The Italian Stereoscopic Archive hosts these rare 3-D photos of advancing Nazi armies, converted to red/cyan anaglyphs from stereographs originally published in two German books. The first book, The Fuhrer's Soldiers in the Field, documents the invasion of Poland in 1939. The second, The Fight in the West, follows the infantry into Belgium and France in 1940.
Wherever Hitler sent his soldiers to capture countries, he also sent his photographers to capture the images. The photos were published in Germany, as propaganda to show off the Nazis as conquering heroes, and their enemies as mongrel weaklings.
These photos are the work of skilled craftsmen. As with other German achievements of this period -- in architecture, just for instance, or rocketry -- one may admire the craftsmanship while deploring the evil use to which it was put. If you could forget that they're Nazis, you could think the pictures are beautiful. But you can't.
This shot of men leaping over a trench was obviously staged (unless we are to believe that the photographer was waiting in an Allied trench for the infantry to catch up with him). But most of the pictures are of the aftermath of the invasion: the parades, the prisoners, the graves, the rubble. Hitler is shown reviewing the troops, and the German occupiers are calmly writing letters home, being nice to animals, and helping the Polish and French peasants any way they can.
But they didn't really come to be nice; they came to conquer, and they were proud of the job they did of it, as the captions to the photos attest. Some of the sentiments might be typical of the boasts of any nation at war: German warriors are praised as simultaneously humane and destructive: "The church is still standing, such is the precision of our artillery!" The opposing forces are scorned as futile: "Belgium thought to halt the German advance with these primitive roadblocks!"
But others are the product of the particular evil of Hitler's ideology. Columns of foreign prisoners are shown in their shabby uniforms, while the captions mock them: "Negro auxiliary French troops taken prisoner... These Moroccan prisoners were employed by France as defenders of civilization!" And Jews are accused of harboring pests: "We burned these Jews' beds, full of bugs and lice!"
Such glorification of evil will inspire revulsion in every viewer of these images, and also relief that these men were ultimately defeated. It is good that this collection has been preserved, lest we forget that lovely pictures can be used to serve ugly doctrines.
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