted gently that the website could use a bit of updating to reduce the confusion. As a longtime librarian/archivist/database specialist, this sort of thing drives me nuts.

Hope you find this helpful.

Regards from
Fairhaven, MA"

So these remarkable, and intimate, pictures of leading Nazis were the work of Siegfried Lauterwasser. None of his biographies seem to mention this extraordinary, and important, body of work, as Andy Eskind so neatly puts it below "until literally the last year of his life, Lauterwasser had never revealed his youthful indescretion of taking some small photo assignments for NASDP (Nazi Party)."

Should the political connections of an artist influence our judgement of his work?


6 hours later - and this story gets more and more interesting. After posting the piece above I received this email from Andy Eskind who was responsible for the attribution of the archive to Siegfried Lauterwasser...

There's lots to tell about the Lauterwasser adventure. I did literally crack the attribution of the images at GEH by using the internet, and I'm happy to share the whole story. The real clincher is that the Lauterwasser family shared digital copies of strips of film which fit together with those at GEH like 'hand in glove'. This despite the fact that until literally the last year of his life, Lauterwasser had never revealed his youthful indescretion of taking some small photo assignments for NASDP. There is much more that could be done with the project - GEH material on the web site is far from fully (or even correctly) sorted out, but, alas, I was among post 9/11 layoffs at GEH when tourism plumeted, as did government and Kodak grants leaving GEH in a financial pinch from which it still hasn't fully recovered. I could go on and on, but at the moment am working on a grant application due May 1. I barely had time to glance at your postings - but this is definitely an interesting story. I did send Riefenstahl those 2 frames before she died in hopes she would identify the cinematographer next to her. Unfortunately never heard from her. Chris Horak and other cinema experts have been contradictory in their identifications of him. I, of course, had incorrectly jumped to the conclusion that she was in Nurenburg shooting what came to be Triumph of the Will. It turns out to have actually been the following year and the project she barely ever acknowledged working on until prints were discovered in Eastern film archives - details when I have more time.
(and later)
Yes, I guess it's ok to post. My only misgiving is I don't want to offend the Lauterwasser family who were very cooperative with me. I had raised the funds to visit them in Germany when my tenure at GEH was abruptly cut short. They have as much material from that era as is at GEH - it's not entirely clear why it was so arbitrarily divided in half - my hunches in the past haven't always turned out to be correct. When you used his later Karajan images, did you deal directly with Lauterwasser? By the way, the film strip sequences on geh.org were assembled before the family shared additional material with me. The new material in several cases proved that I had put things together which didn't really go together. Mistakes I never had a chance to correct.

Regards, Andy


Two days later I received this email from Eastman House.
Dear Sir,
I do not have any information about the relationship of Siegfried Lauterwasser to the conductor Herbert von Karajan.
The article that Mr. Andrew Eskind wrote on the collection of 808 negatives (35 mm strips) for the museum's magazine "Image" (Volume 38, Nos. 1-2, Spring-Summer 1995) was published before his effort to find authorship of the material was accomplished. Mr. Eskind was very persistent with this and I think he would be happy to correspond with you concerning the process and the connection of these negatives to Sigfried Lauterwasser that was established. Perhaps you are already in contact with him, as I spoke to someone here in the US who was following up on your inquiry to us for you and I shared this with her. In any event, you have bumped up against one of the limitations of our offsite database access. We hope to provide acccess to all the updated information that has been added in the past several years since the Museum switched over to a new Data Management System (TMS) which has its own public interface (E-Museum). However, we cannot provide this at present. I'm glad you were able to make contact with us and I do wish I could have responded to you sooner, but believe it or not, there is quite a steady volume of e-mail inquiries which make their way to me and which I try to respond to in a timely manner along with some my other responsibilites here.
Best wishes,
Joe R. Struble
Assistant Archivist
Photo Collection


29th April - a further update with fascinating information on the discovery and attribution of the Lauterwasser archive – see How photo archive was salvaged from a trash can
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Downfall - and the mystery of Karajan's personal photographer

Bruno Ganz in the cinema as Hitler.

Following on from The Chorus we went to see Downfall last week. Director Oliver Hirschbieger has made a stunning film, but the accolades must go to Bruno Ganz's extraordinarily powerful performance as Hitler. In my book his performance is up there alongside Dirk Bogarde's Aschenbach in Visconti's Death in Venice for immersing himself so totally, and so convincingly, in the role. Yes, I understand the reservations about the film 'humanising' the Nazi leaders, and the 'white-washing' of the role of Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, on whose memoir the film is partly based. But just as Shakespeare's plays provide a valid 'drama-documentary' view of English history, so equally Downfall gives us a dramatised (and arguably sanitised) view of the last days of Hitler. The film lasts for more than two and a half hours (and thankfully uses music very sparingly, there is no Wagner of Bruckner at all, despite the fact that the slow movement of the Seventh Symphony was played on Berlin Radio after the announcement of Hitler's death). I have never seen an audience (of all ages) so engrossed throughout a film, or more silent at the end. We need documentary facts, but we also need dramatisations to bring history to life.

Downfall reminded me of one of life's little mysteries. When I was writing my recent post My first classical record I started researching Siegfried Lauterwasser, the 'official' photographer to the conductor Herbert von Karajan - an example of his work is seen below. I worked at EMI in the 1970s when Karajan was one of our artists and I was fascinated by the 'court' that surrounded him and was intrigued by their background. It is documented that Karajan joined the Nazi Party on April 8th 1933 in Salzburg, two months after Hitler came to power. He was cleared by an Austrian Governement denazification tribunal in February 1946 which concluded that Karajan was not involved in any illegal activity between 1933 and 1938. A transcript of the tribunal is given in Richard Osborne's Karajan - A Life in Music (Chatto & Windus ISBN 1956197638, the following exchange is taken from that transcript:

Dr Zellweker, Deputy Chairman of Tribunal: 'Surely you must have had some thoughts about (politics), and then there you were in 1935 joining the Party.'

Karajan: I'm prepared to admit that it was an error, but we artists live in another world, a self-contained one. Otherwise it would be impossible to play music properly, and music is the highest and only thing for me.'


A Google search on Siegfried Lautterwasser returns a web site at the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film. It appears this archive is part of Ryerson University in Toronto. It contains the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection of photos. These are all available online, and they are quite an eye opener. Open the links for coverage of Martin Borman's Visit to Unteruhldingen - May 4-6, 1935 (Boorman was Hitler's number two, and a racist who was outstanding among some finely developed examples of the species), the Nuremberg Rally - September 1935, and much more. The photos have a captivating, haunting and chilling quality. Forget their repugnant subjects, these are compelling images.


Hitler in real life, as captured in the Siegried Lauterwasser Collection

But here is the mystery. Who actually took these photos? They are on the web site as the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection, and the Lautterwasser in question must be the same one as Karajan's photographer as his dates are identical. There are 'Research and attribution' notes on the site, but these are as clear as mud about the origin of the photos, and talk vaguely of 'an unknown Nazi photographer'. So presumably Lautterwasser didn't take them. If not, why are they labelled as his collection? What is the link between him and the photos? The mystery deepens as a key link on the 'Research and attribution' notes is broken. I've sent several emails to both Ryerson University and George Eastman House about the collection, and have not yet received a reply. (For an update on this post, and for confirmation that the pictures are indeed the work of Lauterwasser see my post The mystery of the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection solved via the internet - Pliable 19/04/2005).

So what is the link (if any) between Siegried Lauterwasser and these extraordinary photos? Or is the whole thing an elaborate (and bad taste) hoax? Anyone who can shed any light on this fascinating mystery plesae post the explanation using the comments icon below.

Update -For confirmation that the pictures are indeed the work of Lauterwasser see my post The mystery of the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection solved via the internet - Pliable 19/04/2005).

Further update - just as some other sites have picked up on this post the server hosting the photo archive in Canada at George Eastman House/Ryerson University has started intermittent performance/connectivity problems (nice to think its the traffic we've generated!). If you aren't getting the images on my post, or can't link across to the Siegfied Lauterwasser Collection site please keep trying, it is well worth it when you finally connect - Pliable 27/04/2005)

29th April - a further update with fascinating information on the discovery and attribution of the Lauterwasser archive – see How photo archive was salvaged from a trash can


Another image from the mysterious Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk