Wuerzburg, Germany, Photographs of Jews during deportations, 1941-42.

The album belongs to a larger collection of 1,200 documents, including official communication between the Gestapo in Wurzburg and Nuremberg, concerning the deportation of Jews of Lower Franconia. The 135 photographs contained in the album were taken between November 1941 and April 1942 by Hermann Otto, a member of the Gestapo’s identification service (EKD) with the initial assistance of Balthasar Lutz, on the orders of Kriminalinspektor Michael Völkl, the SS-Sturmbannführer charged with overseeing the deportation of Würzburg’s Jews (Völkl is clearly visible in photographs 58, 70, 76, 79, 81, and 100). Given that photographing deportations were officially forbidden, the so-called Wurzburg album constitutes a rare example of visual documentation of the round-up of German Jews put together by the Gestapo itself. The album contains photographic evidence of three separate deportations: the deportation of 202 Jews from Würzburg on the 27 November 1941; the deportation of 208 Jews from Kitzingen on 24 March 1942; and the deportation of 852 Jews from Würzburg on 25 April 1942. Oddly enough, the three deportations are depicted out of chronological sequence, perhaps because Otto and his colleagues in the Gestapo chose to commemorate their handiwork according to other criteria. The individual photographs detailing each deportation are loosely arranged around the organizational stages of the Gestapo’s operation: the arrival, registration, physical search, and forced embarkation on trains of Franconia's Jews. They include valuable visual evidence of the Gestapo’s self-perception, the round-up of Jews from small towns, and the involvement of local agencies, including the local police, the Gestapo, SS-men, female employees of the security police, porters, and clerks. Some of the photographs carry captions, likely dictated by Völkl, mocking Jews in both religious and racist terms. The album was discovered in August 1947 at the German central bank in Frankfurt by Eddy