Portraits of Madness

An interview with Lawrence L. Rhee, a former US army photographer. Rhee, a German Jew who escaped his native land in the mid 1930s, settled with his family in a New Maxico village in 1936. Later he would serve as an army photographer, returning to Europe. His skills led him to Nuremberg during the War Crimes Tribunals as a Language expert and photographer. At Nuremberg he came to know Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's personal photographer and friend, whose photographs were evidence at the trials. The associations were mostly professionals, but Hoffmann, as if to severe his own long associations with Nazi officialdom, gave the young Jewish American soldier a substantial portion of his unpublished pictorial history of the third Reich. These photographs are background to the interview with Rhee in this film.