Amsterdam — June 20, 1943, an embarrassed and frightened family carrying luggage and branded a yellow star is squeezed into Olympia Plain, one of the city’s most famous public squares. I did. Few people knew where they were going and how long they were going, so when they registered with the Nazi authorities, they wore winter coats despite the scorching sun.
Dutch photographer Herman Hoykels traveled through the crowd and photographed people who were soon deported to the internment camp. His image will be the final portrait of many of the 5,500 people sent from Amsterdam to the Westerbork Transit Camp that day and then to the “East”. The majority will never return.
Heukels photos were used by historians to describe the Dutch Holocaust, which claimed the lives of more than 102,000 of the estimated 140,000 Jewish civilians who lived in the Netherlands before World War II. Some of the strongest visual evidence.
Still, despite being ubiquitous in books and movies, few outside academia know that these images were actually taken by the Dutch Nazis. He intended to portray the Jews in a sneaky light. Instead, he would clearly witness the atrocity of the Third Reich.
“These are very famous photos and some of the most requested photos in our archive from all over the world,” he said. Dutch National Institute for Wartime Resources, Holocaust and Massacre Studies In Amsterdam. The institute holds an archive of about 30 original Hukel photographs from the Dutch Ministry of Justice and confiscated them as part of a post-war joint trial.
In recent months, a biography published in the Netherlands this spring has revealed a deeper sense of Hukel’s beliefs and motivations. This reveals how ordinary Zwol youth became radical as members of the Dutch Nazi party.This book by Dutch World War historian Macrien Vrasbrom shows how Hukel betrayed Jews from his town, plundered their business and property, and was a Dutch SS news photographer. Provides new insights into what has recorded history as
“He caught them in their weakest moments,” Vlasblom said in an interview. Of course, he incorporated the Nazi ideology into these images. “
How does this new information change the way we look at these photos? Or how historians use them, or could they be contextualized in the future?
Kees Ribbens, a popular professor of historical culture and mass violence at the University of Rotterdam Erasmus, a researcher at NIOD, said, “Because it shows that the Holocaust is taking place in a very famous place in the center of Amsterdam. The photo states that it is “very good.” .. They show how the entire deportation bureaucracy worked. “
Still, these are “not innocent images,” said Amsterdam-based Israeli artist Ram Katzir, one of Hukel’s recent photographs as the basis for the monument he created for the deportation site. Said I used. artwork, “Shadow” Announced on the 79th anniversary of the June attack, they recreated the shadows of the exiled from photographs at the exact location of Olympia Plain, where they were last alive and recorded.
“There was no victim’s name,” Katzir said, so he considered a lot about whether to include Heukels’ name in the information plaque. In the end, he decided to do so. “It’s a double-edged image. Hiding it also hides the co-editor role.”
“When you look at the information plaque, you’re standing exactly where the photographer was standing,” Katzir added.
In fact, most of the images of the Jewish persecution that survived in the Netherlands were “made from the perspective of the persecutor,” Rivens said. These include Baltic de CockFranz Antonstaff, a German press photographer who is a member of the Dutch Nazi Party known as NSB and took some of the last images of the Jewish community in Amsterdam before being decimated.
Janina Strook, author of the 2005 book The Holocaust Photography: Interpretation of Evidence, said that after the war, bystanders, perpetrators, and victims took “mixtures of all kinds” and who took them. Few people said they asked. For photography or for any purpose.
“Until very recently, historians weren’t too worried about who took the picture, why it was taken, and what it was for,” she said. “It was rather historians who used photographs as illustrations of text, not text in and of themselves.”
In recent years, the emphasis has been on creating contextual images and explaining how to create them, so viewers can better understand what they are seeing and people are more ethical about what to do. You can make various choices. Present them.
When Revens learned that Hukels’ purpose was to publish a weekly photo at Storm SS, a Nazi propaganda in the Netherlands (the photo wasn’t published there), he decided to exclude him from the frame. He said he could think of his choice. He said he did not see Nazi officials or Dutch police who were forcibly rounding up civilians in his series.
“It doesn’t automatically raise the issue: who organizes this and who is responsible for this persecution?” He said. “People appear, what stress they are exposed to, why they are sent here, what choices they make when they leave the house, why they can find a hiding place. Isn’t it clear that it wasn’t? What was so threatening? “
The official policy of the German occupiers was that images of Jews could not be published in the “legal” Dutch press, said NIOD researcher and photography expert Eric Summers. Explained. However, propaganda newspapers can print such images along with articles of apparently anti-Semitic content.
As a result, in both the Netherlands and elsewhere, most of the Holocaust images were taken by Nazi-approved propaganda photographers who were explicitly allowed to carry cameras, Struk said. The other images were from German soldiers who specifically searched for Jewish “souvenir” images that they thought fit the physical stereotypes.
Sheryl Silver Ochayon, Program Director of Echoes & Reflections, the Education Department of the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Memorial Center in Israel, said:
“The photo didn’t kill anyone,” she added. “But what you can do with photography is that you can justify your ideology. If you present your victims like low, passive, or pest insects, you justify the genocide action plan, as the Germans did. Can be made. “
Vlasblom began her work when her church friend Gerard Visser asked her to look at the box of family letters he inherited. He knew that the treatise was about his two granduncles, Harman Hoykels and Jan Hoykels, who was also a collaborator with the Nazis, but said in an interview: To whom or why. “
Not everyone in Visser’s family is pleased that Vlasblom’s book, Wewaren supermannen (We Were Supermen), contains information about Jan Heukels. The book pays attention to these two collaborators’ ancestors.
“You hear the story of all the heroic resistances from the Netherlands,” Visser said. “But there are people like Heukels who have done really bad things. I felt that part of the country’s history should also be told.”
Does knowing more about Herman Hoykels’ personal biography mean that historians need to use these photographs in different ways?
Some people at NIOD, a Dutch archive, said these images remained valuable historical sources, but Heukels’ story emphasized the importance of providing context to photographs. increase.
“We have to find those photo elements from the beginning,” he said. “Who made the photo for what purpose and under what circumstances?”
Struk said: “We need to move away from the idea that photography is just a window in the world. It’s not. This is a highly edited version of what the photographer chose to take.”
